The "175 Countries Study" Says Meat is a Winner For Longevity
Several years ago, I began writing a book on vegetarianism, veganism and the fraudulent war against meat. In 2016, as part of the research for that book, I examined longevity data for various countries around the world. I also examined the meat intake data for these same countries, and what I found was quite revealing.
The content below was originally paywalled.
Before I share that data, a little background. The previous year, I had traveled to Spain, and observed first hand how the Spaniards lived more temperate and healthier lifestyles, and were plagued by far less obesity, than Australia. Yet, to my surprise, at the time Australia ranked alongside Spain in fourth place on the World Health Organization (WHO) life expectancy rankings.
The Australian Paradox
At first, this made no sense. All "bronzed Aussie" bollocks aside, Australia is not a particularly healthy country, neither mentally nor physically. It shares the dubious honour, with New Zealand and North America, of having the world's highest per capita use of illicit recreational drugs. This isn’t a recent phenomenon; Aussies were early and eager adopters of the drug culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was marijuana, while during the 1990s and 2000s Australians became the world’s biggest users of ecstasy. Now they’re also the world’s biggest users of meth. I should also note that, throughout this entire period, heroin has been a staple and highly problematic drug in Australia.
Then there’s alcohol. If Australians love their drugs, they worship the silly juice. Dysfunctional alcohol consumption has long been a way of life Down Under, with Australian men and women consistently ranking among the world's biggest drinkers. Australian women, in fact, rank alongside their Finnish and Danish counterparts as the most alcoholic women in the world. In a recent global survey of 22 countries, Australian women were the most likely of any female population to require emergency medical care as a result of excessive alcohol consumption.
And they’re probably proud of it (there is something about the Australian psyche that seems to revel in self-destruction via substance abuse).
Despite a near religious obsession with sport, the average Australian is about as fit and agile as a shopping trolley. They’ll yell raucously from the sidelines, but their own physical endeavours are usually dominated by the couch surf and the 375ml curl. A couple of times a week they’ll hit the supermarket and lift some items off shelves into a basket, but for many that’s about as physical as it gets. Despite the rugged, outback shtick promoted via films like Crocodile Dundee, Australia has one of the most highly urbanized, sedentary populations in the world (and no, people here do not keep kangaroos as pets).
Which may be why, compared to other countries in the life expectancy top ten such as Japan, Spain, Italy and France, Australia suffered disproportionately high rates of heart disease and obesity. By how much the recent Pfizercarditis campaign levels the playing field remains to be seen, but there's little doubt that pre-COVID, the Japanese and Mediterraneans enjoyed much better heart health.
They were also a lot slimmer. Not only was Australia the plumpest nation in the life expectancy top ten, it was one of the fattest in the world. In an extensive survey of 188 countries published in 2014, Australia ranked as the world’s 25th fattest country (Tonga received the dubious honour of #1 spot, while the US came in 16th).
More recent WHO figures, from 2016, rank Australia as the 26th most obese (BMI of 30 or more) country in the world, while a 2017 update ranks Australia as the 5th most obese country in the OECD (the concomitant rankings for Spain are 62nd and 22nd, respectively).
As a cyclist, another thing I immediately noticed about Spaniards was their non-psychotic driving habits. Road accidents are a major cause of death in most countries, but Spain's traffic fatality rate is one of the lowest in the world, and consistently lower than that of Australia's.
Subpar physical health and poor mental health often go hand in hand. Little surprise then that Australia is plagued by mental health issues. A 2017 JAMA Psychiatry report found, along with New Zealanders, Australians have the world's highest lifetime prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder.
A 2017 WHO report found Australia, Estonia and the USA shared the world’s second-highest prevalence of depression, behind the Ukraine. As for anxiety, Australia ranked 5th, behind Brazil, Paraguay, Norway and New Zealand, in that order.
Not happy, Shazza.
Thanks to all this depression and anxiety, Australians are the world's third most avid consumers of antidepressants.
Despite all this, Australia still somehow manages to sit near the top of the longevity rankings, alongside countries with healthier habits. What explains this puzzling anomaly? How the heck does such an anxious, depressed, sedentary, obese, substance-abusing nation get to sit alongside a country like Spain on the life expectancy tables?
The official rhetoric heaps credit upon Australia's healthcare system. According to our politicians, the healthcare system here is "the best in the world," but Australian government is full of fraudsters, habitual liars, pedophile enablers, and sexual deviants. I hope I’m not saying anything revelatory when I note you can’t trust any of those demographics. The reality is that our politicians are doing everything possible to drive the country's healthcare system into the ground. And they're doing a heck of a job of it.
