Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Eating Less Meat Could Save 45,000 Lives a Year, Experts Claim
Cutting meat consumption to 210g a week would hugely reduce deaths from heart disease and cancer, research shows
More than 45,000 lives a year could be saved if everyone began eating meat no more than two or three times a week, health experts and Friends of the Earth claim today.
Processed meat such as ham is particularly bad for health, says the FoE report. (Photograph: Food Features / Alamy/Alamy) Widespread switching to low-meat diets would stop 31,000 people dying early from heart disease, 9,000 from cancer and 5,000 from strokes, according to new analysis of British eating habits by public health expert Dr Mike Rayner contained in an FoE report.
Dramatically reduced meat consumption would also save the NHS £1.2bn and help reduce climate change and deforestation in South America, where rainforests are being chopped down to grow animal feed and graze cows which are exported to Europe, the report states.
Eating too much meat, particularly processed meat, is bad for health because doing so can involve consuming more fat, saturated fat or salt than official guidelines recommend, the FoE say.
They do not advocate shunning meat altogether, but do urge people to eat meat no more than two or three times a week, with total weekly intake not exceeding about 210g – the equivalent of half a sausage a day. Average weekly intake at the moment is between seven and 10 70g portions.
Doing so would save 45,361 lives a year, according to research by Rayner and his colleagues in the British Heart Foundation health promotion research group at Oxford University.
They calculated that a switch to eating meat a maximum of five times a week would prevent 32,352 deaths, but another 2,509 people a year will die by 2050 if current meat consumption patterns continue. There are currently 228,000 deaths a year from three major conditions in which food intake plays a key role: heart disease, strokes or diet-related cancers, such as bowel cancer.
"We don't need to go vegetarian to look after ourselves and our planet, but we do need to cut down on meat," said Craig Bennett, FoE's director of policy and campaigns. "While the government has ignored the environmental aspect of high meat and dairy consumption, it can't ignore the lives that would be saved by switching to less and better meat."
Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners, agreed: "People shouldn't stop eating meat but they should eat less meat, especially processed meat, due to their salt and saturated fat content, and eat more fruit and vegetables."
Rachel Thompson, deputy head of science at the World Cancer Research Fund,, which has publicised the potential cancer risk of eating a lot of meat, said: "These figures add weight to what we have been saying about red and processed meat – that there is convincing evidence they increase the risk of developing bowel cancer, the third most common cancer in the UK. WCRF recommends eating no more than 500g of cooked red meat per week and to avoid eating processed meat – such as bacon, ham and salami."
Meat producers criticised the report. "The vast majority of consumers eat less than average recommendations of red meat already," said Chris Lamb of BPEX, which represents 20,000 pork producers in England. "It is over-simplistic to say that changing one element of the diet can have such a dramatic result. Red meat has a valuable role to play as part of a healthy, balanced diet."
Jen Elford, of the Vegetarian Society, added: "I find myself wondering why an organisation as courageous as Friends of the Earth can't bring itself to recommend a vegetarian diet. Of course less meat is better than more, but we can't address the scale of the environmental and health problems facing society without a wholesale shift away from animal protein."
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
43 Comments so far
Show All210g per week? That's less then a decent size steak.
If you make your own traditional soy food : (fermented) tempeh, you can use it as a substitute for meat in most dishes.
The nutritional profile is better than meat and experts agree that tempeh is the best way to consume soy.
It is easy to make; more info at http://makethebesttempeh.org
have they finally seen the light?...........
Reading the byline for this article again demonstrates the race for the bottom is on. "Eating Less Meat Could Save 45,000 Lives a Year". Actually, eating no meat would save around 1 billion lives annually in the US.
Oh, I get it. The homotropic CD editors think that only people have lives Think again, douchebags.
Next time you recruit an editor, try interviewing someone with better critical understanding of English than a third-grader (or year 12 if in the US).
Oh, I get it now... You're talking about the ANIMALS that would be saved in the Uniterd States also!
Me thinks the Guardian Author was just centering his figures around the human population in the UK.
