Hi everyone this is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the

nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous

recently there's been a lot of talk in the news about red meat being bad for you.

I want to talk today about the research but also about what conclusions we can draw.

A couple of months ago, you might remember, I did a series on the three most common

nutrition traps, mistakes that even health savvy people make. Today, I want to add a fourth one to the list.

As one of my clever readers once quipped,

there are two types of people in the world,

those who divide everything into two groups

and those who do not.

I've noticed that people often feel a powerful urge to think of foods as being either good or bad.

I guess it's a way to make this complicated business of food and

nutrition a little simpler, but really this is just silly. Obviously

something that's good for you in small quantities can be harmful in large quantities.

I have some examples of that phenomenon in my episode on quality versus quantity.

And something that's bad for you in large quantities can be perfectly harmless or even beneficial in small quantities.

Last week, for example, the Harvard School of Public Health announced the latest in a series of studies

finding that people who eat large amounts of red meat

have increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and a shorter life expectancy overall.

And this unleashed a predictable media storm about red meat being bad for you.

Completely lost in the shuffle was the part about the quantity involved.

The increased disease risk was seen in people who ate two or more

...