Two months ago, Harvard scientists dropped a bombshell. They claimed that one out of five people that have a single serving a day of processed red meat (bacon, hot dogs, sausage, salami) is going to experience an early death, probably from heart disease or cancer. Leading authors in the Harvard study, An Pan, Ph.D. and Frank Hu, M.D. Ph.D., based their conclusions on a 28-year study of 83,644 women and a 22-year study of 37,698 men. But don’t worry. If you’re having a single daily serving of unprocessed red meats like regular beef, pork and lamb, you only have a 13 percent chance of dying early. Awesome.
Where I’m from, we eat, sleep and breathe steak. On regular occasion, we would get our oak fire going to cook Tri-Tip, T-bone or New York Strip, with corn, homemade garlic bread and slow cooked buttered onion. In fact, the most famous restaurant in our town — Jocko’s Steak House — still grills their steak on oak. The rest of their food pretty much sucks, especially their salad. The point is, I feel your pain. But the truth is clear: If you’re not going to be a vegetarian or vegan, then chicken, turkey and fish is really where it’s at. BBQ’d vegetables also taste amazing, and you know it.
It’s not just the high saturated fats in red meats that cause disease. UCSD’s Ajit Varki, M.D., has shown that humans have an antibody that specifically attacks a sialic acid that is present in vertebrate mammal cells (cows, pigs, lambs, chimps) but not normally present in chicken, turkey, fish or humans. In a weird twist of evolution, eating foods that contain this sialic acid (cow, pig, lamb) causes us humans to incorporate it into our cells and present it on the surface, as if it was our own. Because of this, our own antibodies attack it, which leads to inflammation. Inflammation is linked to many diseases, including cancer. Berkeley’s January 2008 wellness letter, backed by UC Berkeley School of Public Health, discussed the idea that “low grade inflammation may be the cause of all chronic diseases.” It’s no secret that charring your meat also causes cancer. Leading author Robert Gunier at UC Berkeley showed that “those who reported eating grilled, roasted, or broiled meat” had significantly higher derivatives of carcinogens in their urine. So, slow cook your meat. Don’t burn it. Wrap your meat in aluminum foil to help prevent fat from dripping into the charcoal as this can also cause a higher amount of carcinogens. And in addition to your spices, include a good beer, a tiny bit of lemon juice and some olive oil in your marinade. These ingredients can substantially decrease the amount of carcinogens that end up in your grilled meat. Stay omnivorous my friends.
