STEAK may taste good but it鈥檚 not doing you many favours. Eating large amounts of red and processed meats seems to shorten your life.
Both types of meat have been linked to cancer and heart disease, but and colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, wanted to know their effect on overall death rates. They asked 545,000 volunteers aged between 50 and 71 about their diet over the past year, and used this to estimate their meat intake. The researchers then monitored the volunteers for 10 years.
During that time, more than 71,000 of the group died. After controlling for numerous factors, including age, weight, smoking history and total food intake, the researchers found that women who consumed the most red meat 鈥� 66 grams per 1000 calories 鈥� were 36 per cent more likely to have died than women who ate the least 鈥� 9.1 grams. Men who ate large amounts of red meat were 31 per cent more likely to have died ().
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Consumption of processed meats, such as sausage, salami and hot dogs, was lower but still had a significant effect on the rate of deaths.
鈥淭his is probably the biggest and most carefully done study on the relationship between diet and mortality,鈥� says , an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.