Eating Red Meat Linked With Dementia Risk
Diets high in bacon, hot dogs and sausage meat are associated with a 13% higher risk of dementia, a new study has found.

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Consumers are increasingly aware that diets high in red meat and processed meat may come with an elevated risk of developing cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
Red meat’s link to dementia, however, is less well-known, and less established in the research literature.
To address this deficit, researchers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health studied decades’ worth of health data from 133,771 people, comparing the participants’ dietary questionnaire answers against their cognitive decline scores.
The team found that a higher intake of red meat, particularly processed red meat, was associated with a 13% higher risk of developing dementia.
According to the researchers, replacing processed red meat with protein sources like legumes and fish may decrease this dementia risk by 20%.
Their findings were published in Neurology.
Meat head
The researchers accessed data from two ongoing cohort studies, the Nurses’ Health Study – which recruited 121,700 female registered nurses in 1976, all aged between 30 and 55 – and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study – which enrolled 51,529 male health professionals aged between 40 and 75 in 1986. Participants filled out dietary and health questionnaires every two years.
For their analysis, the researchers excluded participants who already had dementia or who failed to provide any red meat intake information.
Over the decades, 11,173 of the participants were diagnosed with dementia.
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Subscribe for FREEThe researchers found that those who ate an average of one-quarter or more servings of red meat (roughly two slices of bacon) per day had a 13% higher risk of developing dementia, compared to those who ate only a minimal level of red meat.
Those who regularly ate processed meat were also more likely to display accelerated cognitive aging, approximate to 1.6 years per average daily serving.
Participants’ self-reported subjective cognitive decline (SCD) scores also tended to be higher among the participants who consumed more red meat, processed or unprocessed. SCD risk increased by 14% for those eating one-quarter or more servings of processed meat per day compared to the minimal-consumption group.
The researchers say their findings highlight the underemphasized cognitive risks of eating too much red meat.
“Dietary guidelines tend to focus on reducing risks of chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes, while cognitive health is less frequently discussed, despite being linked to these diseases,” Dr. Daniel Wang, an assistant professor in the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“We hope our results encourage greater consideration of the connection between diet and brain health.”
Wang and his colleagues didn’t evidence how red meat could be increasing the participants’ risk of dementia, but they posit that, by increasing a person’s total cholesterol levels, red meat could affect the expression of APOE, a gene linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
To minimize this risk, the team advised that regular red meat eaters could replace their protein with healthier options such as fish, eggs, low-fat dairy, nuts and legumes.
Reference: Li Y, Li Y, Gu X, et al. Long-term intake of red meat in relation to dementia risk and cognitive function in US adults. Neuro. 2025. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000210286