But I don't want to die an early death... huh.
Eating red meat isn't gonna kill you when you're young, and not when you have it in moderation.
What'll kill you when you're young is stuff like reckless driving or not knowing your alcohol limit.
Stupid stuff, basically. So don't do stupid stuff.
And ya know, you might die young anyway through no fault of your own. So don't do harmful things to yourself, but at the same time, you can't worry too much. You cannot prevent cancer 100%. Sometimes you're just unlucky. This is coming from someone who actually works in cancer research.
We scientists still enjoy a hot dog every now and again. My boss noted the irony of a venti Starbucks drink on the desk of a scientist who studies the effect of caffeine on tumors. (The scientist was like, "Yeah, I know..."
)
In fact, scientist Marie Curie handled radioactive substances all her life without shielding (people didn't know how dangerous radiation was back then, they just knew it glowed and thus was
awesome) and died in her 60's. Yes, it was from a disease caused by radiation exposure, but she didn't die in her 30's riddled with tumors or anything. Getting cancer in your 60s is not that uncommon even nowadays. So a lot of it is overblown. Still, if we know about the imminent dangers of something, we should take necessary precautions to protect ourselves.
Red meat has a lot less imminent danger in it than actual radioactive substances.
So avoid it if it lets you sleep at night, but I don't think it'll make any real discernible difference.
And yeah, as a microbiologist, I ALWAYS look at population studies with a very dubious eye. You just can't do good rigorous controls on large populations of people.
It's like, some people just have bad genes. My uncle (related by marriage) eats well, exercises, has cut out all salt from his diet, but needs medication to control his high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Whereas my family (grandmother, mother, me) can eat whatever the hell we want and our cholesterol numbers are phenomenal. And we have trouble keeping our blood pressure UP.
A lot of that is luck of the gene pool, and the more we do genetic studies, the more we can really give people good advice about what to do to keep as healthy as possible.
So yummy.
) I agree that steak is overrated, though. Chicken is cheap and dark meat is especially cheap cause Americans for some reason don't like dark meat...