Australia once had a very affordable and easily accessible health system, with many visits and procedures heavily subsidized and even free under Medicare. That system, however, is unarguably in decline, with a gradual reduction in free or subsidized services, increasing wait times, staff shortages, hospital closures and bed shortages. The government-led push towards a privatized, profit-oriented, US-style healthcare system, and its associated attack on bulk billing, is making doctor's visits increasingly unaffordable for low-income earners. Wait times for ‘elective’ procedures can be notoriously long, leaving people to endure protracted bouts of pain and impaired mobility (in Australia, ‘elective’ does not refer to ‘luxury’ procedures like cosmetic surgery, but to non-emergency but nonetheless serious procedures like hip replacements).
A recent comparison of the healthcare systems in 191 countries ranked Australia at #32 spot in terms of overall efficiency, well below Mediterranean countries (France, Italy and Spain all featured in the top ten) and even trailing behind countries like Oman, Morocco and Colombia.
Australia's healthcare system might not be the worst in the world, but it’s by no means the best either, and again fails to satisfactorily explain Australia’s unlikely life expectancy rankings.
So what does?
Importing Good Health
Imagine starting a new sporting team, and being allowed to pick 25% of your new players from the world’s best competitors. Think your fledgling new team might get off to an unusually good start?
That’s the situation Australia finds itself in when competing in the life expectancy stakes. A quarter of Australia’s population was born overseas, and these migrants were pre-screened for health problems before being allowed to settle in the country. While many countries include health screening as part of their immigration requirements, Australia pursues this policy to inhumane extremes, routinely deporting model immigrant families solely because their children subsequently developed health problems.
A 2002 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report noted that, despite their diverse origins, almost all immigrant groups demonstrated good, if not better, health on arrival and for some years after than the Australian-born population. This better health was reflected in longer life expectancy, and lower death and hospitalization rates. Overall, overseas-born individuals experienced all-cause death rates 10% to 15% lower than Australian-born persons. This phenomenon may be partially explained by the “healthy migrant effect”, with health requirements and eligibility criteria generally ensuring only those in good health migrated to Australia.
Numerous studies conducted within Australia indicate this phenomenon may be further explained by the origins of those migrants. Australia is home to a large population of Asian and Mediterranean immigrants whose dietary, social, lifestyle and possibly even genetic traits may help to offset some of Anglo-Australia’s less restrained tendencies. Chinese, Greek and Italian immigrants enjoy a significantly lower risk of coronary heart disease than Anglo-Australians (see Daly 2002, Young 1987, Armstrong 1983, Kouris-Blazos 2002, Hodge 2004). And when researchers analysed data for the period 1981-2007, they confirmed migrants continued to enjoy lower mortality from cancer, cardiovascular disease and a host of other health conditions, with Southern European migrants enjoying the greatest health advantages of all (Anikeeva 2012, Anikeeva 2015).
Australia's high life expectancy rankings may be, in no small part, due to the fact that a quarter of the population has been pre-screened for health issues and is of above-average health.
The Meat Advantage
There is another factor that must be considered when analyzing Australia's unusually fortuitous life expectancy rankings:
Meat.
Australia has long been one of the world's major beef-producing nations. In 2016, when I was researching this topic, the sunburned country had the fourth-highest beef consumption per capita in the world (after Argentina, Brazil, and the US) and the third-highest per capita total meat consumption in the world.
The highest meat consumers, by the way, were Hong Kong and Macao, with per capita supply figures of 420 and 327 grams daily, compared to 319 grams/day in Australia. More on those two countries in a moment.
The WHO isn’t the only organization tracking the life expectancy prospects of countries around the world. The UN and the CIA, as part of its intelligence gathering activities, also maintain life expectancy tables. Unlike the WHO, the UN and CIA tables list Hong Kong and Macao separately from mainland China.
On the UN chart, Hong Kong - home to the world's highest per capita meat consumption - sat at number 1, above Japan and Spain, while Australia and Macao resided at #9 and #30, respectively (the current #1, #2, #3 rankings are Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, respectively, while Australia sits just behind Spain at #8).
The CIA longevity table, which uses different methodology from the UN and WHO and also ranks small and highly affluent principalities such as Monaco, San Marino and Andorra, placed Macao at number 4, Hong Kong at #7 and Australia at #15 (the current rankings are #3, #8 and #14, respectively).
