I've said in the past that I wasn’t going to comment on the next study that claims meat is responsible for heart disease, cancer, or early mortality, or whatever ill they want to assign. But I’ve gotten enough questions from people that I just have to talk about it. There’s a new study out claiming that red meat intake is strongly linked to the risk of type two diabetes. They took a bunch of people, asked them what they typically ate over a specific course of time, and then tried to find associations between the reported food intake and various diseases. Well, it turns out that those who said they had more red meat than others had a higher risk of type two diabetes, with two servings a week being enough to raise the risk considerably, and even higher intakes being even more dangerous.

I will not go into the methodology of the study. You guys all know that food frequency questionnaires are faulty, nonsense, and expect people to somehow remember what they ate on a Saturday eight years ago. I won’t get into the "correlation isn’t causation" thing because everybody knows that, and the fact is that correlation can be an interesting thing to look at and can give you some hints, especially when paired with clinical trials and mechanistic studies. But today, I’m going to talk to you about ignoring your own experience.

What I really worry about is individuals like you having some coworker or relative pass along the study to you and you getting cold feet. Sure, you’ve lost 40 pounds, your lifts in the gym have gone up, your pants are looser, and you have energy you never had before, but in the back of your mind, do you wonder if that grass-fed burger patty you have over salad every lunch is going to kill you or give you type two diabetes? Many do.

What I’m saying is that if everything is going right, including the very symptoms and markers that would indicate a worsening of the specific condition being scaremongered about in the study, you don’t have to worry. There’s no reason to ever think that if your blood glucose is going down, your fasting insulin is improving, your belt is getting looser, and every metabolic biomarker is improving, that the dietary pattern that fostered these positive changes could somehow in a roundabout, totally contradictory manner trigger the very disease you’re trying to avoid. It simply doesn’t work that way. Type 2 diabetes doesn’t sneak up on you. It simmers for years, and you can watch it progress in real time by tracking numbers.

And yet despite everything that we say about doing your own research and running experiments of one and focusing on results, rather than what the health authorities have told you, there can be doubts that remain. Remember that even I second-guessed myself several years back during my prostate health scare. I didn’t listen to my gut, I gave in to the health authorities, got the prostate biopsy done, and I almost died because of it. So, I totally get it when anyone with otherwise stellar numbers and results starts getting cold feet because of the latest anti-meat study.

I'm here to tell you once again to never ignore your own experience. Never ignore your own symptoms—or lack of symptoms. I'm not saying that following the Primal Blueprint will bulletproof you against type 2 diabetes or any other disease, but I am saying that if you are losing weight, staying lean and fit, and have stellar glucose-related biomarkers, you are not at risk of "spontaneous steak-induced diabetes."

How about you folks? Do you ever have those little doubts despite "knowing" better? Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy.