>I only buy meat and vegetables from whole foods, does it shield me from the ill effects of meat.

For processed meat at least the current WHO consensus seems to be that no level of it is safe. It's literally classified as a carcinogenic same as smoking.

Focus on where the meat comes from, the condition the animals were raised in (if you can find anything about that), and whether the animals were given various hormones, antibiotics, et al.

Fortunately it's now easy to buy meat at grocery stores in the US without antibiotics. Every major grocery store chain carries selections of antibiotic-free meat. Just ten years ago that wasn't the case. Typically you can read the packaging and it'll tell you that it wasn't raised with antibiotics, if that's the case (and if it doesn't say that, the odds are that it was raised with antibiotics; the antibiotic-free meat packaging tends to trumpet that as a selling point).

That still leaves the question of whether meat of any kind is healthy. The jury still seems out on that one.