If meat shortens lifespan, then someone clearly forgot to tell the residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Australia. To the contrary, high consumption of meat may just be doing them a world of good.
Before I describe the possible mechanisms, let's look at more recent research that indicates the higher a country's meat consumption, the better its peoples' longevity prospects.
Move Over Ancel
Most of you would be familiar by now with the Six and Seven Countries studies, conducted back in the 1950s by the controversial Ancel Keys.
The Six Countries Study was a paper exercise, while the Seven Countries was an on-the-ground epidemiological study. For both studies, Keys carefully handpicked a small sample of countries in order to support his preconceived thesis that dietary fat intake increased the risk of coronary heart disease.
His studies were biased garbage. And that's being nice.
Egregious bias and laughable methodology aside, Keys' ‘findings’ had a powerful influence on public health and nutrition policy that persists to this day. The decades-long war on animal fats, animal flesh and cholesterol owes much to his untenable research.
Today, I'm going to share with you a more recent and far more extensive study that comes to very different conclusions. This newer study compared, not a half-dozen cherry-picked nations, but 175 countries and territories. That's 90% of the world’s population.
Clearly a far broader analysis than that of dodgey Ancel, but because its conclusions don't conform to the "You vill eat ze bugs and ze fake meat" agenda of our WEF-instructed leaders, don't expect it to have the same influence on public policy. In fact, you can expect it to be largely ignored.
Thankfully, there is nothing to stop you from availing yourself of its important findings.
This was a population-based study, using data collected by the United Nations and its agencies (the same folks who would have you believe eating bugs and fake meat is best for the world).
The head researcher was Wenpeng You, a researcher from - you won't believe this - Adelaide Medical School at the University of Adelaide. Yep, the same city that during the mid-1990s was the ecstasy death capital of the world. A few more people like Wenpeng, and maybe one day Adelaide can be known for things other than meth addicts, serial killings and a-hole cops.
One can only dream.
Anyways, Wenpeng and a collaboration of researchers that hailed from Adelaide, Sydney, Italy, Poland and Switzerland set out to test the hypothesis that, worldwide, populations with more meat consumption have greater life expectancy.
Here's how they went about testing that hypothesis.
Firstly, they listed all the countries/territories of the world with data on meat intake, and then collected other variables that were matched with this list. This produced a dataset consisting of 175 populations with all required information.
Their analysis allowed for 3 years’ delayed presentation of possible adverse effects of meat intake on metabolic/physical health.
It included the major potential confounding factors, such as total calories consumed, wealth measured by gross domestic product, urbanization, obesity and education levels.
Independent dietary variables considered were the cross-population food supply data on total meats, cereals, starchy roots, sugar and sweeteners.
As per the Food and Agriculture Organization, meat was defined as “flesh of animals used for food”, and total meat included beef and veal, buffalo meat, pig meat, mutton and lamb, goat meat, horse meat, chicken meat, goose meat, duck meat, turkey meat, rabbit meat, game meat and offal.
Fish and seafood were not included in the meat grouping. Nor for that matter, were insects or manufactured, prophylactic-tasting products identifying as meat.
Additionally, they extracted the world total meat intake data (grams/day/capita) for all the years with the available FAO data (1961–2013) as the independent variable to correlate with the worldwide longitudinal life expectancy for the same years.
So what did they find?
Great News For Meat Eaters, Not So Good For Vegetarians
The data showed a "significant and strong" positive correlation with meat intake and life expectancy, which remained after factoring for other variables.
In addition, child mortality showed an inverse relationship with meat consumption.
There was a weak and negative correlation with carbohydrate crops intake and life expectancy, although this disappeared when accounting for other variables.
The researchers found, in general, meat intake is correlated with life expectancy in different population groupings regardless of cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, meat intake level and geographic location.
"Unsurprisingly," said the refreshingly non-woke researchers, "populations with lower percentage of vegetarians have greater life expectancy, though the relationship is only marginally significant likely due to small sample size."
The Healthiest Mediterranean Diet: Meat and Plant-Based
Remember all those non-Mediterranean revisionists who claim the Mediterranean diet is healthy because it is low in meat? Well, the researchers had something to say about that, too:
"In the Mediterranean diet country grouping, the strong relationship trend was observed that high total meat intake is associated with greater [life expectancy at birth]. This may suggest that, regardless of suggested beneficial health effects of Mediterranean diet, more total meat intake may benefit [life expectancy at birth] in the populations primarily on this diet."