I would imagine quite a few more 'human lives' would be altered here in Amerika if vegetarianism were to be adopted by the masses!
kill it, gut it, pick it, skin it, now eat it
yes! i have always thought that the hypocritical "paper butchers" who buy neat little packets in a shop should have to go through the entire process if they want to be meat-eaters. that would cut consumption by lots.
When I was very young I took up Yoga and became a vegetarian and was called a fanatic by some misunderstanding people, but now it is good to see that eating meat is being seen more and more as unhealthy. The vegan or vegetarian diet is good for the planet and good for your health too.
RE: "...the government has ignored the environmental aspect of high meat and dairy consumption..."
The government has no more "ignored the environmental aspect of high meat and dairy consumption" than it has "ignored" the environmental damage of war, "ocean acidification, soil depletion, desertification, freshwater shortages, mass extinctions, toxic chemical pollution, the rifts in the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, etc. All of these find their common cause in our current mode of production".* That is, capitalism. And, that is why focusing on meat consumption in isolation of all these other issues - which are systemic in origin - will accomplish nothing more than a drop in the bucket to the problems we face.
*http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/foster270410.html
One thing is sure. As long as we listen to you, nothing will be accomplished. I've read all your long winded soliloquies with much truth in them about the evils of capitalism. But your inability to see the conspiratorial hand behind the curtain of 90% or more of every insult visited on the common people is telling. There is no passion in your prose. I suspect you are a well educated, high net worth individual who is definitely 'getting something' from the corrupt capitalism you ostensibly attack.
You'd be funny if you weren't so inflated with self importance. You need to be poor so you can get over yourself.
Ardent, you seem to know as LITTLE about OCD as you do about vegetarianism.
Unless you are a psychiatrist, psychologist, OCD patient, or have a family member or friend with OCD, you most likely know nothing ACCURATE about it.
OCD is very likely a survival instinct in overdrive:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19213201
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16530315
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16005572
this only scratches the surface of a much larger problem, that is - what's the problem with industrial agriculture? forget all the land and other resources used to produce beef - what about all the land and other resources used for soy products? or shipping produce thousands of miles? i'm sick of how trendy veganism is, as if it is not reliant on the same industrial system it claims to be against! eat local, organic, grass fed, nothing from a box - friends of the earth should push that idea and see how many lives it saves.
Nice article and I agree. This was common knowledge among health nuts back in the 60's. There are are also changes in consciousness with a vegan organic whole food diet.
But, my mother ate meat twice a day since a child and she is now 97 !
What the researchers are not evaluating is what sort of cancer causing pollutants are in industrial meats ?
And wild game meat does not have the saturated fat content of industrial meat or the pollutants. And grass fed free range cattle actually have omega fats in their meat rather than saturated fats.
Etc.
The average american couldn't care what they shove in their mouth. Out of an office of 15 where I work, I am the only one who actually cares about what I eat, the others will eat any fast food garbage that comes their way. Even after reading things about meat plants, the happy meal that wont rot, etc.. they still put that crap into their bodies.
I think the diet for the last 50 years has rotted the brains of most of the people in the US.
Diet isn't just about human health and the environment. Life is more than human....
All-you-can-eat American consumers enjoy devouring no fewer than a million animals (birds, mammals) every hour. In personal terms, the average American consumer is responsible for the suffering and deaths of no fewer than 2,500 animals over a 75-year lifespan.
The 10,280 million animals raised and killed for “food” in the U.S. in 2008 includes both 9,527 million who were slaughtered as well as an additional 752 million who died lingering deaths from disease, injury, starvation, suffocation, maceration, or other atrocities of animal farming and transport. 9,766 million of these were chickens, 233 million males born into the egg industry, who were ground up in macerators or suffocated to death in plastic garbage bags upon hatching.
