| Good morning, everybody. Some of the stuff they try to levy against red meat is just ridiculous. Take type 2 diabetes. How does that even happen—what's the proposed mechanism? We've all seen or heard about people with type 2 diabetes who start eating way more red meat and cutting out carbs, and they improve by leaps and bounds. Get off medication, lose all the extra weight, have energy again. Hell, Virta Health is putting people on high-meat, high-fat, low-carb diets and generating powerful clinical evidence that it not only protects against type 2 diabetes, it resolves it. Weight gain? Sure, maybe "Too much steak will make you gain weight" would have worked 20 years ago, but not anymore. Nowadays pretty much everyone knows that eating more meat (and less other stuff) will usually help you shed body fat, not gain it. But colon cancer? That's the big one. Because as good as you can look and feel on the surface, as lean as you can get, as much as you can lose body fat and get off diabetes meds and have a new lease on life, no one quite knows what's going on...down there. The notion that red meat causes colon cancer is hard to dislodge. Heck, cancer is one of those things that often seems to strike the ones who you'd never think would get it. It's often a silent killer until it's too late. So it's no stretch of the imagination to think that while eating more meat could improve many aspects of your health, it could also trigger other issues. But the best evidence we have suggests that this isn't the case. I dug into this. I looked really close. I looked at the proposed link between heme iron—the "animal" form of iron that's highest in red meat—and colon cancer. It turns out: That to give rats colon cancer by feeding them red meat or heme iron, you have to remove the calcium from their diets. A calcium deficiency is required to cause colon cancer. That to give rats colon cancer by feeding them red meat or heme iron, you have to feed them polyunsaturated fats alongside it. Giving a high MUFA oil like olive oil or high SFA oil like coconut oil protects against the cancer. That to protect against heme-induced colon cancer, dietary antioxidants and polyphenols can really help. One study found that giving red wine completely protected against colon cancer in processed meat-fed animals given a carcinogen. This makes intuitive Primal sense, doesn't it? Red meat doesn't appear with very much PUFA in nature. The fat that accompanies beef or bison or lamb is primarily monounsaturated and saturated. Red meat goes very well with cheese. Nothing like a burger patty with some aged cheddar or gouda. Red meat goes very well with red wine. Nature always gives hints, doesn't it? It's really quite elegant. That's it for today, folks. What are some of your favorite examples of the elegance of nature? Where things just work on every level? Let me know in the comment section of this week's Weekly Link Love. Thanks for reading today, and enjoy your Sunday. Best, | 