Are Red Meat Warnings Based on Flawed Science? Dr. David Klurfeld on Nutrition Myths and Industry Bias

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
You've probably heard the claim that eating red meat causes cancer. That message went global. Hardly any understood where it came from, or the science behind the claim. Dr. David Klurfeld spent decades at the USDA. He's not a fringe voice. He helped write the US dietary guidelines. This episode may change how you think about red meat, science, and who is shaping your health. Are you concerned that a lot of what we've been told about red meat has been built on shaky science? You should be. Keep watching to find out what red meat really means for your health. Dr. David Klurfeld, welcome to the show.

**Dr. David Klurfeld** (0:49)
Thank you.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:50)
I cannot tell you how long I have been reading, what you have been researching and publishing. You've just been a tremendous force and it is not always easy to be a fantastic scientist and to question and push for transparency. But you have done that. You are up there better than anybody that I think is out there. So just welcome to the show.

**Dr. David Klurfeld** (1:17)
Thanks. I could roll up my sleeves and show you some of the bruises, but I'm not sure your fans want to see them.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:23)
Yeah. Well, we are going to talk about the bruises. To give people context about you and your work, you have been in academics for years. You recently retired, so congratulations. You were an adjunct professor in the Indiana University School of Public Health. You also retired as national program leader for Human Nutrition in the USDA Agricultural Research Service. That was at the end of 2020 Prior to that, you have a long list of accolades, professor and chairman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at Wayne University in Detroit, Michigan for 12 years and then of course, before that you were faculty at the Worcester Institute and at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for 15 years. Yeah, it seems like you just haven't been doing much for all that time, really extraordinary. But it goes beyond that. You've published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, associate editor of the American Journal of Clinical, for Clinical Nutrition for 12 years. And you're currently the associate editor of the Journal of Nutrition.

**Dr. David Klurfeld** (2:32)
Right.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:33)
Distinguished Fellow, and that is ASN. Again, this goes on and on. But one of the reasons why I really wanted you to come here is you have been very outspoken in terms of your work and your research, really pushing for transparency and reproducibility. And especially when it comes to nutritional sciences and red meat. Also, you haven't done a ton of podcasts or speaking publicly. So we're going to share it here.
Tell me about a little bit of your journey as to how you just became interested in all of these things regarding nutrition.

**Dr. David Klurfeld** (3:19)
Well, I have no formal training in nutrition. My undergraduate degree is in agriculture. And as an undergraduate student, I need to tell you a short story. I got interested in nutrition and health. And I bought a paperback book in the college bookstore called The Poisons in Your Food. And it's still on my bookshelf at home. But I reread it about 10 or 15 years ago. And it's garbage.
It's really scaremongering.
But I worked in my last summer in college, I worked in a pathology lab at a hospital in New York City. And I got really interested in pathology. And I applied to graduate programs in pathology and was accepted at the Medical College of Virginia. And ended up getting a master's and PhD in human pathology. As a postdoctoral fellow, I went to work with David Krusevsky, who's a very famous nutritional biochemist. And always described himself as a biochemist, not as a nutritionist. But he was one of the most prominent nutritionists in the world. And wrote the first book on cholesterol, and was probably the funniest guy in the nutrition business. So I actually ended up working with him for 15 years. And Dave was a very honest guy, and put his own work in perspective. And he always said, never change what you do based on one study. And he also wasn't very much a fan of crediting the right people, not sticking to the elite group of people who seemed to hold sway in various scientific fields over time. You know, he used to say that people change their mind after they die. And that's a problem in science. You know, one of the real problems that has bothered me for decades is the concept of allegiance bias. If you tell me the name of an author of a nutrition paper and just read me the title, I can tell you what the conclusions are just from knowing that person's name.