Example Of Bad Headline

Dishonesty is, like, everywhere man!  Greedy corporations are takin'...  Oh.  Hang on.  Sorry.  Red meat!  Yeah, red meat!  Gonna kill us, gonna kill us all!  And that brings me back to dishonesty.  One of these headlines has taken a fast and loose approach to the truth in favour of being sensationalist.  See if you can pick which one...

Too Much Red Meat May Shorten Life Span is one headline, while

Study: Lots of red meat increases mortality risk this is the other.  

The first one sounds so damn dramatic, doesn't it? Eat red meat, and for every steak you eat, your lifeline gets shortened by six weeks!  Except it isn't true - it's as the second headline suggests, that there is an increased risk of death to people who eat red meat every day.

These assholes are dealing with people's health and lives here and they would prefer sensationalism to helping.  Yes they are both published by the same news source, and yes they are both women.  But being a woman doesn't preclude you from being a sensationalist asshole.  And it seems that "editorial" staff at Yahoo aren't above seeing the same story twice, and allowing what's basically an untrue headline.

I normally wouldn't get quite this upset, but you know that health is my "thing" and healthy diet is pretty much my alpha and my omega, as I've discovered over and over how important good food is to health.  So to see such an outright beat-up bullshit headline makes me upset.  People read that first headline they start to actively avoid red meat, next thing their bodies are having to learn to cope without the source of aminos and proteins that it's been used to having for all your life, and then you're wide open to a whole range of diseases.

Yes our ancestors had to make do with a low-meat diet but that's it - LOW meat not NO meat and certainly not ALL meat.  And these articles, when you read them, bears that out.  Consuming less red meat is more like our ancestors' diet. It wasn't something you had access to seven days a week, and now that we can, doesn't man we should.  I haven't done the maths (am too slack to!) but suppose everyone in the developed world cut down to one meal with beef per week, one meal with pork, one with chicken, another with lamb or capretto, and you compared the carbon footprint of that, I reckon you'd find several million cattle a year less are needed, with the attendant reduction in greenhouse gases, and an attendant increase in health.  And all those resources that are being put into raising cattle now could be put into feeding a few third world countries...  

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