Meat, Longevity, and the Collapse of Dietary Theology, By Mrs. Vera West

A new study using data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey tracked over 5,000 adults aged 80+ from 1998 to 2018 and found something deeply unfashionable:
those who avoided meat were less likely to reach 100 than those who ate it. Cue nutritional heresy trials.

The authors are careful — as modern academics must be — to avoid sounding like they've endorsed steak. They hedge with confounders, qualifications, and methodological caveats. And fair enough: observational nutrition research is notoriously messy. Diet is tangled with wealth, healthcare access, rural vs urban life, disease burden, smoking history, genetics, and survivorship bias. No randomised controlled trial assigns octogenarians to beef or tofu for 30 years.

But still — when a dataset this large, longitudinal, and age-targeted points consistently in one direction, it's worth pausing before ritualistically chanting correlation is not causation and moving on.

Because what this study really disrupts isn't dietary science — it's dietary theology.

The Modern Nutritional Myth: Meat as Toxin

For roughly the last half-century, Western nutrition culture has been driven by a curious inversion of human evolutionary history. For over two million years, Homo species survived on diets in which animal protein and fat were not merely optional — they were structural. Brain expansion, caloric density, micronutrient sufficiency, and seasonal survival all depended on animal foods.

Yet modern nutritional orthodoxy increasingly treats meat — especially red meat — as if it were an industrial contaminant accidentally introduced into the food supply around 1973.

Meat is now discussed less as food than as:

• "Pro-inflammatory"
• "Carcinogenic"
• "Environmentally immoral"
• "Metabolically toxic"
• "Ethically compromised"

The framing is theological rather than biological: meat becomes sin, abstention becomes virtue, and longevity becomes salvation.

But here's the awkward empirical problem: the longest-lived populations in recorded history were not vegetarians.

Not Okinawans.
Not Sardinians.
Not Icelandic fishermen.
Not rural Chinese peasants.
Not 19th-century Europeans.
Not hunter-gatherers.

And now, not Chinese centenarians either.

The paper examined adults aged 80+ and followed survival outcomes to extreme old age. Those who consumed meat — even infrequently — had higher odds of reaching centenarian status than those who abstained entirely. Importantly:

• This was not about ultra-processed meat
• Not about Western fast food
• Not about industrial feedlot beef
• But traditional diets including pork, poultry, fish, and small amounts of red meat

In other words: normal human diets.

The meat eaters were not carnivore extremists — just people who hadn't adopted the modern belief that animal protein is poison.

Yes, observational studies can't prove causation.
Yes, diet recall is imperfect.
Yes, meat consumption may correlate with wealth, healthcare access, or urbanisation.

But notice something odd: these same limitations never seem to trouble studies linking meat to disease. When red meat correlates with colorectal cancer risk at hazard ratios of 1.12, nutrition journalism explodes with moral urgency. When meat correlates with longevity — suddenly we rediscover epistemological humility.

This asymmetry tells us something important: the scepticism is ideological, not statistical.

One plausible mechanism here is not exotic at all: protein sufficiency.

In advanced age, muscle wasting (sarcopenia), immune decline, and frailty become primary drivers of mortality — more so than heart disease or cancer. Animal protein is:

• More bioavailable
• Richer in leucine
• Easier to absorb in elderly digestion
• Higher in vitamin B12, iron, zinc, and DHA
• Less dependent on gut fermentation or plant antinutrient tolerance

Vegetarian diets — especially in elderly populations — frequently drift into protein insufficiency even when calories are adequate. You don't die of cholesterol; you die of falls, infections, fractures, and weakness.

Centenarians rarely die of plaque rupture. They die of frailty collapse.

Meat — boringly — prevents frailty.

What modern nutrition often forgets is this: humans did not evolve eating "heart healthy" diets.

They evolved eating:

• Fatty marrow
• Organ meats
• Muscle tissue
• Bone broth
• Blood
• Occasionally plants

The question should never have been:
"Is meat safe?"

It should have been:
"What evidence suggests the ancestral human diet suddenly became toxic in 1977 when dietary guidelines were rewritten?"

No such evidence exists.

What exists instead is:

• Epidemiology confounded by processed food environments
• Industrial seed oils
• Sedentary lifestyles
• Ultra-refined carbohydrates
• Metabolic syndrome masquerading as meat toxicity

Meat became the scapegoat for civilisation.

Much of modern dietary research now functions less as metabolic science and more as moral philosophy with blood biomarkers.

Meat avoidance signals:

• Environmental virtue
• Ethical purity
• Political alignment
• Spiritual modernity

The vegan plate has become the Eucharist of progressive secularism.

But biology is unmoved by moral theatre.

Cells do not metabolise ideology. They metabolise amino acids, fatty acids, minerals, and vitamins — many of which occur in their most bioavailable form in animal foods.

Longevity, as it turns out, is less impressed by ethical branding than Twitter.

This paper does not prove that meat causes longevity. But it does strongly undermine the idea that meat is intrinsically harmful — a toxin, carcinogen, or metabolic villain whose elimination improves lifespan.

Instead, it aligns with what human history, physiology, and basic gerontology already suggest:

Moderate meat consumption is compatible with — and may support — extreme old age.

Which is rather inconvenient if your worldview depends on steak being murder.

Perhaps the most interesting result here is not statistical but cultural:

In one of the longest-lived populations ever recorded — rural Chinese elders born before modern nutrition dogma existed — the people who ate meat lived longer than those who didn't.

Before cholesterol became a moral category.
Before protein became "problematic."
Before eating like your ancestors became radical.

Maybe the simplest hypothesis remains the strongest: Food humans evolved to eat is probably not poison.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002916525007282?via%3Dihub