Behavior (and red meat) affects health

Gulp! I plead guilty for enjoying red meat.

I do, however, generally don't have two servings a day. Maybe one. And in all kidding aside, this article showing that frequent red meat eaters at higher risk of stroke provides some guidance in how your behavior can affect your health. An excerpt:

To see what influence different types of dietary protein have on stroke risk, the researchers divided up the people in the study based on how much red meat, poultry, fish, dairy and other sources of protein they typically ate each day.

Men who ate more than two servings of red meat each day -- which was at the high end of the meat eaters -- had a 28 percent increased risk of stroke compared to men who averaged about a third of a serving of red meat each day, the low end of the red meat eaters.

The researchers considered a serving of red meat as four to six ounces of beef or a hamburger patty.

Women who ate nearly two servings of red meat a day had a 19 percent higher risk of stroke than women who ate less than half a serving each day.

A 19 percent increase in stroke risk means that instead of 26 out of every 1,000 people having a stroke, 31 out of every 1,000 people would have one.