- Previous speculation suggests that eating red meat leads to higher levels of inflammation and thus contributes to increased risk for cardiovascular disease.
- A recent study’s evidence, however, indicates that red meat consumption is not associated with inflammation, and instead, this link has more to do with body mass index.
- Further research is required to understand the potential negative and positive effects of consuming red meat.
Red meat is a common dietary item that specialists sometimes recommend limiting for health reasons. Researchers are still seeking to determine the benefits and health risks of consuming varying amounts of red meat.
A new study, aiming to understand this complex relationship between red meat and inflammation, found that red meat may not contribute to inflammation after accounting for body mass index (BMI).
The findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
This study was a cross-sectional analysis, and researchers used data from participants who were part of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA).
Researchers included participants between the ages of 45 and 84 years. They ultimately included 3,638 individuals in the final analysis. The researchers collected data from the MESA food frequency questionnaires. They also collected data on height and weight. They accounted for multiple covariates, including smoking, physical activity level, education level, age, sex, and household income.
The researchers looked at participants’ consumption of processed and unprocessed red meat and how this was associated with certain inflammation markers. They looked at plasma metabolites as they “capture the effects of diet after food is processed, digested, and absorbed, and correlate with markers of inflammation,” which helps explain the relationship between diet and health.
The study’s…
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