In their regression analysis, the researchers found education is an important contributor to life expectancy similar to caloric consumption, while meat consumption had a significant effect on life expectancy at age 5 years.
Meat: The Most Nutritious Food on Earth
This, of course, goes against all the anti-meat propaganda we've been bombarded with over the last 80 or so years. Turns out the 'experts' were not really experts, but a bunch of terribly misguided automatons.
"Meat has advantages over food of plant origin," write the researchers, "containing complete protein with all essential amino acids, is rich in vitamins, in particular vitamin B12, and all essential minerals. It has a significant role not only for maintenance of health, development and proper growth but also has played an important evolutionary role in ancestral hominins for approximately 2.6 million years."
Damn, it's refreshing to hear researchers talk sense.
I'd like to add a few extra key nutrients to the list.
Not only does meat contain the full compliment of essential amino acids and bioavailable B12, it contains a number of other key nutrients you won't find in plants. These include carnitine, carnosine, creatine, taurine and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.
The one I'll expound upon here is carnosine, an amino acid with some very interesting and highly beneficial properties.
Meat is the only food containing significant amounts of carnosine. Not surprisingly, biopsies reveal far higher levels of carnosine in the muscles of omnivores than vegetarians (Harris 2007, Eeveraert 2011).
Carnosine is a potent antioxidant, especially effective in protecting cellular fats against free radical damage. Research shows carnosine may accelerate wound healing, boost immune function, protect against cataracts, inhibit gastric ulcer formation, rid the body of toxic metals, and even help fight against cancer.
The most potent effect of carnosine however, appears to be its ability to prevent glycosylation (a.k.a. glycation), which, along with free-radical production, is a major contributor to degenerative illness and aging. Glycosylation is dramatically amplified by elevated blood sugar levels, and is one of the reasons why diabetics suffer far higher rates of heart disease, cancer, infection, blindness and early death. During glycosylation, glucose and fructose bind to protein and fat molecules within our bodies, forming advanced glycosylation end-products (also known as AGEs). These AGEs quite literally stiffen our tissues, organs and arteries (think of the hardened honey glaze on a roasted leg of ham).
Some researchers believe the binding of AGEs to metals such as copper and iron inside the body is a major stimulus for free radical production, which in turn further compounds the damaging effects of glycosylation.
Laboratory research suggests that, for preventing AGE-induced damage, carnosine is equal to or even superior than the widely-studied drug aminoguanidine (Alhamdani 2007, Yan 2008).
The potent anti-glycosylation effects of carnosine may explain why a comparison of vegetarians, vegans and meat-eating omnivores revealed the latter to have significantly lower levels of nasty AGEs circulating in their bloodstreams. The difference could not be explained by total carbohydrate intake, blood sugar, age or kidney function, as all these variables were similar between the vegetarian and omnivorous groups.
Unaffected by the reigning anti-meat bias, UK researcher Alan Hipkiss, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, has written several papers proposing that high-carnosine (read: meat-rich) diets may in fact combat the aging process (for examples, see: Hipkiss 2005, 2006, 2009, 2009a, 2016).
The anti-meat militia would no doubt scoff at such a suggestion, but its members might want to ask themselves why the upper echelons of the longevity charts are dominated by countries with high meat consumption and hence high carnosine intakes.
Conclusion
For decades, we've been bombarded with the claim that meat, especially red meat, is harmful to our health and that its intake should be limited or avoided.
Proponents of "plant-based eating" (the term used by vegetarians and vegans who are too embarrassed to identify themselves as such) want you to accept the ridiculous proposition that a diet inevitably deficient in key nutrients such as B12, carnitine, creatine, carnosine, taurine and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids is somehow healthier.
That's a bit like telling a runner that weighing himself down with a 20kg backpack during competition will improve his race times.
It's stupid, illogical, and flat out wrong.
So don’t be a banana. Eat your meat.
The Mandatory “I Ain’t Your Mama, So Think For Yourself and Take Responsibility for Your Own Actions” Disclaimer: All content is provided for information and education purposes only. Individuals wishing to make changes to their dietary, lifestyle, exercise or medication regimens should do so in conjunction with a competent, knowledgeable and empathetic medical professional. Anyone who chooses to apply the information on this substack does so of their own volition and their own risk. The author/s accept no responsibility or liability whatsoever for any harm, real or imagined, from the use or dissemination of information contained on this substack. If these conditions are not agreeable to the reader, he/she is advised to leave this substack immediately.
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