HEALTH: Red Meat Kills, Black Kids and Food Allergies

Red Meat Could Be Ticket to Early Grave Here's a tip for those wanting to live a long and healthy life: Leave the hotdogs, burgers and spareribs alone. That's right, a new study shows. Those who make a daily habit of acting out their carnivorous propensities have a higher risk of suffering from maladies like heart disease and cancer over a 10-year period. In other words, munching on red meat marks a shortcut to the grave. "This is the biggest and highest quality study like this," says Barry M. Popkin, Ph.D., from the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, which was published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine. "They collected the diet data very carefully, and it-s saying to people, "˜You don-t have to eat red meat every day.'" The decade-long study of more than a half-million people found that "people who ate the most red meat every day (about 62.5 grams per 1,000 calories per day, equivalent to a quarter-pound burger or small steak per day) had about a 30-percent greater risk of dying compared with those who consumed the least amount of red meat (a median of 9.8 grams per 1,000 calories per day)," ABC/Reuters News reports. "The excess mortality was mostly the result of cardiovascular disease and cancer." The study, conducted by a research team led by Rashmi Sinha, Ph.D., from the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Md., looked at all types of beef and pork, including bacon, cold cuts, ham, hamburgers, hot dogs, and steak, as well as meat in pizza, chili, lasagna, and stew. Black Boys More Likely to Suffer Food Allergies Nobody is at greater risk of food allergies than Black boys. A study presented at this year's annual Meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, revealed that non-Hispanic Black boys and boys of low-income families are more prone to be sensitive to foods, particularly peanuts and shrimp, than other children. Read full story Read more: Start a Conversation