The Conversation How unhealthy is red meat? And how beneficial is it to eat vegetables? A new rating system could help you cut through the health guidelines

 You'll want to check out the visualization tool since there are risks for stroke and hemorrhages in there. But I suppose you could defer to your doctor who will have that information to you in 50 years.  And since these are guidelines NOT protocols they aren't that much help,

How unhealthy is red meat? And how beneficial is it to eat vegetables? A new rating system could help you cut through the health guidelines

Aleksandr Aravkin, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Jeffrey Stanaway, Assistant Professor of Global Health and Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, and Christian Razo, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington

Fri, October 21, 2022 at 8:38 AM·4 min read

The new rating system shows that eating the right amount of vegetables can lower your risk of heart disease by nearly 20%. Westend61/Getty Images

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

We developed a new method for assessing health risks that our research suggests should make it a lot easier for people to determine which health advice to follow – and which to ignore. The approach, recently published in the journal Nature Medicine, offers a straightforward way for both policymakers and the general public to assess the strength of evidence for a given health risk – like consuming red meat – and the corresponding outcome – ischemic heart disease – using a rating system of one to five stars.

The system we developed is based on several systematic reviews of studies regarding risk factors like smoking and health outcomes such as lung cancer. Well-established relationships between risks and outcomes score between three and five stars, whereas cases in which research evidence is lacking or contradictory garner one to two stars.

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In our analysis, only eight of the 180 pairs that we analyzed received the top rating of five stars, indicating very strong evidence of association. The relationship between smoking and lung cancer, as well as the relationship between high systolic blood pressure – the higher of the two numbers in a blood pressure reading – and ischemic heart disease were among those eight five-star pairs.

This rating system enables consumers to easily identify how harmful or protective a behavior may be and how strong the evidence is for each risk-outcome pair. For instance, a consumer seeing a low star rating can use that knowledge to decide whether to shift a health habit or choice.

In addition, we created an online, publicly available visualization tool that displays 50 risk-outcome pairs that we discussed in five recently published papers in Nature Medicine.

While the visualization tool provides a nuanced understanding of risk across the range of blood pressures, the five-star rating signals that the overall evidence is very strong. As a result, this means that clear guidelines can be given on the importance of controlling blood pressure.