Red Meat Kills

Eating red meat isn't so great for the environment. By adopting a vegetarian diet, you'll reduce your carbon footprint by over 5,000 pounds. By just cutting out beef, you'll save about 3000 lbs of CO2 a year. Scarfing down red meat has a huge environmental impact.

Even though beef and other meats are very carbon intensive, people are staunchly unwilling to stop eating them. I mean, the two most "American" dishes, the hamburger and the frankfurter, are made of beef. (Isn't it weird how American cuisine is named after German cities?) It's hard to convince people to change something so culturally natural.

If the environment won't convince people to cut down on red meat, maybe health concerns will. A new study has linked red meat with an early grave. According to the study, people who consumed the most processed and red meats were the most likely to die sooner of heart disease and cancer.

From New York Times:

During the decade, 47,976 men and 23,276 women died, and the researchers kept track of the timing and reasons for each death. Red meat consumption ranged from a low of less than an ounce a day, on average, to a high of four ounces a day, and processed meat consumption ranged from at most once a week to an average of one and a half ounces a day.

The study finds that if Americans ate less meat, the deaths of 1 million men and 500,000 women could be spared per decade. And if you still want to eat red meat, then you should follow the doctor's orders.

To prevent premature deaths related to red and processed meats, Dr. Popkin suggested in an interview that people should eat a hamburger only once or twice a week instead of every day, a small steak once a week instead of every other day, and a hot dog every month and a half instead of once a week.