According to the Global Burden of Disease Study,

diets high in processed meat, like bacon, ham, hot dogs,

lunch meat, sausage, may kill off more than

100,000 people every year, mostly due to heart disease,

but also cancer and diabetes, resulting in millions

of healthy years of life lost every year around the world.

And it doesn't take much. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated

that if Americans could cut down to an ounce a week,

thousands of annual cancer deaths could be averted.

But that's on a population scale. How can we better understand

our individual risk?

Though the NutriRECS panel in the Annals of Internal Medicine

meat papers I've done the last few videos about,

discarded their own findings, using their numbers, a reduction

in red and processed meat consumption is associated

with a 13% lower risk of premature death.

What exactly does that mean?

Like what does a 13% increased risk of death mean?

To get a better handle on it, let me introduce the concept of microlives.

Acute risks, such as riding a motorbike or going skydiving,

may result in an accident.

A good way to compare such risks is with a unit known as a Micromort,

defined as a 1-in-a-million chance of sudden death.

I did a really fascinating video about it recently.

However many risks we take don't kill you straight away.

Think of all the lifestyle frailties we get warned about,

such as smoking, drinking, eating badly, not exercising, and so on.

So the microlife aims to make all these chronic risks comparable

by showing how much life we lose on average when we're exposed to them.

A microlife is defined as 30 minutes of your life expectancy.

Why is that?

Well, someone in their 20s, a 22-year old man or a 26-year old woman,

may have, on average, about 57 years left.

That's about 20,000 days, or 500,000 hours, or a million half hours.

Aha! So that's how they define a microlife:

a reduction of one of the million half hours we may have left.

Here are some things that would, on average,

cost a 30-year-old man one microlife.

Smoking two cigarettes, drinking two pints of beer,

or every day they live 11 pounds overweight.

See how helpful this can be in terms of comparing risks.

So drinking a pint of strong beer cuts your life expectancy short

as much as smoking one cigarette.

If it's unthinkable to you to have so little respect for your own health

that you'd light up twice a day, maybe one cigarette in the morning

and one at night, then it should be just as unthinkable

being 11 pounds overweight.

Alternately you can compare life-extending behavior.

For example, eating at least five servings of fruits and veggies a day

may add an average of four years onto your lifespan for men

and three years for women.

That's up to twice as beneficial as exercising every day.

But check it out. Exercise for 20 minutes,

and you add an hour to your life, two microlives.

So for all those who say they don't have time to exercise,

it's like a 3 to 1 return on investment.

Give 20 minutes of your life to get 60 minutes of life.

Beyond that, there's a bit of diminishing returns, but

exercise an hour a day and get back more time than you put in.

Okay, so what about the meat?

Each burger is associated with the loss of a microlife.

So it's as if each burger were taking 30 minutes off your life.

So lifespan-wise, one burger appears equal to two cigarettes.

If it wouldn't occur to you to light up at lunch,

maybe you should choose the bean burrito instead.

And processed meat is even worse.

There's a couple of equivalent ways you could say it.

Imagine two people who are identical in every way,

except that one eats around 50 grams of processed meat a day,

which is like one large sausage or hot dog, or a few strips of bacon,

and the other eats none.

Eating that single serving of processed meat every day

is expected to take about two years off the length of your life.

Two years less with your loved ones, your grandkids,

your spouse, two more years of mourning.

Or you could think about it on a day-to-day basis.

Eating a baloney or ham sandwich every day,

just two slices of deli meat,

is expected to take around one hour off your life each day.

Don't think there's ever enough hours in the day?

Well, you may have effectively one less

depending on what you pack for lunch.

Alternatively, you could think about it in terms of "effective age."

Eating 50 grams of processed meat a day is expected to add around

two years onto your "effective age," meaning basically give you

the annual chance of dying of someone two years older.

In summary, wrote the chair of Nutrition at Harvard and colleagues,

the NutriRECS meat recommendations suffer from

important methodological limitations and involve

misinterpretations of nutritional evidence.

To improve human - and planetary health as a side bonus -

dietary guidelines should continue to emphasize dietary patterns

low in red and processed meats, and high in minimally processed

plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes -

beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils.

Let me end with a quote from Dr. Dean Ornish

about the Annals meat papers that suggested people should

continue to eat meat with abandon.

His Lifestyle Heart Trial was one of the many studies

the meat panel ignored. It showed that a plant-based diet

and lifestyle program could reverse the progression

of even severe coronary heart disease,

the #1 killer of men and women.

The control group actually made modest reductions in meat

comparable to those in the Annals review

and showed continued worsening of their atherosclerosis.

"I take solace," Ornish said, "in knowing that the light

"drives out the darkness.

"But, these days, the light has to be very bright indeed.

"Caveat emptor. Don't be fooled.

"Your life may depend on it."