Another Red Meat Scare

By Rich Kozlovich

As I was at breakfast yesterday morning (two fried eggs, sausage, home fries, Jewish Rye toast slathered in butter) the waitress was perusing the article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer regarding the “new” discovery that is “likely” to cause heart disease.  Since I eat there a lot and know the people working there I pointed out that the word “likely” is a weasel word and it means -at that point she interrupted me and said – “they haven’t got a clue”.  Now that was encouraging. 

I really do think that all these scares have made society calloused.  When all this started in 1959 with the Great Cranberry Scare people panicked.  That pattern continued for decades; one scare after another until now people are suffering from what I call “green fatigue”. 

Admittedly, this isn’t a green scare on the surface, but all these scares are orchestrated by the same types, and I can guarantee that the greenies will start touting this as a reason to abandon red meat in their promotion of global warming initiatives.  After all, cows flatulate, and cow flatulence is a green house gas, so clearly cow flatulence is destroying the world, therefore it is critical that you stop eating red meat, especially since we now know that eatng red meat is a “likely” a cause of heart disease. 

By the way; does anyone notice the lack of consistency in all of this?  By their reasoning those who slaughtered the millions and millions of buffalo, bringing them to the brink of extinction, were the "good guys".   Then there are the false claims that global warming is killing the polar bears.  Polar bears must not flatulate.  But now take elephants.  They must be a serious source of flatulence.  So should we abandon all efforts to save the elephants?  One group of greenies demands we save all these animals and another group of greenies says their flatulence is destroying the planet, and clearly the only way to stop that is to kill them all.   Right?  It really is a good thing for the animal world that the climate change initiatives are being exposed for the scams they are.

Make no mistake about this.  They greenies know that unless they can make this green issue a personal health issue it won't have nearly the impact they want.   Rachel Carson was far more successful with the public because she made her return to nature anti-chemical cancer scares a personal health isssue for humanity versus her predecessors who were clearly misathropic.  It was her unscientific claims that modern chemicals, especially pesticides, were going to cause cancer in the vast numbers of the human race.  That was blantanly false and she had to know it.  But that is what works and that is the pattern for the activists. 

Steve Milloy wrote a small article about this today in Junkscience.com titled “Claim: Red meat substance (L-carnitine) linked with heart disease; RealityDrop — No credible evidence meat-consumption associated with heart disease”,  saying: "The premise of the new Nature Medicine study is that that red meat consumption is linked to heart disease risk. But this is not true. First, all the “research” supposedly linking meat and meat products with heart disease are weak association studies. Next, this 2010 Harvard review study reported:

Red meat intake was not associated with CHD (n=4 studies; relative risk per 100-g serving per day=1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.81 to 1.23; P for heterogeneity=0.36) or diabetes mellitus (n=5; relative risk=1.16; 95% confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.46; P=0.25).

While it may be true that meat-eaters may have higher levels of “proatherogenic” compounds (as per the new study), this is a far cry from evidence, much less proof, that meat consumption causes heart disease. Also keep in mind that atherosclerosis (and, hence, heart disease) is an entirely natural and as yet unexplained phenomenon.  Read more about the new study."

Throuhout the course of my life, I have watched coffee go from friend to foe to ally to fiend and back again based on "studies".  Eventually everyone ignored them and where did all of those studies end up?  In the same place this study will go; into the ash heap of history, where it belongs. 

I would like to recommend reading the book by Steven Milloy, “Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense against Health Scares and Scams”. I have read it twice and still reference it regularly.