How Risky Is Red Meat?

When clients tell me their eating habits, I often hear, "I never/rarely eat red meat," suggesting that "Red meat is bad..."

Is red meat bad for you?

You might wonder, especially since headlines once declared that eating a hot dog was the equivalent of smoking a cigarette.

That came from the World Health Organization (WHO), which labeled processed red meat—things like bacon, sausage, hot dogs, and salami—as “carcinogenic to humans.”

What IS red meat?

Red meat is meat from mammals: beef, pork, lamb, venison, etc.

🐷 Fun fact: pork only got branded as “the other white meat” because of a 1980s ad campaign. It’s red meat.

The definition is simple: Mammals are red meat and birds are white meat.

Then there's processed red meat. Processed red meat has been preserved in some way — smoked, salted, cured, or turned into bacon, sausage, hot dogs, salami, or corned beef.

The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) looked at hazard (whether something can cause cancer), not risk (how likely it is to cause cancer).

Sunshine is a hazard because UV rays can damage skin, but your risk depends on how much time you spend outside without protection.

Processed red meat has been linked to cancer, mainly colon cancer. But what’s the actual risk?

Putting Numbers To It

Your lifetime risk of colon cancer (with no family history) is about 4%. Eating 50 grams of processed meat daily—roughly a hot dog or a few strips of bacon—raises that risk by 18%

That bumps your lifetime risk from 4% to about 5%.

That’s not a massive jump. But multiplied over millions of people, it adds up to a lot of preventable cancers.

Unprocessed red meat (like steak or pork chops) isn’t as strongly linked. The concern is mainly with processed versions.

So… Should You Stop Eating Meat?

Not necessarily. Here’s a practical way to think about it:

• Processed meats (bacon, hot dogs, sausage, salami): Best to limit. Not “never,” but not an everyday habit.

• Unprocessed red meat (steak, pork chops, lamb): The data is weaker here. Moderation is the name of the game.

• Chicken, turkey, fish: These don’t carry the same risks and are great protein sources to lean on more often.

The WHO wasn’t saying that a single hot dog at a ball game will strike you out. (see what I did there?)

The greatest concern is daily, long-term processed meat consumption.

When you consider how often processed meats show up in our daily diets, it's obvious how easy it can be to overdo them--bacon or sausage for breakfast, a ham sandwich for lunch, pepperoni or sausage on pizza at dinner......

There's no health reason to completely avoid red meat. Grill your steak. Enjoy the occasional BLT--just don’t make bacon its own food group.

⚖️ Balance your plate with other proteins and especially, plenty of plants!