A Harvard study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in March of 2012 found that red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. They also showed that substituting other healthly protein sources was associated with a lower mortality risk.
They studied 37,000 men and 83,000 women for up to 28 years via questionaires every 4 years. They found that one daily serving of unprocessed red meat was associated with a 13% increased risk of mortality and one serving of processed meat was associated with a 20% increased risk. For cardiovascular risk alone, there was a 18% and 21% corresponding risk and for cancer there was a 10% and 16% corresponding risk for mortality.
No mention was made of what kind of red meat was consumed. It would be of interest to study feed lot animals vs organic, range fed or wild game sources of meat.
