WHO: Processed meat linked to cancer; red meat is risky too

[Jonathan Fairfield]

WHO: Processed meat linked to cancer; red meat is risky too

PARIS (AP) — It's official: Ham, sausage and other processed meats can lead to colon, stomach and other cancers — and red meat is probably cancer-causing, too.

While doctors have long warned against eating too much meat, the World Health Organization's cancer agency gave the most definitive response yet Monday about its relation to cancer — and put processed meats in the same danger category as cigarettes or asbestos.

A group of 22 scientists from the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France evaluated more than 800 studies from several continents about meat and cancer.

Based on that evaluation, they classified processed meat as "carcinogenic to humans" and red meat as "probably carcinogenic."

Meat industry groups protest the classification. The North American Meat Institute argued in a statement that "cancer is a complex disease not caused by single foods" and stressed the importance of lifestyle and environmental factors.

Doctors have warned that a diet loaded with red meat is linked to cancers, including those of the colon and pancreas. The American Cancer Society has long urged people to reduce consumption of red meat and processed meat.

The researchers defined processed meat as anything transformed to improve its flavor or preserve it - including salting, curing or smoking.

They noted that red meat contains important nutrients but said it was associated with some cancers in several studies. Their report said grilling, pan-frying or other high-temperature methods of cooking red meat produce the highest amounts of chemicals suspected to cause cancer.

-- (c) Associated Press 2015-10-26

[oncearugge]

A better analysis of this issue can be found in the link

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/10/26/processed-meat-and-cancer-what-you-need-to-know/

Scary Tabloid style headlines and very poor uninformed reporting does not convey fact !

Will I be giving up eating bacon, sausage, pastrami and big juicy steaks ?

He*l NO !

Edited October 26, 2015 by oncearugge

[dcutman]

At this point, are there any foods that are farmed, that don't cause cancer? You could of course stop eating, but not likely to have a positive effect on life expectancy.

[webfact]

IARC confuses consumers and media with report on cancer-causing meats

LONDON: -- The International Agency of Research into Cancer has again shown it doesn’t give a sausage about effectively communicating valuable data to the general public, and it has confused vast swathes of the media in the process.

Its findings that consumption of processed and red meat carry cancer risks were presented at a press conference.

“From the combined analysis of several studies there was about a 17 percent increase of cancers of the colorectum per portion of about 50 grams per day of processed meat. Now that increased risk is about similar for red meat – it’s 1.17 per 100 grams – but again the evidence if it’s really causally related is not as strong yet,” said the IARC Monographs Head of Section Dr. Kurt Straif.

These foods have been lumped together in the same group as tobacco and asbestos, in other words, known to have the potential to cause cancer. That’s very different to being certain to give you the disease.

“Processed meat has been classified as carcinogenic along with other well-known substances, including tobacco smoking, and asbestos, even air pollution, but it’s important to recognize that those classifications relate to the strength of scientific evidence for carcinogenicity and not to the level of risk. So even though they are all on the same category, the level of risks for tobacco smoking is much larger than the risk associated with eating meat, ten times larger than the risk for processed meat, for example,” says Dr. Dana Loomis.

Nowhere do the scientists make any distinction, either, between the scraps squeezed together to make cooked ham or sausages and injected with preserving agents, or farm dry-cured ham which only uses salt, or antibiotic-stuffed factory produced beef with grass-fed smiling Aberdeen Angus. So are you any the wiser following the IARC’s words of wisdom?

Perhaps what your grandmother told you that a little bit of what you fancy never did anyone any harm is more valuable than this report that probably cost the WHO millions to produce. Perhaps not.

Certainly everyone in the developed world eats too much meat of all types and the agricultural systems developed to produce this are unsustainable, and impoverish those who can never afford to eat meat. This argument has been widely proposed elsewhere, however, and we are going somewhat off-subject.

In the end if you want to try and make head or tail of this technobabble this article might be the most useful.

