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The press release from the Annals of Internal Medicine arrived last week under embargo, sent to me by several reporters: “New guidelines: No need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health.”

The press announcement was accompanied by 5 review papers, a sixth with this recommendation, and an editorial.  These are posted on the website of their publisher, the American College of Physicians, implying this organization’s endorsement of this guideline.

Collectively, these papers challenge dietary advice to eat less processed meat and red meat on the grounds of inadequate science.

These papers argue:

• Eliminating processed and red meat from the diet may reduce disease risks but the effects are small and evidence for them is of low quality and low certainty.
• Omnivores are unwilling to eat less meat.
• If you continue to think eating meat is bad for you in the face of this evidence, you are a victim of the “the less you know, the more you hold to your beliefs” syndrome.
• You can ignore dietary guidelines (regardless of source) and continuing eating meat as you always have.

This is a good example of what I call nutritional nihilism, an approach that insists that because observational studies are based on self-reported information and necessarily flawed, their conclusions are unscientific and should be discounted.  Therefore, because we can’t do more rigorous studies, we should not advise the public about diets best for health or the environment.

I have several concerns about all this:

• Yes, the effects are small but that is true of nutrition studies in general.  The small effects show benefits from eating less meat.  The authors could easily have interpreted their work as suggesting that eating less meat might be useful.  This is an example of interpretation bias.
• The authors took a strictly science-based approach to a problem strongly affected by social, economic, and political factors and values.
• The studies look at previous studies that compared people who eat meat to those who eat less. The authors excluded studies of vegetarians compared to meat-eaters.
• They look at meat outside its context of calories.
• The authors did not look at the totality of the evidence; they excluded laboratory and animal studies that can be more closely controlled.
• They excluded studies of environmental impact, which has a significant bearing on human dietary practices (meat production adds more greenhouse gases than vegetable production).
• The conclusions fall into the category of “everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong.”  This rarely happens.  Science usually works incrementally, not in one enormous reversal like this.

Do the authors really believe that all those other committees and commissions urging less meat were wrong and continue to be wrong?   Their strictly science-based approach seems unrealistic.

The papers come across to me as a concerted attack on dietary guidelines (national and international), on nutrition science in general, and on nutritional epidemiology in particular.

The meat industry and its supporters will love them.

Attacks on the quality of nutrition research have been coming from many sources lately: the food industry, of course, but also statisticians (John Ioannidis at Stanford is making a career of this), and some scientists (usually with ties to food companies).  The criticisms themselves are not new.

What is new is the vehemence and level of effort to discredit observational studies, particularly those based on self-reports of dietary intake.  Yes, nutritional epidemiology has flaws, but the methods have been useful in many instances, as argued convincingly by two of its leading practitioners.

In looking at nutrition research, I think it is essential to evaluate the totality of information available: laboratory, animal, human epidemiology and clinical studies—and to do this in the context of what people actually eat and the number of calories they consume, as well as adding in a hefty dose of common sense.

Common sense is what’s missing in these studies.  Do the authors really believe that:

• Meat eaters are healthier than vegetarians?
• Eating more meat is better for health?
• Meat eaters are less obese and have less heart disease and cancer than those who eat less?

If not, the conclusions make no sense.

Most of the authors report no financial ties to the food industry.  I would love to know the back story about why they chose to do these studies and to interpret them in this way.

Reactions (I will be adding to this list as they come in)

• The Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Department issued a statement
• The True Health Initiative (THI) issued a press release outlining its concerns (the link is here)
• THI council members sent a letter to the journal editor stating objections (the link)
• THI collected quotes from members of its council and others (including mine)
• THI also produced graphics.  Here is one example.

• David Katz weighs in
• New York Times: 5 things you should know
• New York Times coverage: “Eat less meat, scientists said.  Now some believe that was bad advice.”
• From Dean Ornish
• Consumer Reports (I’m quoted)
• From the World Cancer Research Fund
• Vox’s crystal clear explanation
• NPR’s The Salt’s excellent analysis
• Aaron Carroll’s follow-up to his editorial

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, explains in The Atlantic Why It’s Immigrants Who Pack Your Meat.

You really should read the whole thing.  It’s a powerful indictment.  Here are a few excerpts. 

• The immigration raid last week at seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi was a perfect symbol of the Trump administration’s racism, lies, hypocrisy, and contempt for the poor. It was also a case study in how an industry with a long history of defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto workers.
• What Trump has described as an immigrant “invasion” was actually a corporate recruitment drive for poor, vulnerable, undocumented, often desperate workers.
• The immigrant workers arrested in Mississippi the other day were earning about $12.50 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, during the late 1970s, the wages of meatpacking workers in Iowa and Colorado were about $50 an hour.
• Over the years, I’ve spent time with countless farmworkers and meatpacking workers who entered the United States without proper documentation. Almost all of them were hardworking and deeply religious. They had taken enormous risks and suffered great hardships on behalf of their families. Today workers like them are the bedrock of our food system. And they are now being scapegoated, hunted down, and terrorized at the direction of a president who inherited about $400 million from his father, watches television all day, and employs undocumented immigrants at his golf resorts.

