Oct 282015
 

In response to the WHO announcement of the dangers of processed and red meat, as a vegetarian I could say "I told you so". But that wouldn't be the case – I'm not a vegetarian for health reasons.

But what I can do as a vegetarian is comment on the issue from a position of neutrality, or at least slightly more neutrality than someone who is having his favourite food labelled as cancerous.

There's been a few reactions from butchers who comment that we're evolved to be carnivores; wrong! We're evolved to be hunter-gatherers which makes us omnivores. Hunter-gatherers don't have meat every day, and even if they hit a particularly lucky streak it wouldn't be every meal. Essentually we're evolved to eat meat on an occasional basis – perhaps every other day.

And even if we're evolved for a hunter-gatherer diet, that doesn't mean to say that such a diet is the best possible diet for us. Although hunter-gatherers probably (if they avoided all the accident risks of such a life) lived longer than their agricultural cousins and descendents, that doesn't mean they lived long in comparison to modern expectations.

Processed Meats

Apparently the biggest risk is down to processed meats. But which ones?

Even I know that there are many different ways to process meat; or cure it. And if there are many different ways of curing meat, there are many different levels of risk. There are those who say that the risks associated with processed meats are to do with cheap processed meat, and proper bacon and sausages are fine. They could be right, or completely wrong. Who knows?

So it would be helpful to identify what level of risk is attached to each different processed meat. Or even more craftily perhaps someone can discover a new way of curing meat so we can have safe bacon and sausages (well, you anyway).

In the meantime, eat processed meat in moderation and to be safe seek advice on what "in moderation" means.

Red Meat

The risk of cancer associated with red meat is much lower than the risk associated with processed meat. Of course lower doesn't mean no risk, but just about anything has it's risks.

And the less red meat you eat, the lower the risk.

Cooking

This is a tiny bit speculative. There are a group of chemicals called nitrosamines which are nearly all cancer causing. They are formed in various different ways (particularly ways involving sodium nitrate which is added to cured meat to make it look red or pink), including two particularly interesting mentions: frying and the combustion of tobacco (i.e. smoking). 

It is possible that exposing certain organic materials above a certain temperature forms nitrosamines; in other words cooking meat in ways that produces burning or charring could produce nitrosamines. 

So you may be able to reduce the risk associated with that big lump of steak by eating it rare.

 

Feb 072011
 

Sometimes it seems like breast cancer gets a little too much publicity in comparison to other cancers.; it seems that breast cancer gets 10 mentions in the media to every mention of prostate cancer; not to mention lung cancer which causes more deaths in women than breast cancer.

I’ll be using figures from Cancer Research UK to make the points throughout this posting …

First of all lets get the big figures out of the way. In 2008, breast cancer killed 12,047 women (and 69 men) in comparison to total deaths from cancer of 156,723 – “only” 7%; even excluding cancer deaths for men, breast cancer claimed 16% of all cancer deaths for women.

Lung cancer is the one that claims the most lives – 22% of all cancer deaths are from lung cancer, but we can ignore them because it’s the fault of those smokers. Although according to the Wikipedia article on lung cancer between 10-15% of all deaths from lung cancer are from non-smokers – probably all passive smokers.

After the two big cancers, we get prostate cancer which claimed the lives of 10,168 men, or 6,5% of all cancer deaths – not much behind the levels of breast cancer And just for those who aren’t paying attention, no there were no deaths amongst women from prostate cancer.

Including all deaths from gender specific cancers (and I’ll cheat and include the breast cancer figures for both men and women), male specific cancers account for 6.65% of all cancer deaths, and female specific cancers count for 12.5% of all cancer deaths. That is quite a significant difference, and significantly more than the figure of 7% for breast cancer deaths amongst women.

If you look at cancer as a whole, 52% of all cancer deaths were men, and 48% women. It’s relatively even despite the increased risk women run of dying from a female specific cancer. Of all non gender specific cancers, men had a higher number of deaths in 22 out of 27 different cancer categories.

So let us have a look at the figures from the media. Specifically counting the search results from the BBC News website :-

Search Phrase Number of results Percentage of mentions Percentage of deaths
“Cancer” 14401 100% 100%
“Breast Cancer” 2206 15% 7%
“Prostate cancer” 606 4.2% 6.5%
“Lung Cancer” 758 5.2% 22%
“Rectal Cancer” 40 2.7% 10.4%

I think it’s more than obvious that breast cancer gets a little more attention than the others. That’s not to say it gets too much attention – it’s the others that get too little.