A new National Cancer Institute study claims that prolonged high consumption of red and processed meats may double our intestinal cancer risks. The journal Nature headlined the study: “Red meat is strongly linked to cancer: Diet experts urge move to poultry, fish and beans . . .”
Strongly linked? The NCI’s researchers themselves admit that when they used their full set of data, there was no linkage at all between red meat and intestinal cancer.
Argentina’s red meat consumption is far higher than America’s. Last year, a similar Argentinean survey of the diets of colorectal cancer victims and control cases found no relationship with consumption of meat—red or white. The only correlation found was a very weak one between colorectal cancer and eating lots of cold cuts, sausages, and other high-fat meats.
Humans evolved eating red meat. In prehistoric hunting societies, the proportion of red meat in the diet was often double what we eat today. There weren’t any fields of rice or wheat back then. Calories came from what you could kill, dig, or pick from branches.
The Plains Indians’ diets were based on the bison, and red meat dependence was found in most other hunting societies. If red meat were a deadly food for humans, we’d have made the connection long before this.
Red meat contains a full set of the amino acids that are the building blocks of protein and muscle. It’s a key source of important minerals (iron, zinc, magnesium and manganese) and the B-class vitamins. The dietary benefits of eating meat are based on strong, rigorous experimental data. The negative effects sometimes attributed to animal products are, and have long been, based on weak statistical inferences.
Ditto for the latest NCI study. The database included 148,610 adults over the age of 50 who provided information on meat consumption in 1982, and again in 1992/3. Through Aug. 31, 2001, they’d developed 1,667 colorectal cancers. That’s a colon cancer risk rate of 1.12 percent.
We wouldn’t want to double that. But the study’s own published data tell us that the “link” to red meat disappears when the data from both the 1982 and 1992/3 surveys are included.
The data for the study was collected by 77,000 untrained volunteers who interviewed their family and friends. We don’t have any real information on how much the study subjects smoked, drank, or exercised; nor about their very important family cancer histories.
Why is the National Cancer Institute even releasing such shaky stuff? Is it afraid that unless it keeps scaring the public about new cancer risks, the public will forget to top up its budget? Have the scientists learned from Greenpeace that a scare a day keeps budget-cutters at bay?
Why is the once-respected journal Nature publishing such “research” with unwarranted “fright” words in the headlines? Are they trying to scare up more subscription sales?
I have a modest proposal. If government-sponsored research institutions use public money to churn out ill-conceived and sloppily-executed headline hunts, the money should be returned to the public coffers. Let say, for starters, a 25 percent refund on each project misrepresented as an addition to the public fear pool. This might encourage a return to honest reporting by both the press and the institutions.
