Harvard researchers recently came out with a less than satisfying portrayal of the beef industry in connection to people’s health. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health was released recently showing that red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, cardiovascular and cancer mortality.

With these allegations brought into light, it causes much frustration among many as they believe the study has essentially been blown out of proportion.

Sally Barclay, clinician for food science and human nutrition at Iowa State, had her own take on the study.

“I think it was a good study; it was published in a good journal, and it was a large number of participants,” she said. “[The Participants of the study] were followed for a long period of time, an average of 24 years, but it was all self-reported data. They filled out questionnaires about how often they ate certain things and whenever it’s self-reported that raises the risk for errors.”

With media attention grabbing the study’s findings without much research into the actual inner workings of how results were reported, some are failing to understand that eating meat and the association it has to heart disease is nothing new.

“It was pretty eye opening to people, and of course the media really played it up in the headlines, saying things like ‘Eat Meat and Die,’” Barclay said. “I think it’s something that we need to keep studying because there have been other fairly recent studies that didn’t find the link between meat and mortality.”

Barclay explained about some of the research she has done into the study.

“I was looking at an analysis done on [the Harvard study], and they said basically what it meant was, for instance, if a 40-year-old man chose to eat a hamburger every day, instead of living to 80 he might live to 79,” Barclay said.

Nancy Degner, executive director of the Iowa Beef Industry Council, stood behind a study done by the Cattlemen’s Beef Association, titled “Beef in an Optimal Lean Diet.”

“This study was done at Penn State, with really well-respected researchers, and this would be an example of a controlled study,” Degner said.

The association’s study is a comparison of four diets: Healthy American Diet, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension and two versions of Beef in an Optimal Lean Diet.

The Beef Optimal Lean Diet used 4 ounces of lean beef to replace the protein in the Hypertension diet. The Beef Optimal Lean Diet Plus uses 5.4 ounces of lean beef. The diets were randomly assigned to 36 subjects for five weeks at a time each with a one to two week break in between each diet.

“All three of the diets being compared, excluding the HAD diet, because that was the control diet, reduced the bad cholesterol by 10 percent,” Degner said.

“There are more than 29 cuts of beef — well there’s more than 29 now — which meet the definition of lean,” Degner said.

Some examples of lean beef provided by the Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s website would be 95 percent lean ground beef, round steak, top sirloin strip steak and T-bone steak to name a few.

With other studies available, cattle producers are frustrated to hear that their livelihood is being considered detrimental to the health of society.

“I know that the cattle producers eat the meat that they raise and are confident that it’s healthy and it’s safe. We just need to eat right and move more,” Degner said.