In 2008, approximately 58 BILLION animals [almost 9x the global human population number]were killed for “food” worldwide, up from the previous year due to human population increase. The 58 BILLION includes over 51 billion chickens, 3.5 billion ducks, geese and turkeys, and 3.5 billion mammals. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization numbers are quite conservative because many countries under-report, don’t report at all, or certainly fail to report the number killed by disease, injury, starvation, suffocation, and other animal farming abuses--such as when humans evacuate due to flooding/hurricanes, leaving behind "their" animals to their fate. And, of course, there’s the “game” and “bush meat” trades and consumption.
Every one of these animals is a somebody, a conscious being, not a “something,” or an “it”-- the kind of language most often used by animal farmers and consumers to devalue nonhuman life, and I would include those who say “We don’t have to go vegetarian, just eat less meat.” Right. Hey, another way to eat less meat is for consumers to enjoy a much shorter lifespan! That way the environment benefits, too!
I didn't become vegan to help an overpopulated, violent, and destructive species become more overpopulated, violent, and destructive. I didn’t become vegan for the sake of the environment either, although I don’t drive an SUV and I’m child-free.
If my going vegan for the sake of all these doomed "food" animals won't stop all those consumers "at-the-top-of-the-food-chain" from slaughtering and enjoying "food" animal dinners, then maybe mad "cow" disease, "bird" flu, "swine" flu, salmonella, E. coli, and all the other meat-egg-and-dairy food-borne pathogens and chronic illnesses that affect the consumers of these products will do a good job of culling the consumer herd in the absence of natural predators.
Well said rodent. I gave up meat and animal products years ago for the same reason, and have gotten in the habit of keeping quiet about it because I just got sickened by the lack of concern for other beings as well as the endless accusations that I am somehow "self-righteous." The latter claim can be made about almost any personal effort to engage in behavior that does not promote the suffering inherent in "business as usual." That includes althernatives to driving and using fossil fuels, avoiding sweat-shop produced consumer goods, buying organic foods, etc. I suppose we are all implicated the evils done by our global capitalist nation, but it's great that some still have the courage to speak out. Keep it up!
Killing plants for food is very similar to killing animals for food.
Most Native American traditions recognize that plants have consciousness and a "spirit".
There's one in every crowd, isn't there?!
One of my carnivore pals is always referring to me as one of those... Vegetable Terrorists!
Very similar my ass! Go cut the throat of a pig and then go pick some veggies out of a garden. Then tell me how similar it is.
Big difference between cultivating plants for food and slaughtering animals. Consider this: Plants are harvested near the end of their life cycle (or merely their seeds harvested and the trees are left unharmed). Animals are slaughtered when they are mere teenagers, often pre-pubescent, in the infancy of life. Why are animals slaughtered so young? 1) The risk of disease increases with age, so get 'em when they are young. 2) The costs of maintaining an animal (with food, water) are horrifically high, especially in terms of damage to the environment.
As for "most Native American traditions", I'll remind you that NAs treat animals *extremely* poorly - any other culture would call it abusive. Don't let this fact interfere with your dewy-eyed belief in the much trumpeted and completely false mythology of "NA spirituality".
Eating meat is one of the emotional issues for some reason. It would be nice to see calm if enthusiastic discussion. We know by now that everyone's 'truth' varies from person person.
A couple of thoughts:
The article addresses the healthiness of eating meat which is a different issue from how domestic animals are slaughtered. 'That' they are slaughtered, other things being equal, is only comparable to nature where animals eat each other on a regular basis (young or old, sick or well, stressed or calm, etc).
The bulk of soybeans in the U.S. are GM, unfortunately, so the issue of replacing meat with soy products is not as simple as it sounds.
Seeing friends, family, co-workers happily consuming whatever is at hand is certainly a mystery at times when basic nutrition facts are readily available. I'm guessing we retain an element of trust in retail stores, in the government, and even in industry. After all, we have ingredient labeling now, we have (a few) food inspectors, we have the FDA..., and we have a lot of publicity when tainted products are discovered. We would prefer to trust, I think, even in the face of increased deception and discovered lies.
It's probably not so much about the philosophy of meat-eating vs vegetarianism but about corporatism whereby much of our food is tainted for the sake of profit.
