Red Meat

IT'S a Saturday night at the French restaurant Taix in Echo Park, and a couple of drag queens named Roxxi Botoxxi and Sandy Mangina are engaging an audience of increasingly tipsy Eastsiders. Mangina, a.k.a. Ben Been, a brunet in a hoop skirt, surveys the male patrons with an overheated up-and-down stare and banters uneasily with the women. "So what's your story?" she says, audaciously catty.

Younger women who eat red meat regularly appear to face an increased risk for a common form of breast cancer, according to a large, well-known Harvard study of women's health. The study of more than 90,000 women found that the more red meat the women consumed when they were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, the greater their risk for getting breast cancer fueled by hormones in the next 12 years. Those who consumed the most red meat faced nearly twice the risk of those who ate red meat infrequently.

For many Californians, goat has become the other red meat. Curried goat and birria stew have become fixtures on the menus of local restaurants. Markets catering to Muslims and Latinos do brisk business selling fresh goat meat. Even the meat section of the upscale Whole Foods Market in Glendale now peddles the commodity. Goat meat imports to the U.S. jumped about 140% over a seven-year period ending in 2003. Now some California farmers see gold in goat.

Red is supposed to mean stop, but whether the token chip beside my plate at Fogo de Chao is turned to red or green, it doesn't seem to matter. The meat still keeps coming. It's a slow night, probably one of the few ever, at this luxe churrascaria, newly arrived in Beverly Hills via Brazil. It has been serving up to 400 famished Angelenos a night since it opened in mid-March, and the servers have a lot of meat to unload.

Adding weight to earlier findings, a study of nearly 150,000 adults has found that eating too many red and processed meats raises a person's risk for colorectal cancer by up to 50%. Meanwhile, another study of 285,526 European women has found that eating lots of fruits and vegetables does not lower a woman's risk for breast cancer, refuting some earlier studies.

You ate them up before the election. But can you stomach them now? They're the docu-propagandas spawned by the success of Michael Moore's loopy "Fahrenheit 9/11," which made $119.1 million in theaters. Most of these rotted on the vine -- "Celsius 41.11," a parboiled "Fahrenheit" response earned a mere $100,000 on its opening weekend -- but they're still out there. So, as a public health gesture, we took a guess at the agit-schlock's probable shelf life.

Add stroke to the list of health problems caused by a diet rich in red meat, white flour and sugar, researchers said Thursday. A study of more than 71,000 nurses found those who ate a "prudent" diet rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes and whole grains were less likely to have strokes than nurses eating a more typical American diet. Writing in the journal Stroke, a Harvard School of Public Health team said its study was the first to examine overall dietary habits and stroke risk.

While many Americans are just learning about mad cow disease, scientists here at the Center for Red Meat Safety have spent years getting to know it. The center, part of Colorado State University, is one of a handful of research facilities in the nation dedicated solely to meat. In room after room at the center, scientists and students work on new methods to kill bacteria while studying the properties of beef, lamb and pork.