the beef?
‘There are so many women in the place, the menu had got like a Kensington wine bar! They think three lettuce leaves and a spoonful of tuna is a good lunch. We don’t.’
Joe Ashton MP was fighting back (successfully, too) against the feminization of the House of Commons dining room. Even there, it seems, the food police had struck. ‘There was too much fettucine and penne,’ said Mr Ashton, ‘and not enough steak and kidney pie and stew.’1 He was showing the same dietary preference as the male rats studied by researchers at Rockefeller University, New York, where newborn rodents were presented with a choice of pure protein, carbohydrates and fats. By week four the females showed a strong preference for the carbohydrates, while the males opted for the fats and proteins2 – for meat. An instinctual choice? But let us be wary of rattomorphism, which is the practice of applying rat studies to humans.
Students at the University of Delaware were photographed by hidden cameras as they chose their evening meals in the college dining hall. The men chose bigger portions. No surprise. ‘When protein-containing foods were limited men increased their selection of higher-fat items so that energy intake was unchanged.’3 What the authors did not point out (though their own data shows it) is that the men consumed three times more burgers, roast beef, meat balls, and steak sandwiches than the women. You can lead a man to a salad bar, but you can’t make him eat.
Men, given a choice, do what Joe Ashton does: they choose red meat. Yet those who take most of the diet decisions for men, women, choose to give them white meat instead. In the eighties, while beef consumption in the USA dropped from 91 to 73 pounds per person,4 chicken consumption jumped from 30 to 43 pounds a person. Fish eating also went up, from 13 to 15 pounds a person. In the ten years to 1995 white meat consumption rose by nearly a third in the UK, while beef and lamb consumption fell by a quarter.5
Did the cost of red meat cause the decline? If it was purely a matter of economics then the greatest fall would surely be among lower-income consumers, but it was women with the highest incomes who reduced their beef intake the most.6 So the reason for the sharp decline is not to be found in price constraints.
Perhaps it was fears of mad cow disease? No: the dates are wrong. The decline in sales of red meat predates the 1996 BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) scare which, anyway, is confined to cattle raised in the UK. To date the annual rate of deaths likely to have been caused by BSE shows little or no difference from the rate of deaths caused by salmonella,7 which is too often caused by cross-contamination from chicken skin. Somehow white meat does not inspire the same sense of danger as red meat.
Beef sales declined not because of price, and not because of BSE, but because the food experts kept telling us that it was unhealthy. ‘For a healthy diet, choose fish and poultry instead of red meats,’ is conventional nutritional and medical advice.8 And the underlying reason for this advice is the popular belief that the saturated fats in red meat lead to a high cholesterol count, while those in white meat do not.9 Beef kills you; what better reason can there be for avoiding it?
‘GOOD’ VERSUS ‘BAD’ CHOLESTEROL
The debate about cholesterol is confusing and contentious. Confusion lies at its heart because there are two kinds of cholesterol: ‘good’ and ‘bad’. High density lipoproteins (HDLs) help to protect against heart disease, so they are known as good cholesterols. Low density lipoproteins (LDLs) may increase the risk of heart disease: these, then, are the bad cholesterols. But it is to be remembered that cholesterols, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, are essential to the proper functioning of every cell in the body, and we derive them almost exclusively from animal foods. The catch seems to be that we can have too much of a necessary thing. We need cholesterol to live, but if we ingest too much of the ‘bad’ cholesterol then, according to the nutritional experts, we die.
It seems obvious that if we eat a diet rich in animal foods we will inevitably increase our cholesterol intake, including, of course, the villainous LDLs. But is that true? The October 1995 issue of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology is clear on the issue: ‘Analysis of the results from over 30 years of cholesterol feeding studies in more than 2,750 patients indicates that for the majority of individuals modest changes in dietary cholesterol have little if any effect on plasma lipoprotein cholesterol levels.’ So a modest increase in the consumption of animal fats will have little if any effect on most people’s cholesterol level. Matters are made more confusing by the conclusion of a report in the Mayo Clinic Journal which reads: ‘The total cholesterol level is a relatively weak marker for the risk of coronary heart disease.’10 What these professional journals appear to be saying is that too much weight is placed on cholesterol levels and that the link between such levels and coronary heart disease has been exaggerated. Cholesterol was once reckoned the major coronary villain, now it is blamed in only 20% of heart attacks.11 Fear is created that is either out of proportion to the risk or, when the risk exists, out of proportion to our ability to lessen the risk. The cholesterol card is too easily and too often overplayed.
Analysis of two decades of cholesterol-lowering studies has failed to show a related decrease in total deaths.12 The most recent Scandinavian study on the effects of lowering cholesterol with drugs had too few deaths to show any significant reduction in total mortality.13 Some other recent studies do show more favourable results from cholesterol-lowering drugs,14 but it is also argued that yet more studies are needed if these results are to be accepted as conclusive.15 The scientific jury is still out, so while we await the verdict it is instructive to learn of some findings by David Barker and his team at the Medical Research Council’s Environmental Epidemiology Unit at Southampton. In a study of 6,500 men they found that a man’s weight at one year old was a far better predictor of death from heart disease than his cholesterol level within a year or two of his death.16
The case against cholesterol, or specifically against LDLs, is unproven, but a prudent person might prefer to accept that LDLs are indeed dangerous and so avoid those foods which are high in them. Which, surely, means avoiding red meat? But is the bad cholesterol that results from eating beef really any worse than the bad cholesterol found in chicken? That is what 13 Texan researchers investigated in 199117 when they checked the good and bad cholesterol levels of 46 men given differing diets. Employees and students from the Texas Medical Center, Houston, were first fed a ‘stabilization diet’ of regular prime beef (13.6% fat) for four weeks. They were then divided by lot into two separate groups and for the next four weeks one group was fed with lean top round and loin steaks (both containing 4% fat) while the second group was fed chicken breast and red snapper (both containing 1.7% fat). The rest of the diet, vegetables, fruit, drinks, etc, were the same for both groups.
The researchers discovered that ‘changes in total cholesterol and LDL [the bad cholesterol] were similar in the two diet groups … percentage decreases in HDL [the good cholesterol] also were greater in the chicken and fish diet group than in the lean beef group.’ In other words, the men who ate the beef had more good cholesterol at the end, and the same amount of bad cholesterol, as those who were forced to eat chicken and fish. Other studies also show that diets with lower levels of fat cause HDL, the good cholesterol, to decrease.18 So the result of the Texas Medical Center study flies in the face of common prejudice: the beef eaters had the better cholesterol profile.
A recent experiment shows that low fat diets increase anger and hostility and makes people more depressed – and that a low fat diet had no total effect on cholesterol. A team led by Dr Anita Wells at the Centre for Human Nutrition at the University of Sheffield studied two groups of men and women. The volunteers spent a month eating a diet in which 41 per cent of the energy came from fat – a typical British diet level. Then for another month, half were given a diet with only 25 per cent fat – slightly lower than the health department’s
