The Lean Meat "Health Advice" Is False and It's Keeping America Sick

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We’ve all heard it before, if you want to get healthy consume less red and processed meats and eat more lean meats (i.e. chicken, turkey, fish). Right?

Your neighbor, family members, friends, and even your doctor tell you to do this. It’s all over the media. You can’t go five minutes without hearing a commercial raving about the importance of getting enough lean protein for optimal health.

 

Is this true? Are chicken and fish the superfoods of proteins? How lean are these lean meats? What does this mean for you and your health?

 

You’ve probably pondered these questions in the past, and you’re about to find out the answers. But first, if you have questions about protein, in overall terms of the diet, then please read my article, 35 Ways to Counter the Vegan Protein Interrogation.

 

 

The term lean when referring to meat is defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary as “containing little fat.”

Well, that solidifies it now, doesn’t it?

 

Containing little fat can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people: I’m feeling pretty entitled today. The mirror treated me well after glancing into it this morning, so I think I’ll have two lean ground turkey patties for dinner instead of just one tonight. This might be someone’s version of eating little fat.

 

Only one problem. That 93% lean ground turkey patty actually contains 49.8% of its calories from fat!¹ Maybe you’ll opt for the canned white tuna next time, huh? After all, tuna is fish, and fish is lean isn’t it?

 

To get a better grasp on this subject, let’s take a look at the organizations considered to be the leading experts in the healthcare industry when it comes to nutrition and health for the respective diseases they cover. These organizations often set national guidelines for nutrition recommendations for medical professionals, hospitals, and patients to follow if they find themselves treating or suffering from the following chronic diseases.

 

 

As part of their Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations, the American Heart Association (AHA) states on their website to “Choose lean meats and poultry without skin and prepare them without added saturated and trans fat … Eat fish at least twice a week.”²

 

The AHA considers a low-fat diet one that contains ≤30% of total calories from fat and <7% of calories from saturated fat.³ This is the AHA’s definition of “lean.”

 

 

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) states on their website that “Healthy eating includes eating a wide variety of foods including … lean meats, poultry, fish.”⁴ The ADA says you should reduce dietary fat intake, but fails to give a hard number when it comes to a total percentage of calories coming from fat in the diet.

 

The ADA proclaims, “The optimal macronutrient distribution of weight loss diets has not been established … Studies in individuals with diabetes demonstrating the effects of specific percentages of dietary saturated and trans fatty acids and specific amounts of dietary cholesterol on plasma lipids are not available. Therefore, because of a lack of specific information, it is recommended that the dietary goals for individuals with diabetes be the same as for individuals with preexisting cardiovascular disease (CVD).”⁵

If you remember from the above AHA guidelines, these recommendations consist of <7% of calories coming from saturated fat. But, again, there is no mention of a hard number on total percent calories from fat in the ADA’s official recommendations. The science is apparently too complex and too confusing for the ADA to establish this.

 

With this being said, we’d have to assume the ADA’s definition of “lean” would be similar to the AHA’s version, which would put a limit on total percent of calories from fat at ≤30%.

 

 

The American Cancer Society’s (ACS) official dietary recommendations state the following:⁶

• “Minimize consumption of processed meats such as bacon, sausage, luncheon meats, and hot dogs.”
• “Choose fish, poultry, or beans as an alternative to red meat (beef, pork, and lamb).”
• “If you eat red meat, select lean cuts and eat smaller portions.”

 

The ACS goes on to state, “More rigorous studies in humans have not produced compelling evidence that fat intake increases cancer risk, or that lowering fat intake reduces cancer risk.”

 

No current hard recommendations exist from the ACS for dietary fat intake. Like the ADA, the science is apparently too complex to come to any conclusions. Again, with this being said, the ACS’s definition of “lean” appears to be to choose chicken, turkey, fish, and lean cuts of red meat (without the fat dribbling off the edge or visible to the naked eye).