I’m sure most of us have seen this article (or one from some other news source) declaring which dietary factors influence cancer risk. Here is an overview of the findings from this study (part of the full report):

  • Aflatoxins “convincingly” increase the risk of liver cancer
  • Dietary fiber “probably” reduces the risk of colorectal cancer and “might” reduce the risk of esophageal
  • Numerous fruits and vegetables “probably” or “might” reduce the risk of numerous cancers
  • Chilis “might” increase the risk of stomach cancer
  • Red meat may give you every form of cancer known to man, including lung somehow (perhaps they haven’t controlled properly for smoking?)
  • Fish “might” reduce the risk of colorectal cancer
  • Milk is a mixed bag; it might decrease the risk of colorectal and bladder cancers, but might increase the risk of prostate cancer. Cheese might increase the risk of colorectal
  • Fats and oils “might” increase the risk of lung, breast, and colorectal cancer
  • Sugar and salt “probably” and “might” increase the risk of stomach and colorectal cancer, respectively
  • Alcohol is all kinds of bad

I always question the finding that “red meat is bad” because there are so many uncontrolled variables just within that one food. What kind of red meat? Was it grass-fed/wild or grain-fed? Was it organic or laden with pesticides, antibiotics, and growth hormones? Since grass-fed beef is drastically superior to grain-fed beef in terms of fat composition (and in other ways), we can’t make the assumption that grass-fed beef is detrimental just because a study found that grain-fed beef is. How was the meat cooked? Research has shown that high temperature cooking of muscles meat creates heterocyclic amines, a carcinogen.

Can I buy that too much conventionally-raised beef is hazardous to health? Sure. But is it the beef, the saturated fat, or something else? Here is an article I saw yesterday by Mike Adams, a holistic nutritionist. He raises a point that I had never considered: what if it isn’t the fat, but the toxins and heavy metals stored in the fat of conventionally-raised cows that is the problem? Fat is a storage depot for toxins and since grain-fed animals are a) fattier and b) loaded up with antibiotics and growth-hormones that pass through to humans, it is entirely possible that the fat is benign, while the junk that gets into the fat due to how the beef is raised is malignant. And here’s Steven Milloy taking the study to task. I’d love to see a study that controlled all inputs except the meat source to see if how the meat was raised has an effect on human health.

I don’t think anyone’s mind is blown that processed meats are found to be “bad,” although I do question that they can NEVER be eaten. The main culprit is probably the source of the meat (i.e., grain-fed animals) along with the sodium nitrites, which are also possible carcinogens. Get nitrite free bacon, sausage, and hot dogs if you are going to include them in your diet. But you probably shouldn’t be eating processed meats (even nitrite free) regularly anyway. Also, let’s discuss the “21% increase in colorectal cancer risk from each 1.7oz of processed meat.” That doesn’t mean that 1.7oz gives you a 1 in 5 chance of getting cancer. It means that if the risk of getting cancer is 1%, eating 1.7oz of processed meat per day gives you a 1.21% chance of getting the disease, a 21% increase in RISK. Given that 1 in 100 people don’t get colorectal cancer, the risk is extremely low, but 21% sounds better than “increases the risk to .027%” (or whatever the real number is).

So the bottom line is that there is little in this study that doesn’t follow the typical political correctness of “eat more plants, eat less meat, fat is bad, saturated fat is real bad, red meat is as bad as chugging nitroglycerin, etc.” Oh, and lose weight because that’s apparently bad for your health too. What it comes down to is that this study hasn’t really expanded the body of knowledge that’s already out there other than to convincingly say “Cancer doesn’t just happen. You have a very big hand in it.”


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