The Meat Industry Is Funding Studies That Claim Meat Is Good For You

Is meat good for you? It’s been the subject of heated debate for decades. Countless studies have attempted to determine the effects of meat on the human body, and they’ve largely come to the same conclusion: eating too much red and ultraprocessed meat is unhealthy. Specifically, it leads to higher risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

But sometimes, meat studies are carried out not by independent parties, but by researchers who have connections to, or funding from, the meat industry itself. And wouldn’t you know it: These industry-affiliated studies are 16 times more likely to conclude that meat, actually, isn’t all that bad for you.

That’s what a recent meta-analysis in the journal Obesity Reviews found. Researchers looked at 500 studies on the health impacts of meat consumption published between 2014 and 2023, around 15% of which were funded by or conducted by researchers with connections to the meat industry.

The search criteria the researchers used focused mostly on red meat, specifically meat from cows, pigs and sheep.

Before diving into the results at length, it’s worth noting that none of the studies were directly connected to individual meat companies themselves. Rather, they were associated with or funded by initiatives like the American Beef and Pork Checkoff programs — government-run, taxpayer-funded initiatives aimed at increasing the public’s consumption of meat products and supporting American meat producers — or industry trade associations, like the Australian Meat and Livestock Association.

Ultimately, 61% of independently-funded studies concluded that eating meat in some quantity or another is correlated with negative health outcomes, and 28% reached neutral or mixed conclusions.

By contrast, only one single industry-funded study linked negative health outcomes to eating meat, and a whopping 75% of the studies with meat industry funding reported “favorable nutritional outcomes” associated with meat consumption. In total, industry-affiliated studies were 16 times more likely than the rest to report favorable conclusions regarding meat’s health impacts.

Opportunities for “Spin”

While it may not be surprising to learn that conflicts of interest can skew the results of a study, it’s worth taking a closer look at how this skewing actually works, as it’s not quite as straightforward as it may seem.

Using something called the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, the researchers behind this meta-analysis assessed and compared how well the studies were designed from a scientific perspective. The goal was to determine whether the industry-affiliated studies were less methodologically sound than the others, and as it turns out, they were: Studies with industry ties scored an average of 61% on the assessment, while studies without any ties scored an average of 80%, indicating a higher level of methodological rigor.

However, that’s not the end of the story. While 61% isn’t great, it’s also not terrible, and doesn’t indicate that the study is complete garbage or should be disregarded. Moreover, the researchers behind the meta-analysis accounted for the lower scores in their analysis, and concluded that “while industry studies may differ in methodological quality, this does not sufficiently explain the large differences in their conclusions compared to independent studies.”

What this means is that the skew towards positive outcomes in meat industry-associated research is “not necessarily related to the scientific rigor of these studies,” the meta-analysis says.

But if scientific rigor doesn’t explain the difference, what does? While the authors say that more research is needed to definitively answer this question, they did cite three factors that may account for the differences: Choice of study design, selective reporting and the framing or interpretation of the results.

Choice of study design simply refers to what type of study is being conducted and what specifically is being studied. Research on the health impacts of food typically don’t seek to answer broad sweeping questions like “is meat good for you?” Instead, they focus narrowly on one specific sub-question, such as “does eating red meat two or more times a week increase the risk of colorectal cancer?” It’s possible that these choices of what to study, and how, could account for the different conclusions of industry-affiliated studies and independent ones.

Selective reporting is a type of bias in which researchers only report some of the findings of their studies, while the use of framing or interpretation refers to the way in which the findings of a study are described and articulated by the researchers.

Most scientific studies have an “Abstract” section at the top that summarizes the findings for the reader, along with a “Conclusions” section at the bottom that sums up the big-picture takeaways. These sections offer researchers the opportunity to “spin” their study’s findings to promote one takeaway or another without literally misreporting the findings themselves.

Previous research on topics other than meat consumption “has shown that industry ties in research studies can influence conclusions without necessarily influencing results, indicating the use of spin in their reporting and the reporting of less reliable conclusions,” the paper reads. “Conclusions are important because they may be picked up by media publications and can influence how research is interpreted.”

Whatever the reason for this discrepancy, the upsides for the meat industry are numerous, notes Marion Nestle, emerita professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. When a published study claims that a product is good for you, “the press picks it up and widely publicizes the benefits of the product.”

“Consumers read their reports and consider the product a health food,” Nestle tells Sentient in an email. “Sales of the product increase. Government agencies and health organizations have to take that research into consideration when formulating dietary guidelines.”

The Obesity Reviews study illustrates the importance of looking at the body of research, as opposed to one single study, before drawing any firm conclusions. And when it comes to red and processed meat, the body of research is clear: Eating too much of it is bad for you.