Bacon & Processed Meats Cause Cancer?

[surfpup]

According to stories we all died of cancer many years ago....

 

 

Eating Vegetables Causes Cancer

 

Eating Bread Causes Cancer

 

Drinking Water Causes Cancer

 

Breathing Air Causes Cancer

 

Cell Phones Cause Cancer

 

And notice each article has something in common (except the cell phone one - which is slightly different). It's patently not the water, the vegetables, the bread, or the air - but rather the chemical additives in them in the modern world that are carcinogenic. All of which are avoidable if we want to put forth the effort to do so.

 

Will avoiding carcinogens guarantee a longer life? Of course not! You could get hit by a truck tomorrow. That's why some people become fatalists. Well, I'm gonna die anyway so I might as well smoke and drink and feast on bacon. It's all personal choice.

 

And personally I try to eat food that is actually food - the less processed and the more pronounceable the better.

[surfpup]

Bingo.

 

Look at Keef.

 

Have you looked at Keef lately?

[jdgm]

Bah....and furthermore.....humbug.

 

You'd have to really stuff yourself with it all day every day, to get cancer from bacon. And all the additives and preservatives would probably poison you first.

 

Almost everything causes cancer these days - it's modern life.

2 out of 3 people are going to get some sort of cancer at some point.

Last week I read that rhubarb and beetroot are 'superfoods' that 'could save your life'. BS. They've been eaten for millennia and too much of anything will harm you.

 

100 years ago for most people life was hard then they died.

Now for (most) people life is easier but the world and society is much more complex and most of us (should) live a lot longer.

So there are many more complex ways to get sick and/or die.

 

One general rule of life on planet Earth; species become extinct.

[Searcy]

If you remove all chemicals from your diet you'll be dead in a few days. A week if you're fat and healthy.

[jdgm]

Have you looked at Keef lately?

 

 

[lol]

[Mr. C.O. Jones]

Those studies are useless BS!

 

I agree with almost everything said before.

 

There is something that really does harm your health and that is STUPIDITY.

 

Nutrition has to be well balanced like most things in life.

 

@Stein like I said I get what you are saying, and I agree almost totally.

 

Only one thing has to be said, I am a vegetarian and have the same or probably even more strenght now than when I eat meat and fish.

Muscles get weak when you don't eat proteins!

It really doesn't matter what source they come from.

[Murph]

Have you looked at Keef lately?

 

Well preserved.... But still breathing......

 

Anyhow the W.H.O. is a bunch of power hungry Commies trying to tell free people what to do. It's World Series time.

 

Eat some Nathans hot dogs.

[Digger]

I stopped listening to the medical scientists the day that they decreed that BBQ was bad for your health!

 

Bloody heresy!

[LarryUK]

My marriage broke up because of processed meat. I insisted that she had a sausage every day........and here I am single now.

[rct]

Rock Hudson succumbed to bad meat in the can.

 

rct

[quapman]

I am a vegetarian and have the same or probably even more strenght now than when I eat meat and fish.

Muscles get weak when you don't eat proteins!

It really doesn't matter what source they come from.

 

 

Yep, that's true.

 

I have a life long friend who turned on us in his late teens and quit eating meat.

I thought then, oh ya, nice little phase coming up, he'll be back.

Well it's over 30 years later and he is still vegetarian.

Lives in the mountains is healthy as a horse and can hike and ski all day long

and never really gets sick.

I'm a believer,, however I doubt I will ever be a convert.

Animal protein is so damn yummy.

[BobF_]

http://www.abc.net.a...-agency/6886882

 

Lies perpetuated by the poultry industry ... move along, pass the bacon and brats ...

[Digger]

Rock Hudson succumbed to bad meat in the can.

 

rct

Where are the 'likes" when you need them?

[rct]

Rock Hudson succumbed to bad meat in the can.

 

rct

Where are the 'likes" when you need them?

 

I thought I would get yelled at.

 

rct

[deeman]

This sounds like a case of causation vs. correlation. This study looked at like 800 studies. Who knows what was being looked at in these studies or what the controls were.

People who eat a ton of meat are probably more unhealthy in general. Obese, smokers, drinkers, poor diet, no exercise and comorbidities like diabetes etc.