-- (c) Copyright Euronews 2015-10-27

[shirtless]

The WHO , no mention on the Effects of Fukushima , but bacon will kill you get bent WHO

[Thian]

So what's the difference between a hamburger and just minced meat? What makes it so bad and why the burgercompany's don't start selling fresh burgers instead?

[apetley]

Put ham etc in the same category as cigarettes?

I have yet to hear of anyone contracting cancer from somebody else's second hand bacon.

[Mosha]

Ism't this the mob who said getting cancer was all down to bad luck?

[chiang mai]

I'll give up my English sausage sandwich when they take it from my cold dead hands.

[oneday]

Where there you have it; virtually everything a human can consume can now cause cancer.

I think we should all give up, stop eating and just die and get it over with.

[SABloke]

Newsflash: Being alive can cause cancer

[Ace of Pop]

WHOs Load of Nannies.Roger Daltrey should take over ,then it's worth listening too.

[Denim]

I'll give up my English sausage sandwich when they take it from my cold dead hands.

Yep and I'll give up my bacon sarnie when they pry it from my cold dead hams.

[Jip99]

Newsflash: Being alive can cause cancer

I am beginning to wonder whether life is worth living at all.

Oh, just a minute, the sun is shining, there is a gentle breeze blowing, beer is cooling in the fridge, sausages are sizzling on the grill (no frying for me!) and the eggs are poaching nicely.

YES - life is worth living.

Next news report please.

[Kasset Tak]

Everything is dangerous and will kill us if we get to much and to little of it.
If we have a balance of everything then its better, so I don't eat bacon not more than 7 times a week...

[robblok]

I'll give up my English sausage sandwich when they take it from my cold dead hands.

According tot he article that wont be a problem as it causes cancer so you will die soon

Just joking a bit.

Its interesting to see that processed meats are so much worse as non processed ones. I am on a high protein diet but not too much red meats for some reason. (not planned it that way). But it shows me to choose chicken over pork and beef though if you read other links a bit of red meat wont kill you.

[freebyrd]

I was in the fitness business for 30 years in my younger years, I exercised 3 times a day 6 days a week until age 49. Then.....stroke, heart condition, pneumonia, diabetes. A colleague of mine from my army days, top man in charge of physical training, built like a brick sh*thouse, took his dog for a walk a few years back and never came home, he was 52. The point I'm making? When your number is up it's up. My old man's generation used to espouse "everything in moderation" and that's what I've always lived my life by. If we listened to every health warning and followed it up, I doubt we would have time for any sort of life.

Now, those of you that are going to come back tell me that I wouldn't have had health problems if I had checked my BP ever day, cholesterol every week etc etc, please don't bother. When I decided to live the second half of my life in Asia, I already accepted that 10 - 15 years would be cut off the years allotted to me, due to pollution, lack of 'real' medical facilities, wacky races roads and so on (I live in Cambodia by the way) however, I would enjoy the here and now, hoping that I have years and not months in credit. I have no aspirations to live until 90+, I'd seen it, done it and ticked it off by age 50.

Live sensibly, I smoked in my youth but stopped decades ago., I drink very moderately, 1 or 2 beers a month, but living life eating carrots and broccoli every day isn't for me at all.

All that said, one man's meat is another man's poison. Ulimately it's down to individual choice as to how we live our lives.

[smedly]

So what's the difference between a hamburger and just minced meat? What makes it so bad and why the burgercompany's don't start selling fresh burgers instead?

its all about greed and money, the stuff that goes into mass produced burgers sausages ham bacon etc has to be shaped coloured flavoured texturised to make it taste remotely like what you think it is, the businesses that produce this stuff spend a lot of time creating something that you feel is generally consumable, by the time you add the cheese tomato mayo onion you might actually like it

[kiwikeith]

nitrylocides , main culprit used in curing ham and bacon and in sausages, well known go to LEF.ORG and have a read.

My father used to cure Bacon commercially using none of this crap.

But going back to the old ways instead of corporate wealth is not possible.

Eat in moderation and make you own sausages or rissoles from mince.

