New Report Gives Red Meat a Clean Bill of Health by Gordon Davidson, News & Online Editor, www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk
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ED MEAT has been the victim of ‘information terrorism’, unfairly and dishonestly condemned as a threat to human health. That is the conclusion of a bombshell scientific report that dismantles the last five years of anti-meat propaganda, and questions the motives and the money behind the modern demonization of livestock farming. Compiled by an international group of scientists, led by Professor Alice Stanton, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the paper ‘Consumption of Unprocessed Red Meat Is Not a Risk to Health’ is a direct challenge to the ‘Eat Lancet’ report that put red meat at number seven in the interna-
tional list of dietary ‘threats’ to health. miss out on the nutrition and enjoyment The Stanton report pulls together multi- offered by red meat because policy has ple peer-reviewed studies of unprocessed been influenced by people with a meat consumption and concludes quite the hidden agenda.” opposite, finding time and again that red In particular, Scotland’s Good Food meat is not a contributory factor to ill- Nation Bill, which will introduce a legislative health – at the same time identifying areas requirement on health boards and local in recent anti-meat studies where there had authorities to make good quality, healthy, been ‘an inexplicable transformation of the local food available to all, is set to make background data in the statistical evidence significant progress in 2022 – and the union used’, that produced an abrupt 36-fold wants Scottish red meat to be an important upping of meat’s supposed toxicity. part of that menu, with its health benefits In particular, the evidence for red meat properly recognized. being classified as a cancer agent was con“For some considerable time the red demned as having come from a single meat industry has been taking a pounding scientific publication that suffered from from many ill-informed individuals and ‘technical shortcomings that violate widely organizations that fail to fully understand accepted scientific standards’, and was the huge benefits the livestock industry further marred by an ‘undisclosed conflict brings to Scotland,” said Kennedy. “One of of interest’ involving its author. the biggest and most concerning issues of National Farmers Union Scotland presi- recent times has been the incessant drive dent Martin Kennedy described the Stanton to reduce red meat consumption for the study as a ‘game changer’, saying that pol- apparent benefit of our health,” he said, iticians must now pay attention, and ditch noting that support for such claims often the simplistic ‘red meat bad’ assumptions came from those who stood to make a they had previously been spoon-fed. ‘serious amount of money’ from factory “We need to get this report and its con- manufactured red meat alternatives. clusions picked up and understood by “The truth is, the Scottish livestock sector politicians and the public – we have a duty produces a healthy source of protein and to make sure that people in the future don’t vitamins, in an environmentally sustainable way. We need policymakers to recognize that livestock are vital to the physical and economic health of our nation.” Read the report at www.wfo-oma.org/wp-content/ uploads/2021/07/SC-WFO-Synopsis-Paper-onUnprocessed-Red-Meat-Consumption_final.pdf
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JANUARY 2022
