I'm no nutritionist, but intuition would suggest that it's actually quite healthy to eat the same animals that humans have been chomping on since the dawn of time. Maybe the problem isn't that we eat cows, it's that we eat mutant freak factory-farmed cows that have been pumped full of hormones, raised on diets of toxic garbage and tortured for most of their short lives? I'm only guessing.
With that being said, the thing that concerns me most about lab-grown meat isn't whether it's healthy, it's that if it ever gets popular then it's going to be controlled by a tiny handful of multinational megacorps who'll use it to crush independent food producers worldwide and enforce a brutal centralized control of something as basic to human survival our everyday protein consumption. They're the last people on earth we should trust to keep us healthy and satiated, and their claims that they're doing it for our or the environment's benefit (and not just their own greedy empowerment and profiteering) should be treated with extreme scepticism.
aside from quality there is also quantity, which the quantity of red meat consumed in modern meat eaters' diets as I understand it is significantly higher than that of a few hundred years ago.
When life expectancy is no more than 40, you don't care about getting cancer at 60. When it's 80+, that's more of a problem. Moreover in traditional societies people have grown-up children long before they get cancer in average, so there's very little selective pressure on that front.
But that's why I added the second sentence: from an evolutionary perspective it actually doesn't matter if you die from cancer at 60 when you're close to being great-grand father, you've done your job of reproducing and raising your kids well enough and as such it's a good time to go.
People often don't get this, but from a biological perspective death is not actually a bad thing, the only thing that matters is that you leave descendants bearing your genes behind you.
(Not disputing the idea that how the meat was grown matters, though.)
In large quantities*. It's still very nutritious and dense in important stuff like iron, protein, so consumption in limited quantities is OK. Eating 500g of it twice a day is not.
To be clear on the quantity, I just checked my latest pork steak package in our fridge. It’s 4.47 pounds, across four steaks. After cooking it probably reduces to about three pounds. 500g is 1.1 pounds, so that’s about two of the four steaks. And eating two pork steaks over the course of a day isn’t uncommon for me.
500g twice a day would be the entire pack of 4 over the course of a day. I could imagine myself eating that much, but it would feel more along the lines of participating in an eating contest than my usual intake.
Is there a scientific way to determine, based on available factual evidence, whether I’m at risk of long term problems from this habit? All in all, I usually order a pack of 4 twice a week, and that’s when I’m only eating pork steaks. I usually get bored and switch to sandwiches, salads, cheeses, and other foods. But again, it’s within a factor of three of your warning level, which prompts me to ask.
Some people can make do just fine with that but they're usually burning that off or actually consuming the excess protein from post-exercise recovery, even then, 1kg is still a lot.
A lot by how much, that depends on your body composition and the fat percentage of those steaks.
But anyway, on data: Red meats are classified as <probable carcinogenics> (key: probable). https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...
Quantifying data: "The cancer risk related to the consumption of red meat is more difficult to estimate because the evidence that red meat causes cancer is not as strong. However, if the association of red meat and colorectal cancer were proven to be causal, data from the same studies suggest that the risk of colorectal cancer could increase by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily."
What is not clear to me is if this was measured raw or cooked. Cooked meat will shrink and weigh less.
If I were you, I would just go get some checkups, see if you got any deficiencies or anything wrong that might be caused by your eating habits, and if not, just keep enjoying your 1kg of pork steak a day... anyway, I'm amazed you can eat that much pork in a single day, lol.
Is two pork steaks a day really an amazing amount? Usually it’s one (often none), but if I didn’t eat anything else, two is about how many I’d go through. I honestly had no clue it was far outside the norm… Interesting.
Ironically I’m half Jewish, so maybe there’s a genetic craving after thousands of years of pork denial.
Well, I guess I’ll downshift away from red meats as I push 40. Luckily my other vice is apples (one time I bought so many that the cashier was convinced we were making apple pies, but I told her it’s my standard weekly intake) so the transition won’t be too jarring. Cheers.
It is an increase of 17%, not 17% cancer risk.
1.51% cumulative risk of colon cancer among men age 0–74 years, and a 1.12% risk among women. [0]
If you eat 100g red meat daily you increase that risk to ~1.7667% for men and ~1.3104% for women.
If it serves as a guideline, the calorie tracking app I use has a default serving suggestion of 100-150g, raw, for different meats. So even 2 servings of those, twice a day, would still be around half of 2 of those steaks, which happens to be about what I eat in a day, between chicken and lean beef.
Different things come to mind with the size of those steaks but honestly I would just be assuming things and spouting probable nonsense. If they're packaged raw, I would check if they're heavily injected with water to boost the marketable weight. If it's not cheap meat it's probably not an issue.
Out of curiosity, what's the app name?
The current recommendation is down to 50g a day.
If we look at how prehistoric humans actually lived, we can take a look at today's remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Most of which eat up to 15% of their daily energy intake as meat. The fossil record shows similar patterns since before the emergence of homo erectus, so we can be reasonably sure that this value is relatively consistent over time.
Hunter-gatherers primarily ate meat from small mammals, fish and poultry. If we use the nutrient values of rabbit meat, this would be equivalent to about 200g of meat per day per person, so a rabbit could feed one person for 5 days at least.
Realistically, it would be significantly less than that, as most hunter gatherers had access to fish and poultry.
As far as I can tell, the current bad stuff is trans fats (hydrogenated oils), followed by processed meat (preservation like smoking, nitrates, high salt), followed by some uncertainty, maybe high temperature grilling. Meat fat itself is a mixed bag; some good stuff, some bad stuff, some neutral stuff.
Red meat is not bad for you. Now that's hilarious. Several animals live off red meat alone. They seem to be doing okay.
Sounds more like a little person crying that people are doing what they have done for ages. If you want to cry about environmental aspects of red meat, sure, do it. Most agree with that, but don't collate it in with your emotional falsehoods.
There is no way in hell these would be approved today, but outlawing them because they are dangerous is not up for discussion. Once approved, always approved. Aspirin's approval, specifically, is centuries old.