If you a reading this article over lunch, you may want to put down that hamburger you are eating.  A new study out today in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine says that eating red meat may increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

A team of researchers examined data from three long-term studies.  They included more than 26,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study; over 48,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study; and 74,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study II.  The participants in the studies reported on their eating habits, including their red meat consumption, every four years over an average of 20 years.  During that time, approximately 7540 people developed Type 2 diabetes.

Participants who increased their intake of red meat over the course of the study also increased their risk for diabetes.  Adding a half a serving of red meat per day increased a participant’s risk for diabetes by 48 percent.  In comparison, people who decreased their consumption of red meat by half a serving per day were, over time, able to lower their risk for type 2 diabetes by 14 percent.

A single serving of meat was defined as three ounces of beef, lamb, pork, or hamburger—that’s about the size of a deck of cards according to Medscape Medical News.  A single serving of processed red meat consisted of 3 slices of deli meat, one hot dog, one sausage, or two slices of bacon.

In an email to Bloomberg news, lead researcher An Pan suggested substituting red meat with other foods.  “If possible, try to reduce red meat and replace with other healthy choices like beans and legumes, nuts, fish, poultry, whole grains, etc.,” Pan is an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore.

In a commentary accompanying the journal article, William Evans say it is not the color of the meat which puts consumer at risk, but the fat content.  Evans is head of the Muscle Metabolism Discovery Performance Unit at GlaxoSmithKline and adjunct professor of geriatrics at Duke University.  He told MedPage Today “The color of the meat really has little to do with the risk that’s imposed,” he told MedPage Today. “We should be far more concerned about the total fat, and saturated fat in particular, that’s in the foods.”

Diabetes is an international health problem effecting almost 350 million people around the globe.  In the United States, more than 25 million people have the disease.