Is Red Meat Always Bad for Your Heart?

To answer the question in a word, no.

Grass-fed beef and lamb and all kinds of game meats are high conjugated linoleic acids (CLAs). These beneficial fats are a group of naturally occurring fatty acids predominantly found in milk and animal fat that have gained wide attention for their numerous health benefits. The CLAs in food, particularly abundant in cheese and hamburger, make cells more sensitive to insulin. In fact, they act in exactly the same way on blood sugars as a group of drugs known as thiazolidinediones (TZDs), sold under the trade names Actos and Avandia.

CLAs, however, have very different “side effects.” Like the drugs, CLAs lower cholesterol as well as blood sugars. Unlike the drugs, CLAs reduce body fat and encourage weight loss, even if total calorie consumption stays the same. While there are many reasons not to commend cheeseburgers as a health foods (not the least of them being that more than one study has found that cheeseburgers are, literally, addicting), the recent scientific evidence and the widespread reports of success of low-carb, high-meat diets suggests that foods containing CLAs deserve a second look.

Red meat is also a very source of arginine. L-arginine is not an essential amino acid inasmuch as it can be synthesized by the human body, but it is vital to good health. L-arginine is the chemical precursor to nitric oxide (NO), which regulates the contraction and dilation of blood vessels.

NO regulates blood pressure, helps the blood vessels compensate for excess cholesterol, activates the immune system’s natural killer cells, and makes erection possible in men. Your body can function well if you never eat red meat, but red meat is a healthy choice in your diet.

Is a red meat diet a good choice for planetary health? For spiritual health? I am biased because for most of my life I lived on a ranch my family held for five generations, but I think it’s worth considering that animals also die in the production of row crops.

The animals killed by the heavy machinery that is essential to modern agriculture (and modern agriculture is essential for a planet with six billion humans) are just not the same animals we customarily eat for meat. Replacing meat with plant foods could result in the death of even more animals than are killed for food now. The death of a farm animal in an abattoir is unpleasant, but the death of a farm animal uncared for in the wild is gruesome and painful.

I believe that including meat from grass-fed animals in our diets is probably the best stewardship of the planet’s resources. I know that it is possible to treat food animals with kindness, even in the abattoir. If you are not a farmer or rancher and you would like to encourage the treatment of animals with kindness, either become a vegetarian, or eat free-range meats.