 

So there is a correlation that people who eat a lot of meat have a higher cancer instance but I don't think we can say that the meat is the cause of the cancer.

[stein]

Rock Hudson succumbed to bad meat in the can.

 

rct

 

 

Where are the 'likes" when you need them?

You mean "not-like", don't you?

[jaxson50]

1445974804[/url]' post='1706301']

Rock Hudson succumbed to bad meat in the can.

 

rct

 

 

 

[IanHenry]

Well, not all processed meat products are the same. When I was at school I had a Saturday job working in a local butchers shop, where they made their own bacon and sausages etc.

The bacon was made by laying a pork loin in salt and turned several times a day for about 2 weeks. The end result had a brownish colour to it and tasted glorious, however I think the appearance would have put most modern shoppers off.

The Sausages were made using fresh ground meat and natural flavourings.

 

Contrast this with the majority of meat products found on supermarket shelves and they are poles apart. Bacon is produced by injecting chemicals including flavourings and preservatives into the meat, all done at high speed on an industrial scale.

Most sausages are made from very poor quality, often mechanically recovered meat and the cheapest examples are nothing more than paste, and I doubt most people would consider eating them if they saw what had gone into them.

 

I only eat sausages etc made by people that I know and I know what goes into them.

Do those products fall under the World Health Organisation's categorisation? The information that they have released isn't al that helpfull.

 

How long will it be before the same revelations are about Bread? Most loves of bread bought from supermarkets are full of preservatives hence the reason it last so long. I make my own bread and it's only good for two days, after that it's only fit for toast.

 

Healthy good quality foods are available, but you're going to have to seek it out and pay a lot more from it. Simply, if it's made on an industrial scale by people who's only interest is profit, avoid it.

 

 

Ian

[Digger]

You mean "not-like", don't you?

No, like as I thought the post was clever.

[Notes_Norton]

I haven't read all the posts, so forgive me if I'm repeating.

 

The A4M (American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine) is a huge group of doctors with one thing in mind, extending the human healthy life span. What the press did is take something that is in the same group as sunlight and alcohol.

 

Here is their take:

 

Perhaps no two words together are more likely to set the internet aflame than BACON and CANCER. So when the World Health Organization classified processed meat as a group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco—

 

Hold on. Let me stop right here. Eating bacon is not as bad as smoking when it comes to cancer. Just no.

 

The way WHO classifies cancer-causing substances, on the other hand? Maybe a little dangerous to your mental health. Because it is really confusing.

 

Here’s the deal: The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer weighs the strength of the scientific evidence that some food, drink, pesticide, smokable plant, whatever is a carcinogen. What it does not do is consider how much that substance actually increases your risk for actually getting cancer—even if it differs by magnitudes of 100.

 

The scientific evidence linking both processed meat and tobacco to certain types of cancer is strong. In that sense, both are carcinogens. But smoking increases your relative risk of lung cancer by 2,500 percent; eating two slices of bacon a day increases your relative risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Given the frequency of colorectal cancer, that means your risk of getting colorectal cancer over your life goes from about 5 percent to 6 percent and, well, YBMMV. (Your bacon mileage may vary.) “If this is the level of risk you’re running your life on, then you don’t really have much to worry about,” says Alfred Neugut, an oncologist and cancer epidemiologist at Columbia.

 

The link, though tiny, may start with an iron-based chemical called heme, found in red meat. Heme breaks down into carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds in the digestive tract. Partially on this basis, the IARC also classified unprocessed red a “probable carcinogen.” But processed meat takes it a step further: The nitrates and nitrates used to cure meat—which is to say, preserve it—also turn into N-nitroso compounds. Grilling, frying, or otherwise cooking the meat at high-temperatures may create yet other cancer-causing compounds.

 

So it makes sense that cutting down on bacon, hot dogs, salami, and ham reduce cancer risk a little. But it’s hardly the big deal that quitting tobacco would be. Connecting the two, as The Guardian does in its headline, “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes—WHO,” misrepresents the IARC’s conclusions.

