Researchers recommend focusing on plant-based diets, however some experts point out the study’s flaws. New research from the University of Cambridge suggests that consuming a lot of meat, especially processed and unprocessed red meat, may increase the risk of getting type 2 diabetes.
According to a university press release, researchers discovered that eating 50 grams of processed meat per day — equivalent to two slices of ham or bacon, or one small sausage — increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 15% over the next decade.
Consuming 100 grams of unprocessed red meat per day, equivalent to one small steak, increased the risk by 10%. The results were published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.
Eating 100 grams of poultry was initially found to increase the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 8%, however this association weakened when tested in multiple settings, indicating that more research is needed.
“Our findings provide the largest and most comprehensive evidence to date of the association between meat consumption and a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes,” stated main author Dr. Chunxiao Li from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.
“The link between eating processed meat and red meat and the risk of developing type 2 diabetes is strong and consistent across populations in different world regions and countries.”
The researchers analyzed a variety of factors, including age, gender, health-related behaviors (e.g. smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity), energy intake, body weight, waist circumference, family history of diabetes, and food consumption, according to Li. This study follows several others that have previously proposed this link.
“It was important that we extended the investigation to under-represented populations in countries outside of North America and Europe, which have previously largely dominated research,” according to Li. According to Ken D. Berry, M.D., a board-certified family physician in rural Tennessee, eating meat does not raise the risk of developing diabetes.
“This is an example of observational research,” Berry, who was not engaged in the study, told the sources. “By its very nature, it can never show that one thing causes another thing to happen,” according to him. “All this type of research can do is report a possible association between one thing and another.”
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