Heavy Red Meat Diets Put You At Risk For Cancer & Heart Disease

It’s not exactly breaking news that heavy red meat diets are far from healthy and beneficial for the body. However, although recently more and more people are taking a good look at their diets, there still are enough people that consider the red meat health warnings aren’t that serious. A new study comes to show there’s strong evidence that heavy red meat diets put you at risk for cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

On March 12th a new study for Harvard researchers was published in the new edition of Archives of Internal Medicine. The study shows that people eating processed meat on a daily basis face a higher death risk and are more prone to develop cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Thus, based on the findings, a daily heavy red meat diet increases your chances to actually die from such a terrible health condition by 12 percent.

Harvard researchers spent 28 years looking at the diets 37,700 men and 83,600 women had. Their data shows that out of their 121,300 data group, 5,900 died from heart disease and about 9,500 by cancer. A closer look at the diets showed that red meat consumption was the common factor for patients with a higher risk of mortality from cancer, diabetes, heart conditions. Out of the overall 23,900 deaths, researchers say that 17 percent could have been prevented by a change in the patients’ diet.

Authors explain: “We found that a higher intake of red meat was associated with a significantly elevated risk of total CVD and cancer mortality and this association was observed for unprocessed and processed red meat”.

While researchers in the study don’t preach switching to vegan diets, they do recommend that red meat should be eaten occasionally. Red meat processed or unprocessed should be replaced by poultry, fish, vegetables, nuts and whole grains.

Basically, next time you’re craving for some bacon and a hot dog just think about what heavy intake of such food will do to your health. There’s absolutely no way bacon and hot dogs are so delicious it is worth sacrificing your health. So instead of making bacon your every day breakfast and hot dogs your daily lunch, leave such guilty temptations for rare occasions.