 

The IARC is an organization of scientists, not policy makers. It publishes monographs to identify hazards and sift them into five piles: group 1 (carcinogenic), group 2A (probably carcinogenic), group 2B (possibly carcinogenic), group 3 (not classifiable), and group 4 (probably not carcinogenic.) Group 1 includes processed meat, and also asbestos. Also alcohol (boo!) and sunlight (yup!). Identifying hazards involves looking at existing data—lots and lots of it—to do essentially a meta-analysis of studies already out there. And it’s relatively objective. “Hazard identification is the process that is the closest to the generation of scientific data,” say Paolo Boffetta, a cancer epidemiologist at Mount Sinai who has served on similar WHO panels. In other words, IARC studies the studies and generates numbers.

 

What the IARC doesn’t do—and where things get a lot fuzzier—is risk assessment, or figuring out the danger to humans in the real world. Risk assessment involves looking at different scenarios, finding out real-world exposure levels, and weighing possible benefits. (Useful drugs like Tamoxifen—used to treat breast cancer—are also carcinogens, for example.) Those factors can vary from person to person, country to country. “The issue of whether the monograph program should be amended to also include risk assessment has been raised several times, and each time,” says Boffetta, “the conclusion was it should not. It should let national regulatory agencies do the research.” And after 50 years of doing things one way, it’s not like the IARC can just change its mind.

 

In a way, the IARC’s commitment to, as Boffetta calls it, “an independent list that was not subject to additional pressures,” makes a kind of sense. But science doesn’t happen in a vacuum—just look at the wave of traffic that crashed the IARC’s website after the meat announcement. The agency can maintain that it’s a dispassionate resource for policymakers, but the public is knocking at its door.

 

In recent years, says Boffetta, the agency has gotten a lot of attention each time it classified something, and those actions often get “overinterpreted.” “X causes cancer” does not mean that X will definitely give you cancer; it just means that X increases your risk of cancer by some amount, and it can vary wildly from a tiny tiny percentage to 25 fold. Does bacon cause cancer? Sure. A little. Will bacon cause cancer in you? Probably not.

 

Me, I am an omnivore, I eat meat, fruit and veggies, and that includes occasional bacon and pepperoni.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[Searcy]

I haven't read all the posts, so forgive me if I'm repeating.

 

The A4M (American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine) is a huge group of doctors with one thing in mind, extending the human healthy life span. What the press did is take something that is in the same group as sunlight and alcohol.

 

Here is their take:

 

Perhaps no two words together are more likely to set the internet aflame than BACON and CANCER. So when the World Health Organization classified processed meat as a group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco—

 

Hold on. Let me stop right here. Eating bacon is not as bad as smoking when it comes to cancer. Just no.

 

The way WHO classifies cancer-causing substances, on the other hand? Maybe a little dangerous to your mental health. Because it is really confusing.

 

Here’s the deal: The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer weighs the strength of the scientific evidence that some food, drink, pesticide, smokable plant, whatever is a carcinogen. What it does not do is consider how much that substance actually increases your risk for actually getting cancer—even if it differs by magnitudes of 100.

 

The scientific evidence linking both processed meat and tobacco to certain types of cancer is strong. In that sense, both are carcinogens. But smoking increases your relative risk of lung cancer by 2,500 percent; eating two slices of bacon a day increases your relative risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Given the frequency of colorectal cancer, that means your risk of getting colorectal cancer over your life goes from about 5 percent to 6 percent and, well, YBMMV. (Your bacon mileage may vary.) “If this is the level of risk you’re running your life on, then you don’t really have much to worry about,” says Alfred Neugut, an oncologist and cancer epidemiologist at Columbia.

 

The link, though tiny, may start with an iron-based chemical called heme, found in red meat. Heme breaks down into carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds in the digestive tract. Partially on this basis, the IARC also classified unprocessed red a “probable carcinogen.” But processed meat takes it a step further: The nitrates and nitrates used to cure meat—which is to say, preserve it—also turn into N-nitroso compounds. Grilling, frying, or otherwise cooking the meat at high-temperatures may create yet other cancer-causing compounds.

