You may have heard the expression knowledge is power. Well, today we're going to give you more power to control your diet and lifestyle by giving you the facts.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we conclude our series on how industries impact dietary and health guidelines. Did you know that the meat industry's own study concluded that meat consumption increased the risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and health.

Heart disease, diabetes, and premature death. Here's the story. A series of papers, published in the annals of internal medicine that largely discounted all but the highest quality randomized studies reached a conclusion directly contrary to the public health advice we've heard for years, they suggested that we should continue our current consumption in both red and processed meat.

The authors base their exclusion of evidence on the so-called grade criteria, which were mainly developed for evaluating evidence from drug trials. We need randomized double-blam possible control trials for drugs, but strictness of these criteria would probably cause evidence for just about every dietary lifestyle and environmental factor related to chronic disease to be graded as lower, very low evidence.

If the grade criteria were used to evaluate the evidence for other factors related to diets such as inadequate fruits and vegetables are too much soda or alcohol or whether or not exercise is good or safe sex or sleep, smoking, air pollution, none of the current recommendations on these issues would be supported by high or even moderate quality evidence using the drug trial criteria.

But even after ignoring major parts of the available evidence, they still found an association between meat intake and an increased risk of cancer. And not just cancer, they found that adherence to dietary patterns lower in red or processed meat intake may result in a decreased risk for premature death, cardiometabolic disease, and mortality, meaning the risk of getting and dying of diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes, as well as a risk of getting cancer and dying from cancer.

Yet they still concluded in their dietary guideline recommendations, continue your current red meat consumption, continue your processed meat consumption.

Forget the whole premature death thing, cancer heart disease diabetes, just keep eating your burgers and bacon.

So you have these dietary guidelines developed by some self-appointed panel that are tantamount to promoting meat consumption despite their own findings that high consumption is harmful to health.

How do they square that? Contradicting the evidence generated from their own meta-analyses. There's only one body of evidence. They found the same risk that all the other reviews found.

So they're not saying meat is less risky, they're just saying the risk is acceptable. Well, you do have to consider the risk and benefits, well we've covered the harms, their own data show that a moderate reduction in red and processed meat consumption can be reduced.

This assessment of meat consumption can reduce total mortality by 13%, heart disease mortality by 14% cancer, mortality by 11% and type 2 diabetes risk by 24%.

What are the benefits? In short, omnivores enjoy eating meat.

Okay, given people's attachment to their meat-based diet, the associated risk reduction in our leading killers like cancer heart disease diabetes is not likely to provide sufficient motivation to reduce consumption of red meat or processed meat.

So therefore, eat up. In fact, they even say straight out that unlike the other dietary guidelines suggesting we limit consumption of stuff because I like that cancer thing,

these other guidelines have paid little no attention to the reasons people eat meat, whereas they did a systematic review of preferences regarding meat consumption and people who eat meat enjoy eating meat. Maybe that's even why they do it.

They're generally unwilling to change their meat consumption even in response to health concerns. So it's a panel belief, the panel you'll remember with generous support of a group getting millions every year from the meat industry, the panel belief that for the majority of individuals, the desirable effects like lowering your risk of family devastating cancer and heart attacks associated with reducing meat consumption, probably do not outweigh the undesirable effects like having to give up all that yummy meat.

This is what led them to make their recommendation to continue current consumption. That sounds like something straight out of the journal, meat science. Why should we keep eating red meat? Because of the enjoyment.

People also like to smoke, they like to drink soda, they like to have unsafe sex. It's kind of like saying, we know motorcycle helmets can save lives, but some people still prefer the feeling of the wind in their hair.

So let's just tell people to not wear helmets. But you'll actually see this argument, complying with dietary recommendations and poses a taste cost on consumers.

So how about socially desirable dietary recommendations that are most compatible with consumer preferences? You know, the best balance health benefits against taste cost.

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