More than 45,000 lives a year could be saved in the UK if everyone began eating meat no more than two or three times a week, health experts and Friends of the Earth (FOE) said yesterday.
Widespread switching to low-meat diets would stop 31,000 people dying early from heart disease, 9,000 from cancer and 5,000 from strokes, according to new analysis of British eating habits by public health expert Mike Rayner contained in an FOE report.
Dramatically reduced meat consumption would also save the National Health Service £1.2 billion (US$1.9 billion) and help reduce climate change and deforestation in South America, where rainforests are being chopped down to grow animal feed and graze cows that are exported to Europe, the report states.
Eating too much meat, particularly processed meat, is bad for health because doing so can involve consuming more fat, saturated fat or salt than official guidelines recommend, the FOE say.
They do not advocate shunning meat altogether, but do urge people to eat meat no more than two or three times a week, with total weekly intake not exceeding about 210g — the equivalent of half a sausage a day. Average weekly intake is between seven and 10 70g portions.
Doing so would save 45,361 lives a year, according to research by Rayner and his colleagues in the British Heart Foundation health promotion research group at Oxford University.
They calculated that a switch to eating meat a maximum of five times a week would prevent 32,352 deaths, but another 2,509 people a year will die by 2050 if current meat consumption patterns continue. There are 228,000 deaths a year from three conditions in which food intake plays a key role: heart disease, strokes or diet-related cancers, such as bowel cancer.
Meat producers criticized the report.
“The vast majority of consumers eat less than average recommendations of red meat already,” said Chris Lamb of BPEX, which represents 20,000 pork producers in England. “It is over-simplistic to say that changing one element of the diet can have such a dramatic result.”
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