Vegetarians have considerably lower obesity rates compared to those who eat meat, but why? Is it because they’re not eating meat or because they’re eating more plants? Or maybe they’re just eating fewer calories or exercising more? A study out of the Netherlands controlled for all of that, as profiled in my video, Chicken Big: Poultry and Obesity.
Researchers effectively studied men and women who ate the same number of calories a day, ate the same amount of vegetables, fruits, grains and did the same amount of exercise, but ate different amounts of meat. Men and women who ate less than a small serving of meat a day were on average not overweight, but the more meat they ate, the heavier they were. By one and a half servings a day, they crossed the threshold of a BMI of 25 to become officially classified as overweight.
Which type of meat was the worst? I previously profiled a study of hundreds of thousands of men and women which showed that poultry consumption appeared to be the worst (see Meat and Weight Gain in the PANACEA Study). But maybe it was reverse causation, meaning obesity leading to greater chicken consumption and not the other way around. The new study controlled for that, adjusting for dieting habits, yet found the same thing. Chicken consumption was most associated with weight gain in both men and women, and it didn’t take much. Compared to those who didn’t eat any chicken at all, those eating about 20 or more grams of chicken a day had a significantly greater increase in their body mass index. That’s around one chicken nugget, or a single chicken breast once every two weeks compared to no chicken at all.
Why poultry though? We don’t know, but here are some possible contributing factors:
Other surprising discoveries in the field include:
In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.
PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my free videos here and watch my live, year-in-review presentations—2013: Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death, More Than an Apple a Day, 2014: From Table to Able: Combating Disabling Diseases with Food, 2015: Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating the Most Dreaded Diseases with Diet, and my latest, 2016: How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers.