Monsantos GM corn now modified to include insectiside believed to be causing stomach cancer.

Monsantos share price tumbles because of Round Up residue now known to be harmfull (cancer causing) found in most foods, ect ect ect.

It is well known by research institutes that asians who move to western countries and adopt their diet have hugely increased cancer rates.

The cancer rates on asian diets is greatly less than on western diets.

Scoff the sausages bacon and eggs at your own peril.

[2unique]

Take away my bacon and I will kill you!!!

[attrayant]

What's worth noting is that the evidence comes from observational studies, which of course do not prove cause and effect. Observational data is not produced from controlled experiments and thus may be subject to many confounding factors, but the data is still useful and it has the potential to detect any clear signals.

To quote Joe Schwarcz, McGill University Office for Science and Society:

Populations that consume lots of meat and processed meats have higher cancer rates, particularly colorectal cancer, even when corrections are made for smoking and activity levels. Furthermore there are theoretical and experimental foundations for declaring some components like polycyclic aromatics, heterocyclic amines, nitrites, Iinsulin-like growth factor found in meat carcinogenic.

The evidence against consuming red and processed meat is certainly not ironclad, but science rarely is. It comes down to making educated guesses and evaluating the downside of such guesses. There is no significant downside to limiting red eat and processed meat to 500 grams a week.

Of course you have to replace meat with the right foods - vegetables, chicken, fish, nuts, olive oil. What we are talking about is the Mediterranean diet. More and more studies are concluding that this is the way to go. Basically, I don't see a problem with the 500 gramm recommendation, especially if it results in people eating more vegetables.

What's especially interesting are the paranoid chemiphobes who screamed "SEE, I TOLD YOU SO" after IARC's classification of Glyphosate to group 2A, who now say the classification of processed meats to group 1 doesn't make any sense at all. Other class 1 carcinogens include: Alcoholic beverages, sunlight, cigarette smoke, smog (which is, to some degree, everywhere, so basically the air itself is a class 1 carcinogen), working as a hairdresser, leather dust, Chinese-style salted fish and sawdust.

[FangFerang]

Amazing bit of politics that asbestos and cigarettes are only "suspected to cause cancer'.

Two very big industries that weigh in every time a science report threatens their income.

I would rather go vegetarian than give up tasty bacon and sausages.

And I am NOT going vegetarian. (I'm against organized religions.)

[chiang mai]

The doctors said he deserved what happened to him after all he engaged in risky behavior, he ate bacon! This stuff is just too hard to imagine so I wont even try.

[NanLaew]

That's the straw that broke this camel's back.... I just splurged 10k baht on a passionbox delivery.

[trogers]

There goes my diet on Northern and Esarn saugages...

[ronz28]

Red and processed meat do cause cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. so just eat delicious fruit and vegetables and live longer.

[JDGRUEN]

This WHO report is nothing but politically laced junk science. If eating meat ... even salt or sugar cured bacon and hams and such were so bad for humans to eat -- the human race would have died out thousands of years ago. Cured meat and such methods as pickling were developed in ancient times as preservatives in absence of modern methods of such things as refrigeration. Billions of people over thousands of years have eaten cured meat and the world has gone from a few million to Billions -- So I say Politically Inspired Crap Information...

[mcfish]

I lost 30kg on the Atkins diet, all meat. If I had of stayed at that weight I probably would have died of a heart attack or got diabetes so I will take my chances with cancer.

This info will hit the atkins foundation hard

Sent from my SC-01D using Tapatalk

[abitmiffed]

You have more chance of getting squashed by a cement truck in this country than getting cancer from a bacon butty.

We're all headed for the shitheap anyway so bring on the HP sauce I say.

[Rancid]

Where there you have it; virtually everything a human can consume can now cause cancer.

I think we should all give up, stop eating and just die and get it over with.

No, more so foods that big agriculture modifies or poisons in one way or another. Paleo diets include meat but not modified or full of glycophosphate & hormones etc.

Always comes down to getting the source as natural as possible, be it veges or meat.