"'That' they are slaughtered, other things being equal, is only comparable to nature where animals eat each other on a regular basis (young or old, sick or well, stressed, or calm, etc.)."
I think not. In nature, animals are living life as they are meant to. They are not bred and raised exclusively for the use/abuse of humans. Yes, they die in nature, as all living things do.
Incidentally, organically grown soy is not genetically modified and it's not much more expensive. Also, soy is not required in a vegan diet. Legumes, grains, fruits and vegetables contain more than enough protein for a healthy diet. The meat and dairy industries have created a myth that we need far more protein than we do.
Well, arguably humans are 'meant' to eat meat (and/or whatever's available) much as wild animals are 'meant' to eat each other.
Perhaps organic soybeans (and products) are more readily available than I realized.
Totally agree re learning how much protein we actually require and being able to obtain it from grains and legumes as per Lappe's "Diet For A Small Planet".
Your claim that homo sapiens "are 'meant' to eat meat' is a talking point of the critically-thinking challenged, and is not borne out by data. Our teeth and digestive tract are not 'meant' for digesting animal flesh. The main reason why we cook flesh is because we cannot chew or digest flesh efficiently.
Carnivorism in animals is the exception, not the rule, and there are but a handful of carnivorous species, so please quit with the "wild animals are 'meant' to eat each other". Even omnivores are an invisibly small part of our planet's large-animal biomass (excluding humans, of course).
Most meat eaters feel entitled; just because you can eat meat doesn't mean you should.
Agree with you on Lappe's work on complimentary protein. It's not what you eat, but what you eat it with.
Yes, Jen Elford, it's curious why Friends of the Earth (FoE) slammed the brakes on reduced meat consumption when it could've gone further - unless it wasn't convinced of the environmental and health aspects of a meat-based diet.
The problem with a diet-transition advocacy that promotes giving up meat MAINLY (or worse, SOLELY) for health reasons is that it is self-defeating. It should not come as a surprise that people develop cancer and several other ailments from a meat-based diet, especially a meat-rich one. Livestock are injected with antibiotics and genetically-engineered growth hormones (like Posilac manufactured by Monsanto, the overlord of biotech agribusiness); fed processed and genetically-modified Frankenfeeds (like Bt Maize, still by Monsanto); and cramped in industrial cattle houses, pig pens, and chicken coops (where disease spreads easily and animals live miserably). The answer to this web of problems has been to go organic, even free-range. And with this cult gaining ground in response to the health risks of meat, how else can people be convinced to eat less of it?
This is why I don't stress the health argument, and why I instead approach giving up meat from a holistic frame. Then again, who cares about animal compassion, the environment, and global warming, yeah?
Really? No doubt Bill Gates and other billionaires together with the UN 'save the planet from useless eaters' folks will soon be giving out free hot dogs with cigarette purchases in all run down neighborhoods. Rumsfield has already been scolded by his elite friends and the FDA because people aren't dying fast enough from aspartame (equal) caused brain and/or liver tumors.
Time to get with the program!
Before you are sure of your opinions read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He is not a scientist but a science writer whose specialty is writing magazine articles that make science understandable by the common person. His book recounts the history of the diet - fat - obesity - diabetes, etc. research from the early 20th century onward. It is extremely well written but extremely detailed. If you read it with an open mind you will be shocked at what you learn.
Yep. George Carlin lets our environment (and food) nazis have it with both barrels here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
One more thing. It drives our nutrition scientists crazy that the French, with a high saturated fat and cholesterol diet, have one of the lowest heart disease rates in the world. The scientists ceased on the idea that it was because of the French proclivity for wine with their meals. They pulled out detailed analyses of the composition of wine to show there was a huge level of anti-oxidants that countered the fat. It's total bullshit strawgrasping, of course. What it did accomplish, however, is boost wine sales in the USA where when scientists spout some new crap, everybody assumes it came from God. Of course, rather than drop heart disease in the USA, the result has been lots of winos with heart disease. We don't do moderation in the USA. That, I believe, is the French secret. But nobody knows. And the Mongols have even less heart disease and an almost exclusive fat diet.
