Chew on this! Critics sink their teeth into red meat study
On Monday, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health released a study that linked red meat consumption with increased risk of early death.
Probably not surprisingly, the report, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine along with the editorial “Holy Cow! What’s Good For You Is Good For Our Planet” from Dr. Dean Ornish (the man who helped convince Bill Clinton to go vegan), attracted a lot of interest.
The American Meat Institute was among the first to dispute the findings. In a statement issued Monday, the industry group criticized the Harvard study for “relying on notoriously unreliable self-reporting about what was eaten and obtuse methods to apply statistical analysis to the data.”
During an interview last week with The Times, Kaiser Permanente cancer researcher Lawrence H. Kushi — who was not involved with the Harvard study but said the work produced “important results” — acknowledged that epidemiological studies of survey data aren’t as rigorous as a blinded, randomized trial.
