A letter just published in The Lancet exposed the flawed methodologies used in the Gates-funded Global Burden of Disease project that wrongly suggests red meat is inherently harmful and any amount consumed will contribute to disease.

The Topline:

• Red meat eating has been demonized because of its alleged adverse impacts on the environment and on health.
• Find out why it isn’t red meat that’s the problem: it’s the production system that’s at fault, and why regenerative grazing that’s adapted to local conditions is the answer.
• Did you know that, gram for gram, wheat and rice production yield much higher greenhouse gas emissions than lamb, goat or buffalo? Industrial beef farming is a problem however you look at it.
• The mainstream narrative pushes us to be concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, but fails to tell us how agricultural soils can readily be converted into incredibly effective carbon sinks.
• A letter just published two weeks ago in The Lancet has exposed the flawed methodologies used in the Gates-funded Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project that wrongly suggests red meat is inherently harmful and any amount consumed will contribute to disease.
• A further look at the GBD 2019 data has numerous anomalous findings that show the data isn’t worth the Gates money it was funded with. Check out and please share our downloadable infographic.
• Most of the findings appear to be linked to pushing agendas that fit perfectly with a business-with-disease model that is heavily fuelled by Gates Foundation funding.

Any red meat eaters among you will be aware that it’s becoming ever more un-politically correct to do what your hunter-gatherer ancestors appear to have done food-wise to help all of us see the light of day.

The driver behind this change in perception is less to do with ethics — as little has changed other than increased adoption of inhumane factory farming of animals. It’s more to do with the accumulating body of evidence that points to the environmental and health harms associated with meat eating, especially red meat, and even more especially beef eating.

Of course, we don’t hunt with a spear any longer. Most meat in industrialized countries is industrially produced in factory farms. Much of the feed for these animals is genetically modified and has been imported over vast distances.

Any review of the totality of available evidence suggests this kind of meat production is bad for the environment, contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also ethically suspect given there are much kinder ways of raising animals, and the bit that many are focused on now is: it’s bad for health.

In this article, we’re going to shed some light on where we are on both the environmental and health aspects of red meat eating.

Meat eating and the environment

Let’s start by trying to break down some of the complexities.

A study taking in data from 200 countries published in Nature Food back in September, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, suggested that animal-based food (including livestock feed, transport etc.) contributed to a staggering 57% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Plant-based foods, by comparison, contributed just half this amount (29%).

The “meat & dairy cause twice as many emissions” story from this paper went global. Here it is in the UK’s Independent, Scientific American and the Vegetarian Times.

A nail in the coffin for meat, surely?

Production of different meats yield very different emissions

When you look deeper into the very same study, you see staggering differences in carbon dioxide emissions per gram of different meats, with some red meats contributing less than some plant foods.

For example, the mainstream-approved study relying on the production of both rice and wheat, the two most common staples, emit more greenhouse gases than sheep meat (sometimes also referred to as mutton and lamb), as well as goat or buffalo meat (see Fig. 1).

This alone means that saying meat, or even just red meat, results in more greenhouse gases than plant foods, is a non sequitur. In plain English, it’s a falsity or a lie.

The data also tell us it is irrational to lump all red meat into the same category if you’re looking at trying to reduce environmental impact. Beef and sheep are like apples and oranges. As are rice and maize — again, why lump them together, unless there’s another agenda?

Meat production emissions in terms of agricultural land area

When you look at emissions per unit area of agricultural land, things look pretty disastrous for meat production in areas like the EU and the Middle East (Fig. 2). But they don’t in South and Southeast Asia. What does that tell you?

It’s not meat production itself that’s the problem, it’s the production system for animal-based foods that’s a problem in some parts of the world. And not in others. Blame the production system, not the animal.

Of course that’s got a lot to do with if the animals are raised on industrialized farming systems with imported grain, as you can see (Fig 2).