Prevailing Perspective of Processed/Red Meat and CAD/T2D Challenged

A Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis did not find sufficient evidence to support a causal relationship between red/processed meat consumption and cardiovascular disease (CAD), hypertension, stroke, and type 2 diabetes (T2D). The analysis used data of publicly published genome-wide association studies. The inverse-variance weighted analyses revealed no causal association between the consumption of processed/red meat and the incidence of CAD, hypertension, stroke, and T2D. For processed meat intake, heterogeneity was observed in hypertension and stroke outcomes. Heterogeneity was seen in hypertension, stroke, and T2D for pork intake, while lamb intake showed heterogeneity in hypertension and T2D. However, there was no heterogeneity for other exposures and outcomes examined. No significant pleiotropy was detected for all exposures through an MR-Egger test. Furthermore, the leave-one-out test demonstrated the robustness of the results. The results challenged the common belief that processed and red meat consumption significantly contributes to the risk of CAD/T2D, as suggested by numerous previous studies. Source: https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc