Processed meats found to be bad for your heart....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-21-2011

I was reminded recently that avoiding processed meat most of the time was heart protective. But I don’t recall posting that when that news came out.

A. First, here are 5 ways we already knew to make eating meat safer for your heart.

We now know that it’s possible to eat some meat without harming your heart.

1. Eating less meat helps. Two or three times a week is likely far better for you than 14!

2. Eating a mix of health OK protein foods besides meat helps.

Here are some examples. Eggs, wild caught fish, seafood, beans and lentils, and nuts if you aren’t allergic to them -- are some of the many foods you can eat instead of eating meat every time.

Some skinless and fat trimmed poultry from grain fed birds or if possible from birds fed their natural diet in an unpolluted pasture also works.

Nonfat cottage cheese and some 2% lowfat yogurt and even some full fat cheese if from cows fed only grass can be OK.

3. Then eating the meat you do eat only from animals fed only grass or only the leanest and most fat trimmed meat from grain fed animals also helps.

(By eating less meat, the better for you and more expensive 100 % grass fed meat is more affordable.)

4. Eating meat with onions or garlic -- or wine -- also helps your body process the saturated fat in the meat better.

5. Using only extra virgin olive oil instead of corn, or soy, or canola, or safflower oils cuts your intake of omega 6 oils. That can make eating some meat from grain fed animals that has too much omega 6 oils safer to do.

B. But, I was reminded that there is new information about a whole other category of making meat safe for your heart to eat.

Harvard researchers looked at 20 studies of a total of 1.2 million people and found dramatically more heart disease, 42% more, in people who ate processed meats such as salami, sausage, bacon, hot dogs, and lunch meats than in people who ate other meats. They also found 19 % more type 2 diabetes.

That could be partly from the fact that such meats are often eaten in sandwiches or on pizza with refined grain used to make the bread and pizza dough. Many people eat such foods along with soft drinks as well. (That would certainly help explain the link to type 2 diabetes.)

It’s less well known; but that would also help explain the much higher heart risk. Refined grains and high fructose corn syrup lower your protective HDL and increase your level of heart harmful triglycerides and small particle LDL.

I suspect it’s also likely that the higher fat meats and the curing chemicals used in processed meats helped cause this.

The important thing is to eat processed meats far less often than many people do now.

Eating processed meats twice a month is likely to be far less harmful than eating them twenty times a month.

It may also help to eat such meats that have had less nitrates and nitrites and salt added to them. (Whole foods sells that kind of bacon for example.)

And, it would help for sure to eat them with vegetables or even wine instead of refined grain and soft drinks!