Debunking a Myth: "Red Meats” You Need to Stop Before a Heart Attack Kills You!

                           Myth: You Need to Stop Chopping Down Red Meat Before Your Heart Attack Kills you….

As delicious as it may be, everyone knows red meat is terrible for you. Your steak might ride with nothing more threatening than a bunch of French fries, but it's always tailed by an outlaw posse of cholesterol, coronary heart disease, and cardiovascular disease.

And that's just the tip of red meat's kill-you iceberg: It has also been linked to colon cancer, breast cancer, stomach cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, prostate cancer, atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, obesity, and endometriosis.

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"Is there any chance half of those cancel the other half out?"

Hell, looking at that stack of diseases, it's a wonder anyone who has ever eaten meat is still alive.

But Actually ...

The problem isn't the meat. It's how we eat it.

There are all of these weird exceptions to the red meat rule that have puzzled scientists. People like the Masai and Inuit, who are still fairly close to the classic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, both exist on all-animal high-fat diets, yet have very low rates of the diseases red meat is blamed for. It's not just some fluke of genetics, either: Almost a century ago, a scientific study found that two ordinary men who lived on an all-meat diet for an entire year were in good health and completely lacking in horror diseases.

It appears that the problem with all of the studies about the horrors of red meat is that they don't distinguish between processed and unprocessed meats. According to a massive Harvard study, this seemingly insignificant difference is the entire reason behind red meat's bad rap.

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"Are ... are you sure, guys? You want to run those numbers again, just to be safe?"

Processed meats -- and we mean stuff that has been prepared to last way longer in the package than fresh meat from the butcher, such as hot dogs, sausage, bacon, ham, smoked meats, and the stuff you find in many frozen meals and fast food -- have all kinds of salt and various additives in them. They contain four times more sodium than ordinary red meat, and that's the killer. Those additives account for the link with both coronary heart disease and cardiovascular problems. The high amounts of nitrates, nitrites, and carcinogenic nitrosamines take care of the rest of the list, up to and including obesity -- another ailment red meat is often blamed for.

In short: Red meat doesn't kill you. Processed meat kills you.

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"I want to live forever. And if that means strangling cows and eating their raw flesh, so be it."

The problem is that the type of person who eats unprocessed meat -- that is, who buys a hunk of fresh beef from the meat aisle at the grocery store and then throws it on the grill -- is also the type of person who doesn't think twice about eating processed hot dogs, bacon, roast beef sandwiches, etc., even though the difference in health effects between the two is huge.

The difference, of course, is that buying and preparing fresh meat is way, way more expensive than the cheap processed bologna that will make you a week's worth of sandwiches for a couple bucks. But if you're not going to spend money keeping your heart from developing a fatal clog, what are you going to spend it on?