Another take on the "meat is dangerous" study TL;DR: it's not
Sabine_Stroehm
Posts: 19,263 Member
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The link you posted takes me to a cite to buy a subscription to Financial Times.0
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Ah heck.BlancheandSmooshyface wrote: »The link you posted takes me to a cite to buy a subscription to Financial Times.
Ok, here's a messy cut and paste:
Opinion Health sector
A false alarm on red meat and cancer
Two large trials have tested for evidence and the WHO ignored both of them, writes Gordon Guyatt
Gordon Guyatt NOVEMBER 24, 2015
This month the World Health Organisation announced that eating red meat is an activity fraught with risk, and shoppers in the UK at least are taking no chances. Three weeks after the WHO announced that processed meats are on par with cigarettes as a “convincing” cause of cancer, British sales of packaged sausages were down by about 16 per cent. But the WHO overstates its case, in a way that could even create risks of its own.
There are three ways to tell whether a substance causes cancer. The first, which cannot be relied on alone, is to see whether there is a plausible biochemical mechanism leading from exposure to malignancy. Here, the WHO thought the evidence was moderate to strong. The second kind of evidence, animal testing, gave no grounds for concern. Feeding animals a diet rich in red meat does not give them cancer.
So the WHO leaned heavily on the third source: epidemiological data. Its great success was in linking smoking to cancer. In that case, smokers faced a risk of contracting lung cancer between nine and 25 times greater than did non-smokers. Unless relative risks are greater than five, epidemiological studies typically provide only low-quality evidence. The decision on meat was based on relative risks of just 1.17 to 1.18. Look at the population as a whole, and the lifetime risk of contracting colon cancer is less than 4.5 per cent. A relative risk of 1.17 raises that only to 5.3 per cent.
https://www.ft.com/content/42259e20-92b5-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af 1/3
6/26/2019 A false alarm on red meat and cancer | Financial Times
The implications could be huge - the US government might eliminate processed meat from public institutions
Overstating scientific confidence in a causal connection between red meat and cancer has done the public a disservice. Recent decades are littered with policies based on weak relative risks which, when tested in clinical trials, had to be reversed.
Weak associations are untrustworthy because they could well be due to bias associated with any number of factors in diet or lifestyle. For example, advice to take antioxidant vitamins A and E was based on
epidemiological data with modest reductions in relative risks of cancer in those who took the vitamins. Yet randomised controlled trials showed no benefit for cancer reduction, demonstrating that there was no causal connection. People who take them do have lower rates of cancer, but it has nothing to do with the vitamins: factors related to genetics, lifestyle and socio-economic status may be responsible. The same goes for meat. Vegetarians tend to be richer people who smoke less and exercise more. Randomised trials provide the most reliable information on causal connections. Two large trials have studied the connection between red meat and cancer — and the WHO ignored both of them. Between them, these studies tested a diet low in fat and high in fruit and vegetables, with reduced red meat consumption, on more than 50,000 people.
In the first, researchers found no effect on the recurrence of colorectal cancer; at the end of the second there was no effect on any of type of cancer. Maybe these trials did not last long enough. But they are the best data we currently have.
The consequences of the WHO decision may be vast. The US government might decide to eliminate processed meat from federally funded programmes and public institutions. Meat products may have to carry cancer warning labels. Scientists may be less willing to conduct clinical trials on the health effects of a substance that has been declared to be a carcinogen — preventing them from gathering more convincing evidence on the effects of processed meat on health. People may be deterred from eating red meat, which is a good source of nutrition — a trade-off that might not be worthwhile, even for the cautious. This is a dismal state of affairs for science and for public health policy. The WHO has erred. It should silence the alarm.
The writer is a professor at McMaster university
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019. All rights reserved.
https://www.ft.com/content/42259e20-92b5-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af
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6/26/2019 A false alarm on red meat and cancer | Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/content/42259e20-92b5-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af
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Some of the processed 'meat products' that are marketed out there that are favorites of US public institutions are a pretty scary mix of chemicals and sugars in with meat.... how they can correlate those products with plain red meat floors me!4
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It drives me crazy that they conflate meat with processed meat.canadjineh wrote: »Some of the processed 'meat products' that are marketed out there that are favorites of US public institutions are a pretty scary mix of chemicals and sugars in with meat.... how they can correlate those products with plain red meat floors me!
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Sabine_Stroehm wrote: »
It drives me crazy that they conflate meat with processed meat.canadjineh wrote: »Some of the processed 'meat products' that are marketed out there that are favorites of US public institutions are a pretty scary mix of chemicals and sugars in with meat.... how they can correlate those products with plain red meat floors me!
The PC police have been going after red meat (in any form) for years and will never forgo an opportunity to slam any form of red meat... I have been waiting for them to come after chicken as well, but they seem to be holding off on that.1
