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All you meat red meat lovers out there better listen up. Those who consume red meat every day have a higher risk of dying over a 10-year period. This is primarily due to cardiovascular disease or cancer, compared to their peers, who eat less red or processed meat, according to a new study of about half a million people.

“This is the biggest and highest quality study like this,” says Barry M. Popkin, PhD, from the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, which was published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine. “They collected the diet data very carefully, and it’s saying to people ‘You don’t have to eat red meat every day.’ ”

The report of more than 500,000 middle-age and older Americans discovered that those who ate the equivalent of approximately a small beefburger daily were more than 30 percent more apt to die during the 10 years they were followed, largely from heart disease and cancer. Sausage, cold cuts and other processed meats also added to the danger.
Red meat is a great source of saturated fat, a clear danger ingredient for heart disease. And processed meats tend to be high in salt, which could increase blood pressure.

Interestingly, processed meats, the risks for large amounts were somewhat lower overall than for red meat. The study compared deaths in the those who had the highest intakes to deaths in people with the lowest to determine the increased risk.

In the follow-up time period, 47,976 men and 23,276 women died. The one-fifth of men and women who consumed the most red meat (a median or midpoint of 62.5 grams per 1,000 calories per day) bore a higher risk for overall death, death from heart disease and death from cancer than the one-fifth of men and women who ate the least red meat (a median of 9.8 grams per 1,000 calories per day), as did the one-fifth of men and women who ate the most vs. the least amount of processed meat (a median of 22.6 grams vs. 1.6 grams per 1,000 calories per day).