Sat, Mar-08-14, 00:35
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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‘No proven link’ between cancer and eating meat
Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
8 March, 2014
‘No proven link’ between cancer and eating meat
Warnings that eating meat could be as dangerous as smoking are overblown because the evidence on the link between food and cancer is inconclusive, according to a leading expert.
Professor Tim Key, of the University of Oxford’s cancer epidemiology unit, said that it was difficult to isolate the connection between different types of food and serious illnesses because “everything you eat is correlated with everything else you do”.
“When it comes to diet and cancer people just didn’t realise how difficult this was going to be,” he said.
Professor Key, one of the foremost experts on the link between diet and disease, said that nutritional science was in its infancy and so scientists did not yet have the evidence to back up many of the bold claims made about eating meat, sugar and carbohydrates.
He is running a mass-observational study on vegetarians, which involves up to 70,000 British people. By contrast, a widely reported study, which found that a diet rich in animal protein led to a fourfold increase in the risk of death from cancer or diabetes among those under 65, surveyed 6,381 people.
Professor Key said that while the vegetarians in his study ate less animal protein and less saturated fat, his published research showed that their rates of early death compared with those of meat-eaters were exactly the same.
He also found that there was no difference in the rates of bowel cancer between the two groups, despite the widely held view that eating a lot of red meat, particularly processed meat, was linked to the disease.
“There is a lot of evidence that meat may have an effect on bowel cancer, but that would imply vegetarians had a lower risk of bowel cancer. This we didn’t see,” Professor Key said. “I think we have to conclude, we don’t understand what goes on in the mechanism of bowel cancer, it’s not clear at all
“In relation to cancer and diet, the only two things that are unequivocal are obesity and alcohol, both cause cancer. There are loads and loads of studies and they are completely consistent. Once you get onto other things, meat, bacon, fibre, the data is just not clear.”
He also addressed food regimes such as the Atkins, Dukan and Paleo diets which advocate cutting carbohydrates in favour of protein to lose weight.
Pointing to the fact that vegetarians eat less protein and are thinner than meat-eaters, Professor Key said “that is not compatible with the arguments that lower-protein diets make you fat”.
There is evidence that meat-eating is bad for the heart, with vegetarians showing a significantly reduced risk of heart disease, but the evidence is less clear for other diseases.
Professor Key said that there were areas in rural China and Japan where the population ate little meat but the stroke rate was surprisingly high. He is a vegan, for ethical rather than health reasons, and, despite the lack of conclusive evidence, a second expert, Walter Willett, of the Harvard School of Public Health, has also restricted his meat consumption.
Professor Willett, who is the most cited author in the science of nutrition, eats read meat only once or twice a year, and explained that even when the science was not cast-iron, it seemed plausible to him that this was a healthy change. “The relation with cancer is complicated; it depends on the type of animal product, time of life and type of cancer,” he said. It made sense to cut meat intake because “being smart means making decisions on probabilities; to put odds in our favour”.
Conflicting advice
Professor Valter Longo, University of Southern California Excess protein increases risk of cancer — a chicken breast could be “as deadly as a cigarette”- British Nutrition Foundation No evidence of link between average red meat consumption and cancer
- European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Processed meat could cause one in 30 early deaths
- World Cancer Research Fund Eat no more than 70g processed meat a week; children should have none
- Paleo Factory-farmed meat and fish cause cancer. Eat grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, wild salmon.
- Dr Katharina Nimptsch, Harvard Eating more chicken as a teenager reduces likelihood of colon cancer
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/healt...icle4027103.ece |
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