 The National Catalan's beef association was not happy about the findings of the EPIC study. One of the largest studies on human nutrition ever performed, which is to be seen, recently found that those who eat any kind of meat go on to gain significantly more weight than those who eat less, even eating the same number of calories. One of the beef association's speakers wrote to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, complaining that meat intakes influence on body fatness cannot be assessed without measurement of body fat. Maybe the catalan argued the pounds that the meat eaters packed on was muscle mass, not fat, maybe they were becoming beefier, not fatter. Fine, the researcher answered, we'll not just measure obesity, but abdominal obesity, the worst kind. So they took a small sample out of the study, a sample of, oh, 91,000 people, and found the exact same thing, even eating the same number of calories. The more meat we eat, the more our belly grows. And they even calculated how much our waistline could be predicted to expand based on our daily meat consumption, so one can kind of plan ahead for the new pants one might need to buy. Though nothing comes close to the EPIC study and scale, other recent studies have found the same thing. In Spain, nut and vegetable consumption was recently associated with having a slimmer waist and meat and meat product consumption with a wider one. Another new study, this went out of Belgium. It concluded that animal protein intake was associated with bigger body mass index and waistline, whereas plant protein intake was associated with a smaller BMI and slimmer waist, indicating that the intakes of plant protein could offer a potential protective effect against overweight and obesity.