Just 150 Grams Skyrockets the Risk of Heart Disease and Early Death by More Than 45%

A team of scientists from Hamilton Health Sciences led a global study that has established a connection between the consumption of processed meat and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. However, the study did not find the same link between unprocessed red meat or poultry and cardiovascular disease.

The study involved 134,297 individuals from 21 countries across five continents. Over the course of nearly a decade, researchers tracked the participants’ meat consumption and monitored their health outcomes related to cardiovascular illnesses.

The findings revealed that individuals who consumed 150 grams or more of processed meat per week had a 46 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease and a 51 percent higher risk of death compared to those who abstained from processed meat.

Conversely, the study found that moderate levels of non-processed meat consumption had no significant impact on health.

“Evidence of an association between meat intake and cardiovascular disease is inconsistent,” said Romaina Iqbal, the first author of the study and an associate professor at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.

The first author further added that they “wanted to better understand the associations between intakes of unprocessed red meat, poultry, and processed meat with major cardiovascular disease events and mortality.”

Mahshid Dehghan, an investigator for the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, emphasized, “The totality of the available data indicates that consuming a modest amount of unprocessed meat as part of a healthy dietary pattern is unlikely to be harmful.”

The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study, initiated in 2003, is the first multinational study to provide comprehensive information on the relationship between unprocessed and processed meat consumption and health outcomes in low, middle, and high-income countries.

Salim Yusuf, the senior author of the study and executive director of the PHRI, stated, “The PURE study examines substantially more diverse populations and broad patterns of diet, enabling us to provide new evidence that distinguishes between the effects of processed and unprocessed meats.”

The participants’ eating habits were documented using food frequency questionnaires, while their mortality and major cardiovascular disease events were also recorded. This allowed researchers to establish associations between meat consumption patterns and occurrences of cardiovascular disease and mortality.

The authors of the study believe that further research could enhance our understanding of the relationship between meat consumption and health outcomes. For instance, it remains unclear what participants with lower meat intakes were substituting in their diets and whether the quality of those alternative foods varied between countries.

The inclusion of non-meat food substitutes may play a significant role in interpreting the associations between meat consumption and health outcomes. Nonetheless, the authors of the study suggest that their findings “indicate that limiting the intake of processed meat should be encouraged.”

Image Credit: Shutterstock