FSA urged to withdraw report over flawed red meat claims

A government agency’s five-year Food You Can Trust strategy should be withdrawn because it makes use of flawed research on red meat health risks, processors have claimed.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) cites data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report 2020 which says human deaths from eating red meat rose from 25,000 in 2017 to 896,000 in 2019.

If accurate, that would equate to a 36-fold or 3,500% increase in human health risks from eating meat in two years.

However, the findings were met with a strong challenge from doctors and scientists after the report was published in the British medical journal The Lancet last year.  

See also: Young farmers vote to source and better promote British food

The challenge was led by Prof Alice Stanton of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Further backing came from a food safety expert, Prof Chris Elliott of Queen’s University Belfast, along with a group of other eminent doctors and scientists.

The group subjected the GBD claims to detailed analysis and comparison with global data, but found no relationship to back up the claims.

It suggested the GBD report could be misleading and potentially dangerous to human health if policymakers chose to form strategies based on the data.

Despite the concern among scientists, the Irish Farmers Association said it had already found the GBD data cited in 635 documents, 351 scientific papers and nine policy documents.

Misinformation 

It has now emerged that the FSA, which includes within its remit tackling misinformation about food, cites the GBD report in its 2022-27 strategy under a section on dietary risks to health.

Citing the report’s findings alongside an image of a burger meal, it says diet-related illness costs the NHS £10bn a year.

The emergence of the FSA reference prompted the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) to say that its fears about the uptake of the misinformation had been realised.

The BMPA also claimed that the agency must have known there was widespread condemnation and criticism of the GBD report before it wrote its strategy.

“Given the timeline for these developments, it’s clear that FSA would have known about the challenge a month before they published their Food You Can Trust strategy document”, a spokesman said.

“Yet they still chose to cite the original flawed study to support their arguments. We’re calling on the FSA to remove that citation from their strategy document and adjust any recommendations that rely on the GBD study.”

But FSA head of strategy Sam Faulkner insisted the GBD study had only been mentioned once in its strategy, to make the broad point that dietary risks can lead to people becoming ill.

“We then go on to cite Public Health England figures that show that over half the top 20 risks to human health relate to diet. We weren’t aware when we went to press that the study’s methodology was being revised, but we feel that the point that diet is one of the largest factors that can increase your risk of developing a disease still stands.”