By Karen L. Kier, Pharmacist on behalf of the ONU Healthwise Team 

In 1984, Wendy’s food chain released a commercial with Clara Peller asking “where’s the beef?” The commercial aired in the United States and Canada to highlight Wendy’s use of more beef and less bun compared to their competitors.

“Where’s the Beef?” caught on and became a catchphrase for questioning the substance of an idea, product or event.

Clara Peller lived in Chicago after being born in Russia.  She was discovered at the age of 80 when doing a commercial in her hometown. This launched her career in commercials including the Massachusetts lottery and Wendy’s.  

In managing our health, recommendations have been to limit the amount of red meat (beef) in our weekly diets. Observational study designs have reported a 2 times higher risk of death in those who eat red meat over other choices.  

In 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published the risks of red meat on our health.  The report is still available on the NIH website and specifically talks about the increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer from red meat consumption. This report was based on a published study that sent a survey to participants every four years about their dietary habits.  

Not sure about you, but I am not sure I can remember what I ate last month.  In scientific terms, this is known as recall bias. This is a concern when evaluating observed data. 

Observational study designs are a method of recruiting large numbers and looking at patterns between health and diet.  It is difficult to do an experiment where researchers control someone’s diet looking at changes in health. Scientists use this design for collecting eating patterns over time and compare this to health outcomes.  The red meat studies used this method.  

Researchers out of Canada and the United States, challenged the results of previously published observational studies on red meat.  The authors published their findings on February 12, 2024 in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. The article was titled, “Grilling the data: application of specification curve analysis to red meat and all-cause mortality.”  The title is clever!

The researchers found 15 different publications evaluating red meat and death from the worldwide literature. The authors noted within these studies over 70 different methods were used to analyze the data and draw conclusions.  In addition, many different databases were used with different patient populations. The overwhelming results from these studies was that red meat is bad for your overall health. 

The researchers used a well-known and highly regarded large database of nutrition patterns in the US between 2007 and 2014. The database is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).  The scientists re-evaluated these data with a new statistical application.  This method applies multiple tests to attempt to get the best answer to their question.  

The overall results after multiple analyses deemed red meat does not impact one’s longevity.  Two-thirds of the analyses found no association between red meat consumption and death.  

The point of this published research is really about how we analyze data and draw conclusions impacting health recommendations.  The authors propose a new way to make the best decisions possible when dealing with study results.  

A well-balanced diet is still a key to good health including fruits and vegetables.  

So, where is the beef?

Contact ONU HealthWise Pharmacy at 419-772-3784 for more information. ONU Healthwise is offering the flu and COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine clinics occur Monday through Friday from 4-6 p.m.