I have just heard on CNN that they (whoever they is) are saying that people on the Atkins diet are 300% more likely to get colon cancer. Can anyone give me some evidence that this is not true as I have a caring wife who is alarmed by this news (true or not) and I have lost enough weight on Atkins already that I don't want to quit. However I would like some information from anyone else who may have seen this on CNN.
Thanks a bunch

I have read much and have never seen anything to substantiate that.

hello
how does it cause colon cancer? what did cnn say about it?

Not true!

Here are a links from the Atkins website:

http://atkinscenter.com/Archive/2002/3/19-500061.html

Thanks for the responses. I'm not sure what CNN said about it. My wife called and told me about it. Nice of her, huh?
I will see if I can find out more, only because I'm sure it's 100% nonsense, but I like facts, not feelings, so I will press on until I find out. I'll let you all know what I find.
Thanks

I'd also like to know what they are basing that on and why the Atkins diet specifically unless they are proceeding on their own misinformation that the Atkins diet is low in fiber. I went to the CNN News website and couldn't find anything recent on colon cancer at all. If it's the old "not enough fiber" issue, studies have been done that showed that those that ate a lot of fiber didn't have any less risk of getting colon cancer than those that ate a low fiber diet and that was no small study..it was based on the Harvard Nurse's study which involved over 88,000 women.
I've heard it said before that eating lots of red meat promotes colon cancer, but I've never seen it conclusively proven in medical trial studies.

Yeah, I could see how eating ALL red meats and nothing else in your diet could lead to some health issues, but with all of the other foods and supplements that Atkins requires, I can't see how it is unbalanced. By the way, I've now lost 12 pounds in 19 days. Woooo hoooo..............I wish I had taken a "before" picture.
Okay, back on track. Since this is a health section, is it good that my fingernails are growing much faster now?
Thanks for all the responses.

I studied this in my anatomy and physiology courses. Vegetarians were shown in a study that 90.5% of them were colon cancer free and which is far from that for the meat eaters population. However, there are also a couple of variables that come with that. One is there are many more meat eaters compared to vegetarians in the united states so by looking at numbers that way of course vegetarians are not going to have it as much when you compare person to person.

Secondly, meat goes through your system more slowly. Our intestines are very different compared to typical animals that eat only meats, ours are much much longer which takes longer to process through ( they resemble vegetarian animals). Being that it stays in our system longer means more chance of bacteria turning carcinogenic.

Meat when in decomposition has the tendency to create bacteria that would create an ideal enviroment for cells to turn cancerous(red meat decomposes a bit faster). Vegetables take much longer to turn carcinogenic so usually by the time it goes through your digestive system the odds are not as good that it would be as likely to create cancerous cells. Genetics and obesity are a major play in this also. Except for people following high protein diets, meat eaters when eaten with all other foods are typically overweight so it would be hard to make a conclusive study.

I myself am a lacto-vegetarian, but I feel that the strongest issues would be to be at a healthy body weight regardless of your diet. Also, I strongly encourage to get your colonscopys every five years after the age of 40, if you have a problem (at any age), and with each yearly physical to have a feces smear test, it is not as effective for detecting colon cancer but it will give you a bit of a heads up and not near as troublesome as a colonoscopy.

The one thing about the insulin link is that most people with high insulin are usually overweight (not always) but that could be part of the obesity factor.It is hard to get a proper study, I usually dont follow studies until there has been at least 10 done in controlled situations because there can be too many variances.

OTH, if you look at isolated groups of people who primarily subsist on meat/fish such as Arctic Circle inhabitants who survive mostly on fish, caribou, and seal meat and little or no veggies and have done so for generations, bowel cancer is totally unheard of. Go figure.
Now I could agree with the potential increasing for those high protein individuals whose diet consists of a great deal of processed meats such as bacon, deli meats, hot dogs and sausages.

If vegetarians were shown to have a significantly reduced rate of colon cancer relative to meat eaters, it could be an issue with the quality of meat that the people in the meat eating arm of the study were eating. Most people I know who are "meat eaters" eat processed meats and fast food meats. Nitrates in the former and a tendency to eat the fries and other garbage while eating the latter could be an important variable in how the meat eaters fared with respect to chances of getting colon cancer. It's possible that eating good fresh unprocessed beef, poulty and fish may be as protective as a vegetarian diet; who knows. It could explain why heavy meat eating populations don't have the increase in colon cancer incidence that we have here.

rerics

Good Point rerics although it could be from hormones injected into the animals too, most people do not get meat from a farmer that they know. I am lacto vegetarian but dh is a meat eater so we buy a cow at a time from a local farmer and get our milk from him so we are sure it is not injected with animals plus its guaranteed fresh, you never know how old that meat is in the stores. Alot of people are uncomfortable with the cost at first but it averages out since you dont buy anymore for awhile, and hamburger is a little expensive but the steaks are very very cheap since they charge by the pound not by the cut.

is that these Arctic meat eaters get more exercise than we do also.

I believe there are so many components to being healthy, and also feel that the fact that I sit on my butt at a computer all day is one of the primary things that makes me not feel good!

Before going low-carb I had about 85% of the symptoms of syndrome X and was will on my way to developing diabetes and heart disease. Both of these problems run in my family so I am 100% positive I would have contracted one or both before my 50th birthday. On the other hand the chances of me getting colon cancer are much lower and a risk I will gladly take. The big “C” is a big “IF” for me but the others were a certainty

Well said, Azlocarb....