Joshua Specht.  Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America. Princeton University Press, 2019.

This is an enlightening, engrossing, and eminently readable cultural history of the beef industry in the United States, from the replacement of bison (and Native Americans) from the Great Plains to Big Meat to consumer concerns about the effects of beef on health and the environment.  What I so admire about this book is how it never loses sight of the big picture—the critical social and political forces that promoted the beef industry and made beef an icon of American society.

Specht summarizes big-picture aspects in his introduction:

The cattle-beef complex was the product of small debates, struggles, and fights over keeping one’s job, protecting a home, or making a dollar.  Ultimately, these were contests over what our food system should look like and how our society should be organized.  Low prices and sanitary meat at the expense of all else won out.  It was a system predicated on land dispossession, low wages, animal abuse, rancher impoverishment, and environmental degradation.  But it also democratized beef; hungry consumers could eat what they want3ed, and it tasted good.  Railroads, refrigeration, and capital made this system possible, but politics and struggle determined its contours (p.20).

Specht describes how the establishment of cattle ranching—e,g,, winning the West— meant the destruction of bison (and, therefore, Native American livelihoods).  Ranchers had to contend with the displaced and understandably angry Indians, of course, but also winter, drought, barbed wire, and theft.  Specht explains the political maneuvering that brought us to today’s highly consolidated, industrialized beef industry, controlled by just four companies, and producing most beef in CAFOs (controlled animal feeding operations) infamous for mistreatment of animals and environmental pollution.  How did this happen?

The refrigerator car and the managerial revolution explains how a small group of firms could dominate a world in which cattle were slaughtered in one place and eaten a continent or n ocean away, but the meatpackers’ victories over labor, the railroads, and local butchers explain how this state of affairs went from one that horrified people—pale grey meat in stuffy railcars—to one that was accepted as not only natural and inevitable, but laudable.  The key to the meatpackers’ success was that they would align their cause, centralized mass production of meat, with the interests of consumers (p. 178).

The interests of consumers?  Cheap meat.  As long as the present system keeps the price of meat affordable, it will be hard to mobilize public support for reforming the system.

This book is a welcome addition to the library of  books on the meaning of meat in America life, of which my favorites are Orville Schell’s Modern Meat (Random House, 1984) and Betty Fussell’s Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (Harcourt, 2008).  Schell’s book predated Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, but covered much of the same territory.  Fussell’s is a cultural history.  Specht cites neither.  I commend them to his attention.

Earlier this year, the Lancet published two lengthy treatises arguing that the externalized costs of industrial meat production are unsustainable, and that halving current meat consumption must be a priority for improving human health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.*  It’s too bad these reports came out too late to be included in Specht’s analysis.  I would love to hear his comments on them.

* The two Lancet reports from January 2019 are:

• Willett W, Rockström J, Loken B, Springmann M, Lang T, Vermeulen S, et al. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet. 2019;393:447–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.
• Swinburn BA, Kraak VI, Allender S, Atkins VJ, Baker PI, Bogard JR, et al. The Global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change: The Lancet Commission report. Lancet. 2019;393:791–846. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736 (18)32822-8.

The meat industry is under siege these days over issues of sustainability.  The major recommendation of the EAT-Lancet report is to cut consumption of red meat by half in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  This is a worry for the meat industry.

This collection of articles indicates how this industry is dealing with the sustainability issue—in some cases, with difficulty, denial, and fighting back.

GlobalMeatNews.com, an industry newsletter, has this Special Edition: Sustainability

In this special edition on sustainability, we look at what the major players in the international meat industry are doing to ensure the future of the sector. We start with quality control plans with Brazilian poultry as well as a massive investment in solar technology by Hormel Foods. We also look at Cargill’s work on reducing antibiotics and a new beef scheme in Ireland.

