7 replies to this topic

[johnross47]

http://www.scienceda...20816170404.htm

Reading this report in Science Daily today it occured to me that it is not really clear what is meant by red meat. Is it the meat of mammals, or is it specifically the meat of farmed mammals? The meats normally referenced in experiments are generally farmed cattle and pigs. What about sheep meat; presumably lamb and mutton are red meat? Does the dark red meat of some poultry, such as duck or goose, or the meat of game birds such as pheasant or grouse count as red? What about wild game animals such as deer; is it being mammal meat that matters or something to do with whatever it is that makes meat dark. How about alligator or frog or lizard?

Has it been defined or is it just sloppy useage?

[johnross47]

I'm bumping this up because I think it is actually an important question. Has it been defined at all?

[DukeNukem]

John, I think it's just a sloppy categorization, based strictly on blood content of meat.

[johnross47]

That may be true but seems like it should be simplistic. It's used in study after study. Are all those academics as sloppy as that? I just ate a nice duck breast which was very dark red......much darker than a piece of pork, for example, but I suspect that it would not be called red meat. Perhaps the studies are just oversimplified and use very rough classifications. It seems to me that this is something which could be concealing bigger differences in the figures.

[DukeNukem]

Most researchers cluelessly call LDL "bad colesterol", so it doesn't surprise me at all that "red meat" is also an unscientific concept that has somehow taken root.  Red meat generally refers to mammals, although the pork association has done a great job is positioning themselves away from that.

[johnross47]

That is the impression I've got too. It looks like a lot of the classification and categorisation in many studies is actually very sloppy. How much is the cooking method responsible for, for example, rather than the type of meat? What we need is studies on causation rather than correlation.

[niner]

Some meat categorizations that I've found useful:

Cured meat (bad) vs natural meat (not bad)

Grass fed vs grain fed  (ruminants)

Truly free range (eating bugs and whatnot) vs grain fed (chickens, probably other fowl as well)  There is a fake "free range" that involves letting grain-fed chickens out to stretch their legs occasionally, which I doubt has much impact on the healthiness of the meat.

I don't really know what "red meat" means; it doesn't seem to be precisely defined.  I've always taken it to mean "beef", in the triumvirate of beef/chicken/pork that form the bulk of American meat.  Turkey probably counts as "non-red", mostly.  Lamb would fall on the "red" side.

[johnross47]

Most of the meat I eat (not a lot) is grass fed, and/or genuinely free range and in the case of mamals, often from suckler herds. I also eat a fair bit of game in season, and much of that is very dark red, away beyond normal farm turkey. This not too difficult in rural Scotland. I'm begining to suspect that these epidemiological studies oversimplify to avoid a statistical nightmare and wind up not really clarifying anything.