Eating chicken makes you live longer

One of the largest trials carried out looking at the effects of eating meat on human health has found that eating more chicken can help people live longer.

US researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, USA, carried out a study looking at more than 0.5m people in the US to look at the relationship between increased meat intake and mortality.

A questionnaire was used to estimate their intake of white, red and processed meat and they were monitored for 10 years.

Results clearly showed that eating chicken helped reduce the risk of death from cancer and other diseases by 8%.

But there was a different picture with red and processed meat, where eating too much produced a modest increase in death risk from all causes, particularly heart disease and cancer.

The authors put forward a number of theories in their paper in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, which include meat being a source of several carcinogens which are formed during high temperature cooking. Furthermore, meat is a main source of saturated fat, which is associated with breast and colorectal cancers.