• ABPA outlines quality control plans for Brazilian poultry sector: In an effort to demonstrate its quality standards, the Brazilian Animal Protein Association (ABPA) recently undertook an in-depth on-site analysis of the poultry meat industry’s facilities, taking food safety, sustainability and animal health and welfare into account… Read
• Hormel Foods to build solar array: US processor Hormel Foods Corporation has started construction on a solar energy project at its Swiss American Sausage Company facility in California… Read
• Cargill’s holistic approach to antibiotic reduction: In an exclusive interview with GlobalMeatNews, Cargill’s food safety and quality lead for poultry Randy Giroux explains how the business is doing its part to reduce antibiotic usage… Read
• Meat diets will be maintained by consumers: The influx of meat alternatives may have led to reports about the demise of the traditional meat industry. However, new research from Cargill has shown that the majority of consumers intend to maintain or increase their consumption of animal protein over the next year… Read
• Green shoots: creating a positive future for meat: Ahead of unveiling its new ‘The Future of Meat is Green’ initiative at the IFFA show in Germany, concept developer Vaessen-Schoemaker spoke exclusively to GlobalMeatNews about its hopes for the scheme and how the meat debate could become a positive one… Read
• Glanbia and Kepak launch beef scheme: Irish processors Glanbia Ireland and Kepak Group have announced a new calf-to-beef pilot programme… Read
• Danish Crown aims to be world producer of sustainable meats: Meat processor Danish Crown has pledged to halve the company’s climate footprint per kilogram of pork by 2030 as part of its sustainability goals… Read
• ‘A major step forward’: Brazil founds trade group for carbon-neutral meat: The newly-formed Brazilian Association of Carbon-Neutral Meat Producers will develop both supply of, and demand for, carbon-neutral meat… Read
• JBS USA to develop global sustainability programme with Brazil: JBS USA has revealed that it is in talks with the businesses division in Brazil to develop a 2025 global sustainability programme following the successful progress of its 2020 goals for the US market… Read
• Register now for sustainable packaging webinar: The packaging and meat sectors have their opportunity to discuss sustainability in the latest GlobalMeatNews editorial webinar… Read
• Industry hits back at red meat consumption report: The international meat industry has hit back at a new report suggesting that red meat intake be halved in order to improve health and ensure a global food system… Read

Last week, the USDA and FDA ended their turf battle and announced a joint framework for jointly regulating cell-based meat products.

Congress instructed them to do this in a statement related to the Appropriations Act:

Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Agriculture and the Commissioner of Food and Drugs shall enter into a formal agreement delineating the responsibilities of the two agencies for the regulation of cell-cultured food products derived from livestock and poultry. Such agreement shall be made public on the USDA and FDA websites within one day of the completion of the agreement.

These products, not yet on the market, are made from animal cells grown in tissue culture; no animals are killed in the process.

What to call these emerging products is a matter of some debate.  Proponents call them such things as in vitro, lab-based, vat-grown, or clean.

The meat industry wants them called artificial, synthetic, or fake.  It publishes a flier called “Fake Meat Facts.”

The proposed plan calls for the FDA to regulate the collection of animal cells, cell banks, and cell growth—the processes.  USDA will oversee production, as it does for live animals and poultry.

Much must be at stake.  The agencies’ framework is proactive; the products are not expected to be marketed for several years.

The meat industry is relieved that USDA is in charge.

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association President Jennifer Houston said, “The formal agreement announced today solidifies USDA’s lead oversight role in the production and labeling of lab-grown fake meat products.”

“This is what NCBA has been asking for, and it is what consumers deserve,” Houston said.

The market for these products is expected to be huge, but questions remain:

• Lab-based: Is it really environmentally friendly?
• And yes, more research is needed.

We will be hearing a lot more about these products as they head to market.

I subscribe to GlobalMeatNews.com’s daily newsletter to find out what’s going on in the international meat market.  Here is a sample of the type of issues it covers.

Special Edition: Focus on Poultry

The global poultry market is heating up with some major consolidation taking place. This focus on poultry looks at MHP and Cargill’s expansion plans as well as Costco’s decision to move up the food chain and manage its own supply. We also look at which countries are becoming the big players in poultry.

• MHP plans to acquire Perutnina Ptuj: Ukrainian poultry producer MHP has announced that it is seeking to acquire meat processor Perutnina Ptuj… Read
• Costco takes control of meat supply chain: Retailer Costco is setting a new “protein precedent” for the US market by taking ownership of the chicken supply chain from farm to fork, a new report from CoBank Knowledge Exchange has revealed… Read
• Global poultry market facing challenges: The growing incidents of African Swine Fever (ASF) across the globe could have a knock-on effect on the international poultry market… Read
• Cargill to acquire Konspol: Processor Cargill has reached an agreement to acquire Konspol, a leading Polish value-added food company… Read
• Asia driving global poultry growth: With poultry predicted to become the most consumed meat in the world in the next few years, where will this growth come from?.. Read
• Jamaican Broilers Group grows US presence: Poultry processor Jamaica Broilers Group has expanded further into the US with the acquisition of a feed mill in Georgia for an undisclosed sum… Read
• Singapore fresh chicken distributors fined S$27m: Thirteen fresh chicken distributors have been fined a total of S$27m (Singapore dollars) for anti-competitive behaviour and price-fixing… Read
• Canada resists US pressure to weaken poultry supply management system: Canada’s Government has been talking tough about protecting the country’s supply management system, as negotiators conduct what might be the final round of talks to renew the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with the United States and Mexico… Read
• Hong Kong reports human case of AI in China: Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection has revealed that a 42-year-old man from Guangxi, China has been infected with H5N6 avian influenza (AI) after handling poultry… Read
• Master Good set to expand Kisvárda plant: Hungarian poultry processor Master Good is to embark on a HUF15 billion (bn) expansion plan for its Kisvárda plant, aided by a Government grant of HUF3.4bn… Read

