The saturated fat in meat may only be partly to blame. Iron and other minerals found in red meat may contribute to heart-disease risk as well, Dr. Bernstein says. (Consuming high-fat dairy items—such as ice cream, sour cream, and butter—also increased the risk of heart disease in the study, but less so than red meat.)
Dr. Bernstein and his colleagues followed roughly 85,000 middle-aged women for an average of 26 years, during which time 2,210 of the women had heart attacks and 952 died from heart disease. The women were all nurses, and were part of a long-running study on health behaviors that included lengthy diet questionnaires given every four years. To zero in on the link between diet and heart health, the researchers took into account other health factors, such as body mass index, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise.
Replacing red meat with healthier sources of protein will go a long way toward reducing heart risk, the researchers say.
For instance, they estimate that swapping one serving of red meat per day for one serving of beans will lower a woman’s long-term heart-disease risk by about one-third. Replacing a daily serving of red meat with one of several other foods—including nuts (30%), fish (24%), chicken or other poultry (19%), and low-fat dairy (13%)—will also reduce heart-disease risk, the study found.
Though these are estimates, they represent the first time that researchers have been able to quantify the heart benefits of these food swaps.
“We know that red meat is not as good as other protein sources,” says Karen Congro, a registered dietitian at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, in New York City. “Now we actually have the numbers to put next to them.”
The study “doesn’t mean that red meat is a horrible thing,” says John Bisognano, MD, the director of outpatient cardiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in N.Y. “People like to eat, and all you can hope to do is shift them a little bit away from foods that may have less of a benefit to them to those that have more of a benefit to them.”
