Meat and Cancer: Let's Not Go Overboard

This morning as I was doing my news-browsing rounds, I came across the big news that the WHO has officially declared red and processed meats as carcinogenic [1]. In my case the news was conveyed by the image and associated article on the left, as found on the home page of The Guardian. My first reaction was one of anger and skepticism. How on earth could meat rank with smoking as a cause of cancer? What eggheads came up with this idea? My second reaction was to cool my jets and to investigate a little. After all, the WHO is a pretty respectable organization, and if bacon causes cancer, my being angry about it will have zero bearing on reality. We use science to try to ferret out truths about the universe, after all, not just tell us what we want to hear.

The Guardian article went basically like this: WHO says meat causes cancer, the meat industry is furious, but industry scientists are just in denial. Well, no industry likes its products being called out as harmful (see: tobacco, fossil fuels, etc), so yeah, we wouldn't expect the meat industry to like this. (Disclosure: I am not a meat industry scientist, but my job is impacted by the meat industry.) However...

I later clicked through to the science section where I found this much more responsible article.

It begins:

Vegetarians are probably breathing a sigh of relief today as headlines are warning us that processed and cured meats cause cancer. But the way this message has been framed in the media is extremely misleading.

Comparing meat to tobacco, as most news organisations who’ve chosen to report this have done, makes it seem like a bacon sandwich might be just as harmful as a cigarette. This is absolutely not the case.

Gee, what news organization was misleading?

The article goes on to explain that processed meat is in the same class as tobacco in terms of certainty of cancer causation, NOT risk of cancer. Understanding the difference is important for judging how concerned to be about this. The article includes this handy graphic.

It's important not to go overboard with this. For example, my wife's doctor has her on a low-carb diet, which means that red meat and processed meats make up a larger part of her diet. Freaking out about their cancer potential would be counter-productive because without them she is at much greater risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Presumably governments will issue consumption guidelines sometime in the future, and perhaps methods of meat preparation and cooking will be developed that minimize cancer risk. It seems that the bottom line for now is simply to eat red and processed meats moderately. You can have bacon; just don't go crazy with it.

For more information, see WHO's FAQ.

Notes:
1. According to WHO, "Red meat refers to all mammalian muscle meat, including, beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton,
horse, and goat....Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation."

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The Church's New Institute Manual Makes the Divine Sonship of Jesus a Scientific Issue

The Church is introducing new 'cornerstone' religion courses for Church universities and Institutes of Religion. One of these courses is titled, Jesus Christ and the Everlasting Gospel, with a manual of the same name. The seventh lesson of the manual is titled, Jesus Christ—God’s Only Begotten Son in the Flesh. After laying some scriptural groundwork, students are encouraged to think of physical traits they inherited from their mother and father. They are then taught to think of Jesus, Mary, and God the Father in the same manner, with support from this passage in Jesus the Christ, written by Elder James E. Talmage.

That Child to be born of Mary was begotten of Elohim, the Eternal Father, not in violation of natural law but in accordance with a higher manifestation thereof; … In His nature would be combined the powers of Godhood with the capacity and possibilities of mortality; and this through the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity, declared of God, demonstrated by science, and admitted by philosophy, that living beings shall propagate—after their kind. The Child Jesus was to inherit the physical, mental, and spiritual traits, tendencies, and powers that characterized His parents—one immortal and glorified—God, the other human—woman” (Jesus the Christ, 3rd ed. [1916], 81).

Terryl Givens has written that,

LDS biblical interpretation has tended more toward fundamentalist literalism than historically nuanced or figurative readings. This is largely a product of Mormonism’s origins in a time when Common Sense theology was dominant....Parley Pratt set the tone for Mormon scriptural exegesis with recurrent attacks on those who would “spiritualize” the Bible, rather than read in the plain, literal sense [1].

Reinforcing this literalism was the attempt of Parley and Orson Pratt, as well as John Widtsoe and James Talmage, to fit Joseph Smith's teachings into a theology "amenable to contemporary standards of scientific understanding [2]." Indeed, elsewhere in Jesus the Christ Elder Talmage explained that miracles are simply higher manifestations of natural law, not violations of it.

When Elder Talmage wrote his book a century ago, heredity was an observed phenomenon about which almost nothing was known. The passage above was a sensible thing for Elder Talmage to write for readers of the time, and its inclusion in the new manual speaks to its persuasive power today--when most people still only have a vague sense of the basis for heredity [3]. However, today the mechanism of heredity is well understood. So if we are to let science into the conversation, as Elder Talmage invites us to, then we need to talk about biological and genetic principles and details. Are these topics that can profitably be brought to bear on Jesus' divine sonship? It may seem vulgar to speak of such things in the context of the atonement, but that is the door the writers of the manual open by highlighting Elder Talmage's optimistic appeal to science and philosophy.

Using the lens of science a variety of questions could be raised. Instead, for now let's confine ourselves to this question: What possible relevance could genetics ("the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity") have to the resurrection or any other of Jesus' abilities? The manual directs as follows (bolding in original):

As students respond, make sure they understand the following truth: As the Only Begotten Son of God in the flesh, Jesus Christ was able to perform the Atoning sacrifice, which required Him to endure more than a mortal person could, and thereby fulfill His role in the Father’s plan. In addition, because Jesus had power over death, He had the capacity to rise from the dead. Make sure students understand that if Jesus Christ had been born of two mortal parents, He could not have overcome death or endured the infinite pain and suffering of the Atonement. If He were born of two immortal parents, He would not have been subject to physical suffering and death.

On what basis should such assertions be made? Several scriptural prophets including Enoch, Moses, Elijah, John, and the three Nephites were each given a kind of "power over death" (D&C 7:2), without heredity playing any role. Lazarus was raised from the dead. Any number of miraculous interventions could have been used to prevent Jesus from dying before his mission was accomplished. Further, it is unclear what inherited property could cause a dead body to rise back to life, and since all people are promised the resurrection (Spencer W. Kimball, echoing Brigham Young, taught that it is an ordinance), I don't see why we would even need to posit one.

Remember that in a gospel context death is the separation of body and spirit, with resurrection being the reuniting of the two. Are we to believe that a physical property of Jesus' decaying body made it possible for his spirit to re-enter it? If the decision to initiate resurrection was made by his spirit, how can inheritance be relevant? You would think that the mere fact that Jesus was "God himself"--the premortal Jehovah, would be a sufficient explanation. (And simply as a matter of internal consistency, if, according to Church teachings, it was possible for Adam and Eve to change from immortality to mortality, why wouldn't it be possible for Jesus to do the same if both parents were immortal?)

The atonement and resurrection are incomprehensible, and fundamentally remain mysteries to us. Is anything gained in multiplying the mystery by asserting the necessity of unknown inherited factors? Is such detail clearly supported by the scriptures? And might we unwittingly put stumbling blocks in the paths of students by invoking the authority of science where it probably doesn't belong?

Let's be careful about claiming science in support of doctrine. Especially those doctrines we know very little about.


Notes:
1. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, p. 18.
2. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, p. 126.
3. I think most people know that heredity involves genes and DNA, but don't really know much more than that. I once had a conversation with a highly intelligent and educated friend in which he told me that he did not understand the difference between a gene and the genome. Based on his career path, there was no particular reason why he should have.

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