Red Meat for Food Fear and False Obesity Stories
It is easy to find advice to cut red meat consumption for quite a variety of reasons – including to reduce a person’s risk for weight gain and obesity. AARP advises that “meat is particularly problematic for putting on pounds because it contains protein and saturated fat, both of which promote weight gain.” Obesity is frequently tacked onto a list of problems with consuming red meat.
But it’s a false narrative. A new systematic review and meta-analysis in Obesity points out this problem quite clearly.
Interventional Studies
The new study in Obesity uses data from 24 interventional studies identified in a systematic review of 5,630 references. They developed a random effects model to determine pooled effect sizes of interventions targeting red meat. The analysis found no significant effect for unprocessed meat on BMI, body weight, or percent body fat. Senior author Nikhil Dhurandhar says:
“Beef contains high-quality protein and other essential nutrients and people enjoy this key source of nourishment – yet they’re often discouraged to consume red meat based on recommendations primarily driven by observational evidence. Our study is the first to fully review the totality of causal evidence, which shows no protective or adverse effect of unprocessed red meat intake on obesity.”
Leaping from a Link to a Cause
We have the burden of this false narrative about red meat and obesity because too many people are too quick to jump from an association of high consumption of meat with obesity to a presumption that it is meat that is causing obesity. Ten years ago, Distinguished Professor Aaron Carroll wrote in the New York Times that the problem comes from misinterpreting epidemiologic data:
“Epidemiologic evidence can take us only so far. As I’ve written before, those types of studies can be flawed. Nothing illustrates this better than a classic 2012 systematic review that pretty much showed that everything we eat is associated with both higher and lower rates of cancer.”
We lose sight of a simple fact, he says. For any type of food, moderate consumption is not a problem. Overconsumption is. Telling everyone to stop eating so much red meat is not helpful because not everyone is over-consuming it.
Healthy dietary patterns are important. But one-size-fits-all dietary advice, like “eat less red meat,” is unhelpful. We don’t need to fear food that is nourishing and we don’t need false narratives that obesity is simply caused by eating too much of this or that.
Click here for Dhurandhar’s new study in Obesity and here for further perspective. For free access to Carroll’s perspective from the Times, click here.
Roast Beef, photograph by Dolon Prova, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
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July 28, 2025
