Academic studies funded or supported by industry are 16 times more likely to draw positive conclusions about the health impacts of meat than independent research, a new review has found.

Public health experts at the University of Queensland reviewed 500 nutritional studies, including nearly 80 that had received funding or been penned by researchers linked to the meat sector.

These studies promoted the health and nutritional benefits of meat consumption – despite the majority of independent research pointing to health harms including diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

The findings come amid a growing public craze for animal-based protein sources, with the livestock sector widely promoting meat consumption on health grounds.

Yet, science shows that over-consumption can lead to obesity, heart attacks, and premature death.

Just nine percent of independent studies drew positive conclusions about the health impacts of meat – compared to 69 percent of those with industry links, the new research published in Obesity Reviews found.

Meat consumption in wealthy countries like the U.S. already far outstrips recommended amounts. A peer-reviewed study published in October found that switching to a healthy, sustainable diet with significantly lower meat consumption could save 40,000 lives every day around the world.

Meanwhile, the meat sector has attempted to discredit concerns about high-meat diets. In 2025, DeSmog and The Guardian revealed that meat industry lobbyists had launched a “smear campaign” to undermine peer-reviewed research showing the health and environmental benefits of reducing meat consumption.

Livestock farming is a leading driver of climate breakdown, responsible for over 14 percent of all emissions worldwide.

Martin Bowman, senior policy and campaigns manager at the environmental charity Foodrise, said that the new findings were “scandalous” and “deeply concerning”.

They “show the meat industry’s corrosive effects on public health debates, and its direct role in distorting public perceptions of the health risks of meat,” he said.

‘Highly selective cherry-picking’

The findings have raised major concerns about a lack of transparency when it comes to conflicts of interest in academic studies.

Queensland’s public health team found that almost a fifth of all the reviewed studies did not provide information on whether the meat industry had funded the research or was linked to any of its authors.

This is despite trade groups for the livestock sector spending millions on nutrition research, according to the academics.

The findings build on a second peer-reviewed paper published in June 2025, which found that the industry had funded dozens of clinical trials examining whether unprocessed red meat leads to heart disease. Studies linked to the sector were four times more likely to reach conclusions that were favourable or neutral about meat consumption than independent reports. 

Academics have previously found that links to the sugar, pharmaceutical, and alcohol industries had major impacts on the outcomes of health research. 

The impact of meat industry links, though, appears to far outstrip those from other sectors. Navid Teimouri, lead author of the new Queensland paper, told DeSmog that, while studies linked to the sugar and pharmaceutical sectors are three to four times more likely to find outcomes in favour of their products, the new research “found an odds ratio of sixteen” for meat.

He believes the scale of the impact may reflect the complexity of the nutritional science: “There are cases where meat consumption is beneficial for certain nutritional outcomes, for example in undernourished, undernutritioned people. That means you can quite easily design a research study where you can know ahead what type of result you’ll get,” he said. 

“It’s quite easy for you to create a research design that gives you a beneficial outcome.”

Bowman added: “At best, these findings suggest highly selective cherry-picking” by the industry-linked studies.

They are not the first to raise these concerns. In 2019, a New York Times investigation showed that Bradley C. Johnston, the academic behind a study that undermined widespread warnings linking meat consumption to heart disease and cancer, had failed to disclose previous funding from an industry association largely supported by agribusiness, food, and pharmaceutical companies.

Johnston told the New York Times that he was not required to disclose the links and that they had no influence on his ongoing research.