Study involving 1.5M people shows raised mortality rates among meat eaters

PHYSICIANS should advise patients to limit animal products when possible. FILE PHOTO

The T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies based on Cornell University’s online study program (eCornell) published a study that showed meat consumption raises mortality rates based on the analysis of more than 1.5 million people involved in the study.

Physician, researcher and author

Eddie Ramirez cited a review of large-scale studies involving more than 1.5 million people which found “all-cause mortality is higher for those who eat meat, particularly red or processed meat, on a daily basis.”

Ramirez said the study was conducted by physicians from Mayo Clinic in Arizona. The study, titled “Is Meat Killing Us?” was published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association this year.

He related that the authors analyzed six studies that evaluated the effects of meat and vegetarian diets on mortality with a goal of giving primary-care physicians evidence-based guidance about whether they should discourage patients from eating meat. Their recommendation: physicians should advise patients to limit animal products when possible and consume more plants than meat.

“This data reinforces what we have known for so long—your diet has great potential to harm or heal,” said Brookshield Laurent, DO, assistant professor of family medicine and clinical sciences at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine. “This clinical-based evidence can assist physicians in counseling patients about the important role diet plays, leading to improved preventive care, a key consideration in the osteopathic philosophy of medicine.”

Science Daily online also published the same study that points to “higher death rates” when “red and processed meats are eaten daily, according to reviewers.”

The Science Daily story was published May 5, 2016, titled “Meat consumption raises mortality rates.” The source of the article was cited as the American Osteopathic Association.

Aside from the health costs, another issue hounding animal products is its environmental cost. A lecture by David

Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University, and Bruce Monger, who teaches oceanography also at Cornell, illustrated the implication of our food choices in the environment and how animal consumption, including marine resources, is destroying the environment.

As the global population surges toward a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, Western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from UN Environment Program’s international panel of sustainable resource management. The Guardian quoted Prof. Edgar

Hertwich, the lead author of the report, as saying: “Animal products cause more damage than (producing) construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as (burning) fossil fuels.”

Livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions. This is corroborated by a 2006 report showing that worldwide GHG is attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry by up to 51 percent, citing an analysis performed by Robert Goodland, a former World Bank Group environmental adviser, with cowriter Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corp.