Total meat intake associated with life expectancy

The plant-based narrative is falling apart faster than Beyond Meat’s stock. Nevertheless, VCs and special interest groups continue to pour abundant resources into an agenda counterproductive to the last 2.5 million years of human evolution… that is, eating meat.

Photo by Hitesh Dewasi on Unsplash

Today’s review article gets right to the point:

“The association between a plant-based diet (vegetarianism) and extended life span is increasingly criticized since it may be based on the lack of representative data and insufficient removal of confounders such as lifestyles.”

Data was collected from 175 countries and the objective was to compare life expectancy at Age-0 and Age-5 with intakes of meat and carbohydrates respectively.

“Worldwide, bivariate correlation analyses revealed that meat intake is positively correlated with life expectancies. This relationship remained significant when influences of caloric intake, urbanization, obesity, education and carbohydrate crops were statistically controlled.”

These results are important because, as many in the ancestral health space have pointed out, the fact that many Western populations are over eating everything (in general, which includes meat), but specifically are eating a tremendously large amount of vegetable oils.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8805510/

Also of note in the study we’re reviewing, is that meat consumption had a linear, positive (as one increases, so does the other), and statistically significant relationship with life expectancy; while carbohydrate consumption had a weak negative correlation (as one goes up, the other goes down) with life expectancy.

You, W., Henneberg, R., Saniotis, A., Ge, Y., & Henneberg, M. (2022). Total Meat Intake is Associated with Life Expectancy: A Cross-Sectional Data Analysis of 175 Contemporary Populations. International Journal of General Medicine, Volume 15, 1833–1851. https://doi.org/10.2147/ijgm.s333004

Let’s also take a look at some supporting evidence before we dig deeper into this study. As of 2010, 70% of American calories already come from plant-based sources (ref.). Yet, almost 700,000 people in the United States die from heart disease every year (ref.).

Source: USDA

A 2021 review (ref.), looking at dietary trends from 1800 - 2019 gives us additional insight:

1. Consumption of “ultra-processed foods” went from < 5% to > 60% in that time.
2. “Especially” consumption of sugar, white flour, white rice, vegetable oils, and ready-to-eat meals.
3. “These changes paralleled the rising incidence of NCDs (non-communicable diseases), while animal fat consumption was inversely correlated (to NCDs).”

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8805510/

Do note that those last two references are for the United States / Western populations only. The study we’re reviewing today is worldwide, which also includes a regional breakdown:

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8881926/

You can see clearly that in general, there is a trend for life expectancy at birth to increase in a linear fashion with meat consumption in all regions except South East Asia. Of note, those countries (SEARO) consume an estimated 82% of their calories from carbohydrates (ref.). While a 2023 review (ref.) reported that this number is decreasing it’s a pale comparison between 82% carbohydrates and a mere 8% protein.

A similar criticism can be made of the afforded discretionary macronutrient ratios in generic dietary prescriptions such as “paleo, Mediterranean, animal-based”; where many people default to eating far too many carbohydrates simply because they’re “allowed” at all within that particular framework.

“In the Mediterranean diet country grouping, the strong relationship trend was observed that high total meat intake is associated with greater e(0) (life expectancy at birth). This may suggest that, regardless of suggested beneficial health effects of Mediterranean diet, more total meat intake may benefit e(0) in the populations primarily on this diet.”

This makes categorical discussion of outcomes difficult. When someone says they eat an “animal-based” diet, is that 50g of carbohydrate / day or upwards of 200g? Does “paleo” mean gobs of nuts and sweet potatoes and a measly 100g of protein per day? This is party why oversimplifications (keto, vegan, carnivore) appeal to people — “just do / don’t eat X and all your problems will be solved.”

Lastly, it’s not surprising that GDP is referenced as a predictor of life expectancy as well; but we can’t let this slip into an “eating meat is a privilege” quip. It would be more accurate to say that “eating carbohydrates is a tax on the poor.”

Again, the authors of our review are very astute:

“Simply put – a human animal consuming a body of another animal gets practically all constituent compounds of its own body. Recently, massive agricultural production and advanced food manufacturing technologies have made it possible to replace the beneficial nutrients of meat with other agricultural industry products and/or synthetic chemicals.”

In summary, then, eating meat improves life expectancy even when total calories (obesity), socioeconomic factors (urbanization), level of education, and carbohydrate intake are controlled for.