Why go meatless?
• A Harvard study found that women who ate two servings of red meat a day had a 30 percent higher risk of heart disease compared with women who ate red meat just three or four times a week.
• A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition of 200,000 men and women ages 25 to 75 found that replacing just one serving of red meat a day with nuts, grains or low-fat dairy lowered the risk of Type 2 diabetes by about 20 percent. Conversely, eating just one hot dog or sausage or two strips of bacon daily increased the risk of diabetes by 51 percent.
• Harvard researchers who followed 84,136 women ages 30 to 55 found that eating one serving per day of nuts instead of red meat was linked to a 30 percent lower risk of cardiovascular heart disease; subbing one serving of fish for red meat meant a 24 percent lower risk, poultry a 19 percent lower risk and low-fat dairy a 13 percent lower risk.
