Reaction to Harvard's red meat study

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Reaction to Harvard's red meat study - Los Angeles Times

Critics of red meat study
March 13, 2012|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times / for the Booster Shots blog

On March 12th, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health released a study that linked red meat consumption with increased risk of early death.

The report, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine along with the editorial “Holy Cow! What's Good For You Is Good For Our Planet” from Dr. Dean Ornish (the man who helped convince Bill Clinton to go vegan), attracted a lot of interest.



The American Meat Institute was among the first to dispute the findings.

In a statement issued Monday, the industry group criticized the Harvard study for “relying on notoriously unreliable self-reporting about what was eaten and obtuse methods to apply statistical analysis to the data.”

During an interview last week with The Times, Kaiser Permanente cancer researcher Lawrence H. Kushi — who was not involved with the Harvard study but said the work produced “important results" — acknowledged that epidemiological studies of survey data aren’t as rigorous as a blinded, randomized trial.

But since it’s really not possible to do such a study for this kind of research, large epidemiological studies are the state of the art in this discipline, Kushi said. 

 It’s “as good as you can do without randomizing people — some eating red meat, others not, and following them for 15 to 20 years,” he added.

Vegetarians loved the article about the Harvard research; die-hard carnivores — and, for that matter, some who just appreciate an occasional bite of steak — expressed dismay and  disdain.



 


 
All things in moderation.