A short while back, the New York Post published a health piece titled, “Just 12% of Americans — mostly men — are eating half of our beef supply: new research”. You can click here for the news story, and here for the study upon which it was based. Both the story and the study represent an interesting trend in reporting on beef. In a bygone era, major news outlets reporting beef-related studies would center the story on risks to human health. The evidence suggested then, and continues to suggest now that an overabundant intake of red meat (which includes beef) contributes to chronic disease outcomes, such as heart disease and cancer. But nowadays, it is far more common to report the risk of beef from an environmental dimension, where stories and studies focus on beef’s carbon footprint, specifically the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released in consequence of its production. Such was the case in this New York Post article and the study upon which it was based.
Here is a breakdown of both the study and the story. Full disclosures to the reader, 1) I occasionally (once a month) eat beef, and 2) I think reducing carbon emissions is a worthwhile pursuit.
The study and the story are fairly well-aligned in the title, as the study is concerned with identifying which populations eat the most beef, with the end goal to design targeted interventions that reduce beef’s consumption:
“Concern for the environment when making dietary choices has grown as the contribution of the food sector to global greenhouse gas emissions becomes more widely known… Programmatic attempts to reduce meat consumption would benefit from a greater understanding of the problem. In particular, those targeting promotional or educational campaigns need to know in which population segments consumption is high… To address this need, we evaluated the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics associated with disproportionate beef consumption in the US.”
The major shortcoming of this study is reflected within the story’s inaccurate description of how “A new study reveals that 50% of the beef consumed in any given day goes to just 12% of the US population.” The inaccuracy lies with the description of “any given day”, as the diet data represents a single 24-hour recall from NHANES data, an ongoing nationally conducted survey on human health and behaviors. NHANES employees contacted participants on a randomized day, and recorded what the participants had consumed in the previous 24 hours. Data-wise, you cannot interpret this as “any given day”, as that would require data collection techniques representing more than one time point. As presented here, it's more accurate to say that 50% of the beef consumed on the day selected by researchers went to 12% of the US population.
But even this claim of disproportionate intake runs into trouble. Within the NHANES survey, “beef” does not exist as a unique variable you record and measure. So instead, the researchers used a clever technique by connecting NHANES dietary responses to the Food Patterns Equivalents database, where various dishes and recipes are quantified into ounce equivalents of beef, providing a way to measure beef intake. However, this technique likely overestimates true beef consumption, since anytime a dish or recipe was ambiguous about its meat content, the researchers assumed beef made up at least half the ounce equivalents of meat:
“If the food description included beef alongside another meat (e.g., “Frankfurter with beef and pork”) or just referred to meat (e.g., “lasagna with meat”), we allocated half of the ounce equivalents from the above groups to beef.”
Lastly, the study’s classification of “disproportionate beef-eaters” (which I’ll just call DBE’s) feels like an inaccurate caricature. Anyone who consumed more than 4 ounces of beef (~30 grams of protein) per 2,200 calories in their diet was classified as a DBE. While the dietary guidelines do indeed suggest a daily limit of 4 ounces of red meat per day for a 2,200 calorie diet, the classification of DBE suggests a pattern, and that is far-fetched given how this study is based on a single day of diet data. Furthermore, recommendations for meat intake are more commonly described in servings or ounces per week, not per day. When assessing health, patterns trump individual food choices, and weeks display patterns better than days.
The results describing population characteristics of these DBE’s unveil some interesting, but expected findings. If you were a man, you were 55% more likely to be classified as a DBE, compared to being female. By simple descriptive numbers, 14.6% of the men in the study were categorized as DBE’s, compared to 9.9% of women. This explanation of the data sounds less impressive than the claim that “mostly men” are eating our beef supply. By analysis of other demographics, Asians, college graduates, and health conscious people (those familiar with MyPlate) were least likely to be DBEs. Ranked by weight, steaks made up the vast majority of beef intake with 6.67 million pounds of recorded intake, and burgers trailing in the #2 spot with 3.93 million pounds.
Now a few comments on these findings.
The scientific interest and emphasis on beef, as opposed to chicken or pork, is easy enough to explain. Beef makes up a significant portion of the American diet, and its production creates more carbon emissions compared to other animal products. But the study veers into dramatic assertions when describing the food system as a whole:
“Numerous studies have documented our collective impact on climate change, with the food sector playing a big role [italics added].”
Declaring the food sector to play a big role in climate change is an overstatement, like saying the French played a big role in defeating the Nazis in World War II. I’m sure they helped bring down the regime, but claiming they were major players requires revisionist goggles that are 12 inches thick. The true percentage of carbon emissions produced by the agricultural sector is hotly debated (see what I did there?), ranging anywhere from more reserved estimates of 11%, all the way up to 33%, the latter number being reported in the study. Researchers who assume the highest possible estimates unfairly characterize agriculture’s contributions. But beyond this misleading characterization, there’s something more important to consider. It’s food. It wouldn’t matter if 90% of the carbon emissions came from food production. We need food, and no cataclysm that is real or imagined is going to change that dependence, so we’d do well to offer more reverence for the system that sustains mortal fixations.
The claim that men consume meat more often than women has long been observed, not only in America, but all across the globe. And it’s not simply a matter of preferences or tastes, as women are more likely to actively abstain from meat consumption, given reports of how the majority of vegans are women.
Finally, there is the study’s central aim of helping create targeted beef intake reduction campaigns that idealize environmental concerns. Simply stated, this strategy won’t work. Not so much the targeted design aspect, but assuming that environmentalism can be a driving factor to alter dietary patterns. The primary drivers of consumer food purchase decisions are taste and cost, and this has long been the case for many years. In consumer surveys, only 34% of participants report sustainability as having a “Great impact/somewhat of an impact” on their food purchases. People simply are not thinking about mother nature when they order at a restaurant.
In conclusion, the study largely reports on what we already know about diet patterns when it comes to beef, and its associated story in the New York Post presents these findings in a slightly exaggerated manner. Efforts to reduce carbon emissions are a worthwhile enterprise, but should consider the reality of why consumers make the choices they do, and pay a little more respect to the food system we all rely upon.