FRAMINGHAM, Mass. - It was here in this thriving New England town that America's love affair with beef started to lose its sizzle.
It was here a half-century ago that obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels were all identified as risk factors for heart disease.
Indeed, it was here that scientists coined the term "risk factor," triggering the deluge of nutrition research that keeps beef from being "what's for dinner" in many households.
But Big Beef is fighting back.
The beef industry has funneled millions into a public- relations campaign to cast steaks and burgers as something akin to health food - something you can eat every day, even twice a day.
In its yearlong study of the issue, The Kansas City Star found that Big Beef is:
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• Attempting to influence the next rewrite of the federal government's Dietary Guidelines in 2015. Big Beef wants to include new research the industry paid for that promotes a beef diet intended to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. It also has paid for advertising and promotions, for example, getting lean cuts certified by the American Heart Association as "heart-healthy" food.
• Spending even more money influencing the nation's dietitians, treating them to junkets and dinners. The industry arranges continuing education programs for nutritionists to spread the gospel immediately after beef-sponsored research is published in scientific journals.
• Stifling criticism of food or its production methods through what are called "veggie libel" laws now in effect in 13 states. The laws were promoted by the American Feed Industry Association, whose members include large beef packers and animal pharmaceutical firms.
In an effort to maintain market share, the beef industry has gone on the nutritional offensive. Its own marketing research shows that concerns about nutrition, and fat in particular, remain a major disincentive to consumers from buying beef as voraciously as they did a generation ago.
The average American maxed out on beef in 1976, eating a record 67.9 pounds that year. Since then, beef consumption in the United States has fallen by about a third.
Despite a seemingly endless onslaught of medical research that implicates beef and other red meat in heart disease, cancer, diabetes and weight gain, the beef industry remains hopeful, citing marketing data that 94 percent of us eat beef at least once a month.
Industry-sponsored research, such as the diet study, is designed to "address important information gaps," said Shalene McNeill, a registered dietitian and executive director of nutrition research at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
Yet other nutrition experts remain skeptical of the continuing marketing push to burnish beef's public image.
"There's just so much evidence that beef is related to heart disease," said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the health- advocacy organization Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Decades of research
Since 1948, the heart study has used this middle-class town, Framingham, about 21 miles west of Boston, as a virtual research laboratory. People - continuing to this day into a third generation - have been surveyed about their lifestyles and undergone regular comprehensive medical exams.
Early findings from the Framingham Heart Study, and from other research at that time, helped set off the nation's turbulent relationship with food and fat - and turned prime rib into a prime suspect.
The basic message has always been that having high cholesterol levels raises our risk of heart disease.
And eating saturated fats - which are found in animal products such as meat and dairy - raises those levels.
Red meats like beef no longer are Nutrition Enemy No. 1 - that role has been assumed by sugary drinks, white bread and french fries. Refined carbohydrates can wreak havoc with heart health.
But that doesn't mean red meat has won a total reprieve.
"Meat has got to be a rare experience, and whenever you can eat a plant protein over an animal protein, you're better off," is the advice William Castelli, former director of the Framingham study, gives his patients.
Big Beef, as might be expected, will give you different advice.
Beef is a different food from what it was in the 1960s, the industry maintains. It's a lot leaner. On average, a well-trimmed sirloin steak has 34 percent less fat, 17 percent less saturated fat, than it did 49 years ago.
Beef is not only a good source of iron, zinc and B vitamins, its high-quality protein helps maintain muscle mass and keeps you feeling full between meals. There's industry-sponsored and other research to back up these claims.
There's even a scientifically tested diet plan - Beef in an Optimal Lean Diet, or BOLD - to lower cholesterol levels.
The BOLD diet has become the centerpiece of industry efforts to promote beef as heart healthy food.
And its development, The Kansas City Star found, illustrates just how closely Big Beef is tied to both academic researchers and to the health professionals who advise people on what to eat.
It also suggests just how sophisticated industry strategy has become for gaining beef some leverage in the federal Dietary Guidelines.
Dash Vs. Bold
The BOLD diet is a direct response to another diet plan with a catchy acro-nym, DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), that has become a mainstay of doctors and dietitians who want to lower their patients' blood pressure or cholesterol.
One of DASH's recommendations calls for curbing consumption of red meat.
The Star found that after DASH made its way into the federal Dietary Guidelines in 2005, Big Beef started plotting BOLD.
Doctors and dietitians were pushing people "toward choosing a dietary pattern that looked like DASH," McNeill of the cattlemen's association told members of the industry during a Jan. 19 webinar on BOLD that The Star accessed online.
"Why couldn't we also have, for lack of a better word, a 'beefy' (DASH) diet?" she suggested.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, first published in 1980 and updated every five years by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, may be the nation's most influential food document.
The guidelines are used to determine nutrition standards for school lunch programs, how much assistance is provided through food stamps and what goes on food product labels.
Big Beef set out to make the new guidelines friendlier to the industry.
Planning for BOLD began in 2006 "so that we can be prepared for future dietary guidelines and future advocacy," McNeill explained during the webinar. They're aiming for the next revision of the guidelines in 2015.
The Star found that to get the science it needed to back up a BOLD diet, the cattlemen's association approached Penny Kris-Etherton, a prominent Penn State University nutrition expert who had been on the association's dietary guidelines committee in 2000.
Where the DASH diet skimps on beef, different versions of BOLD average 4 to 5.4 ounces per day.
The researchers found that, compared to a healthy version of a typical American diet, BOLD diets lowered cholesterol just as well as DASH. BOLD diets with the most beef also lowered blood pressure.
Kris-Etherton said that the source of her funding doesn't affect how she conducts her research.
Sub with fish, seafood
The guidelines have always emphasized eating lean meat and limiting consumption of fats, but they were slow to offer advice about specific foods.
It wasn't until the 2010 guidelines that these connections were made more explicit. The guidelines now include advice to substitute some of the meat in your diet with fish and seafood.
As federal food programs have become tied more closely to the Dietary Guidelines, the panels of experts who write the recommendations "seem to be doing more for the public than the industry's bidding," observed Carol Tucker-Foreman, a consumer advocate.
Dependence on industry may lead to biased research, said Lenard Lesser, a researcher at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute.
When Lesser reviewed scientific articles about the health effects of soft drinks, juice and milk, he found that those funded by industry were almost eight times more likely to have favorable conclusions than the reports with no industry funding.