 

So it makes sense that cutting down on bacon, hot dogs, salami, and ham reduce cancer risk a little. But it’s hardly the big deal that quitting tobacco would be. Connecting the two, as The Guardian does in its headline, “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes—WHO,” misrepresents the IARC’s conclusions.

 

The IARC is an organization of scientists, not policy makers. It publishes monographs to identify hazards and sift them into five piles: group 1 (carcinogenic), group 2A (probably carcinogenic), group 2B (possibly carcinogenic), group 3 (not classifiable), and group 4 (probably not carcinogenic.) Group 1 includes processed meat, and also asbestos. Also alcohol (boo!) and sunlight (yup!). Identifying hazards involves looking at existing data—lots and lots of it—to do essentially a meta-analysis of studies already out there. And it’s relatively objective. “Hazard identification is the process that is the closest to the generation of scientific data,” say Paolo Boffetta, a cancer epidemiologist at Mount Sinai who has served on similar WHO panels. In other words, IARC studies the studies and generates numbers.

 

What the IARC doesn’t do—and where things get a lot fuzzier—is risk assessment, or figuring out the danger to humans in the real world. Risk assessment involves looking at different scenarios, finding out real-world exposure levels, and weighing possible benefits. (Useful drugs like Tamoxifen—used to treat breast cancer—are also carcinogens, for example.) Those factors can vary from person to person, country to country. “The issue of whether the monograph program should be amended to also include risk assessment has been raised several times, and each time,” says Boffetta, “the conclusion was it should not. It should let national regulatory agencies do the research.” And after 50 years of doing things one way, it’s not like the IARC can just change its mind.

 

In a way, the IARC’s commitment to, as Boffetta calls it, “an independent list that was not subject to additional pressures,” makes a kind of sense. But science doesn’t happen in a vacuum—just look at the wave of traffic that crashed the IARC’s website after the meat announcement. The agency can maintain that it’s a dispassionate resource for policymakers, but the public is knocking at its door.

 

In recent years, says Boffetta, the agency has gotten a lot of attention each time it classified something, and those actions often get “overinterpreted.” “X causes cancer” does not mean that X will definitely give you cancer; it just means that X increases your risk of cancer by some amount, and it can vary wildly from a tiny tiny percentage to 25 fold. Does bacon cause cancer? Sure. A little. Will bacon cause cancer in you? Probably not.

 

Me, I am an omnivore, I eat meat, fruit and veggies, and that includes occasional bacon and pepperoni.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

 

Yea, Reason had a quick replay to they whole stupidity too.

 

 

 

 

Is Bacon Really Bad for Your Health?

 

 

A new World Health Organization (WHO) study has purportedly found that "processed meat ranks alongside smoking as a major cause of cancer."

 

According to the WHO report, "each 50g of processed meat a day—the equivalent of one sausage, or less than two slices of bacon—increases the chance of developing bowel cancer by 18 percent. Global health experts listed processed meat as a cancer-causing substance—the highest of five possible rankings, shared with alcohol, asbestos, arsenic and cigarettes."

 

I am sure that, in the coming weeks and months, many scholars will pore over the report and ascertain its robustness.

 

 

 

 

In the meantime, let’s put colon and lung cancers in perspective. Among American men, both reached their peak deadliness in the mid-1980s. They have been declining ever since. Between 1985 and 2010, lung and colon cancer death rates declined by 39 percent and 54 percent respectively. Among American women, lung cancer peaked in 1998 and colon cancer in 1961. Between their peaks and 2010, the two cancers’ death rates declined by 15 percent and 53 percent respectively.

 

Moderation in the consumption of bacon and sausages is probably a good thing, but let’s not put the U.S. bacon industry out of business by indulging in America’s favorite past time—overreaction.

 

 

[BobF_]

Is there a link to that you can share?

[L8_4thesh0w]

The amount of time that processed meat spends in your gut has a lot to do with it.

The greater risk of colon cancer comes with a diet that includes little or no fiber.

[BobF_]

The amount of time that processed meat spends in your gut has a lot to do with it.

The greater risk of colon cancer comes with a diet that includes little or no fiber.

 

I always stir-fry my grilled brats with chopped cabbage, including fresh garlic and copped onions.