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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