Headlines blaring that processed and red meat causes cancer have made this steak-and-bacon-loving nation collectively reach for the Rolaids. Vegans are in full party mode, and the media is in a feeding frenzy. But there is more to this story than meets the (rib)eye.
With United Nations climate talks beginning in a few weeks in Paris, the cancer warning seems particularly well timed.
Environmental activists have long sought to tie food to the fight against global warming.
Now the doomsayers who want to take on modern agriculture, a considerable source of greenhouse-gas emissions, can employ an additional scare tactic:
Meat production sickens the planet; meat consumption sickens people.Late last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—part of the World Health Organization, an arm of the U.N.—concluded that red meat, like beef and pork, is “probably carcinogenic” to humans, and that processed meat is an even greater cancer threat.
The IARC placed foods like bacon, sausage and hot dogs in the same carcinogen category as cigarettes and plutonium.
The working group assessed “more than 800 epidemiological studies that investigated the association of cancer with consumption of red meat or processed meat in many countries.”
But support for the IARC’s sweeping conclusion is flimsy at best.
First, the report largely addresses only one cancer—colorectal—while making passing mention of other cancers, like stomach and prostate.
Yet the evidence linking red meat and colorectal cancer is unconvincing.
Read on. Junk science will kill us faster than anything we eat!
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