Among the several specific dietary changes that we should recommend to our patients to bring down their elevated LDL cholesterol (discussed in another article on this website), probably the most important is to minimize their consumption of red meat. This is VERY important to do in patients with high LDL cholesterol.
I had been emphasizing this to my patients for several years before I realized that many of them had incorrect views about which foods are or are not “red meat.” Then, I asked a couple of non-psychiatric physicians, and, to my surprise, they also had some wrong beliefs about which foods were or were not red meat.
Note: Here, we are using the term “red meat” to include only the unprocessed muscle meat of certain animals (Rock et al., 2020). But which animals? Amazingly, many practice guidelines and review articles that discuss a healthy diet or dietary management of elevated LDL cholesterol say that red meat intake should be limited or avoided without clarifying anywhere in the document which meats are considered to be ‘red meat’ from the viewpoint of nutrition.
Beef, sheep meat (lamb or mutton), and goat meat are well-known to be red meat. And, chicken is well-known to be white meat. But what about pork, veal, and venison? What about turkey, duck, and goose? In this brief article, let’s clarify misconceptions about these.
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