Global Meat News is one of those industry newsletters I subscribe to.  This is a collection of its articles on halal meats—those from animals slaughtered and prepared according to Muslim dietary laws.

The market for halal meats is increasing worldwide.

Global Meat News’ Special Edition: Halal

Halal produce is continuing to grow in demand across the international meat market, with China, Russia and Mexico showing a recent surge of interest in certifications and exploring opportunities for export. Is it time for halal meat to win over its previous critics by embracing the 21^st​ century?

• Demand for halal meats to raise Mexican export market: Mexico is set to open up export opportunities for halal certification into the Muslim market… Read
• Russian meat giants drive up halal exports: Russia exported 50,000 tonnes (t) of halal meat in 2017, up almost twofold compared to 2016, as major agricultural holdings Cherkizovo, Miratorg and GAP Resource have shown increasing interest in this segment, according to the International Center for Halal Standardisation and Certification… Read
• Japan’s halal wagyu industry grows as Asian Muslim tourism increases: Japan’s halal wagyu industry is poised for rapid growth, thanks to demand from an increasing number of Muslim tourists and the opening of new export markets… Read
• Saudi regulatory board concerned over Brazilian chicken slaughter: Saudi Arabia’s regulatory board has expressed concerns about chicken products from Brazilian slaughterhouses and the need for investment from the Brazilian slaughterers to make improvements… Read
• Chinese company steps up halal beef production: A leading Chinese beef firm with overseas halal sales is opening a new plant this month that will double its capacity… Read
• Russia looks to export opportunity for halal venison: A recently opened slaughterhouse in northern Siberia has been certified to sell venison in accordance with Islamic standards (halal) and is currently in negotiations to export commercial batches of premium cuts to Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)… Read
• Lisaili abattoir trials Al Mawashi smart app delivery service during Ramadan: The Dubai Municipality has trialled the Al Mawashi smart application at its Lisaili abattoir, for meat to be delivered to customers during Ramadan… Read
• Russia to promote halal poultry internationally: Around 75-80% of poultry that Russia plans to export in 2020 will be labelled as halal, according to Aidar Gazizov, director general for the International Center for Halal Standardization and Certification, speaking at the international summit Agroinvest Russia-2017 in Moscow… Read

This is a collection of articles on the Chinese market for meat from the daily industry newsletter, Global Meat News.

Special Edition: Focus on China
China has been the highlight of the international meat market this year in terms of re-igniting unexpected relationships for trade access and its continuous clashes with the US market. With the Asian sector ramping up its global position, will we see China dominate the meat market in years to come?

• China lift on British beef ban to ‘unlock UK agriculture’s full potential’: China has today (27 June) made a landmark decision to lift the ban on UK beef exports for the first time in 20 years… Read
• NAMI welcomes additional China beef export facilities: The US meat industry has welcomed US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) efforts to secure approval for 20 additional facilities that are now eligible to export beef to China… Read
• US pork could lose $2.2 billion a year due to China trade war: The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) has called for a swift resolution of the United States-China trade dispute, in the hopes of paving the way for increased US pork exports… Read
• China and France reach beef agreement: China has signed an agreement to import beef from France… Read
• USDA reassures farmers that Trump will resolve China trade war: The US Department of Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue believes Donald Trump will defend national interests for farmers following the country’s ongoing trade war with China… Read
• Irish beef given China approval: Irish companies have been given approval to export beef to China… Read
• China poultry equipment sector to be hit by new Trump USA tariffs: America’s pork exporters will be counting the cost of new 25% tariffs announced on Saturday (16 June) by the Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council of China, on US-made meat and poultry exports… Read
• Ukraine and China take steps towards trade deal for poultry meat: Representatives from the Ukraine and China have signed a document to promote mutual trade in poultry meat… Read
• China set to visit Brazil to inspect 84 slaughterhouse refrigerators: Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply has revealed that Asian veterinarians from China will visit the South American country at the end of May to review 84 slaughterhouse refrigerators… Read
• US beef sector unsettled by threat of Chinese duties: US beef industry representatives are voicing consternation over the Chinese Government’s announcement that the country is preparing retaliatory sanctions against beef exports as part of its escalating trade war with the USA… Read