Bottom line. Scientists are as confused as anybody else and the inability to put humans in a lab for 70 years complete with control groups and double blind testing makes it virtually impossible to categorically and pedantically dictate food choices. Oh, but they've got great PR.
Before you are sure of your opinions read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He is not a scientist but a science writer whose specialty is writing magazine articles that make science understandable by the common person. His book recounts the history of the diet - fat - obesity - diabetes, etc. research from the early 20th century onward. It is extremely well written but extremely detailed. If you read it with an open mind you will be shocked at what you learn.
George Carlin say it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
If you haven't seen it, Food Inc. http://www.foodincmovie.com/ covers so many of the important issues here. Probably most people here have seen it, so even more reason to check it out if you seriously care about this problem.
Its not a dreary nightmare that offers no hope, or solutions either. To sum up one of their main and I think most important conclusions:
Just because its a 'good deal', on sale, or a lot of 'bang-for-your-buck" doesn't mean its good for you, good for the economy, good for livestock, or good for the Earth. Most likely its bad for all these things. Be willing to pay what it takes to produce food RESPONSIBLY. For organic and local, this generally means paying substantially more, but its well worth it in the long run. I am a vegetarian (ovo-lacto, and eat seafood responsibly, i.e. no bluefin, swordfish, Chilean sea-bass etc), but feel this point (buying responsibly, esp. meat) is even more important than cutting out meat from our diet.
Finally, those economists and con-men who claim organic farming is 1. unsustainable, 2. doesn't address burgeoning 3rd world populations, or3. that it is only for the elite and rich, are full of semi-undigestable, hormone-injected, rotted GMO meat. Don't listen to a word they say... better, force them to shut their stinking mouths.
–SS
I am so glad I turned into a vegetarian a year and a half ago.
It's been 30 for me. I just did a twelve mile hike to the summit of Mt Katahdin in Maine for my 70th birthday.
I try not to eat USA beef. Growth hormones are deadly. The milk is worse. More growth hormones and more deadly.
Why has cancer tripled in the past few decades? I'm thinking its all the toxins in the food, air, water, etc. including the meat with antibiotics, hormones, and the years they live in terror is bound to do something to their flesh too...
Was just thinking of all the people I know in their 90's and even into being over 100 (I visit a "home") - many of them have British backgrounds and grew up on pork, lamb, beef (bacon and sausages) chickens etc. from old-fashioned farms.
I'm thinking its not necessarily the meat (I wonder how much longer they would live if they would have been vegetarian?) These people did not grow up eating fast foods and foods from boxes and packages --- nor meat from factory farms. But they did eat meat.
Just wondering...
In a PETA video, ...'Meet your Meat', it shows a slab of beef on the table, ...the tumors cut out, and the table haphazardly rinsed off with a hose, before the next slab of meat is slapped on. Animals and fish get various cancers as humans do, and obviously they don't undergo CT scans. Chances are extremely likely, if you eat meat or fish, you've consumed millions of live cancer cells. I couldn't say if this is the smoking gun, but it at least is not a very sensible thing to do.
Actually if everyone became a vegetarian it would likely end world starvation, ...in addition to ending the 1.2 billion metric tonnes of methane gas into the atmosphere, the secondmost greenhouse gas emitter, behind carbon. There are of course many animals and vegetation that produce methane as well, but cattle production is still the leading cause, and the leading cause for a 1% increase in methane in our atmosphere every year.
But I think the most important aspect of all this, is our world community beginning to respect all life. We don't need to consume animals, ...because of convenience and taste. We need to break away from all that surrounds us and set ourselves apart from that violence. For the first time in the history of all that has lived, it is us, the human race that has the chance to survive. It's true, nearly everything in this world relies on another creature to survive. But perhaps this is meant for us, ...a chance and a choice to live a better way, ...no matter what we see before us.