A disgraceful scare story – so don’t bin your bacon sarnies
BURGER fans beware – and if you’re about to tuck into a bacon sarnie, put it down now. And don’t even think about a ham roll for lunch.
Last week the World Health Organisation declared war on red and processed meat. It said that beef, lamb and pork were ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’ and ‘each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 per cent’.
The proclamation caused quite a stir. But, before we rush to bin those sausages, perhaps we should take time to dissect the WHO claims more accurately.
I was confused because the claims were made despite no controlled trials ever having been done to look at what actually happens to people if they’re given 50 grams of processed meat – that’s two slices of bacon, five slices of salami, half a hot-dog, or 1.7 meatballs – per day.
Without such a controlled scientific trial, you cannot conclusively say A causes B.
So how did the WHO come to this shocking conclusion about bacon?
Well, it looked at observational studies. This is where a large group of people are asked loads of questions and given health tests (for example blood pressure, weight, height and cholesterol) at the start of the study. This is called the baseline.
These people are then sent off to live their lives, and followed to see what conditions they go on to develop.
Researchers look at the data to try to see patterns.
They may observe a pattern between people who consume processed meat and then who go on to develop bowel cancer.
This is then reported in a journal article, and it is all such articles that have been reviewed by the WHO.
The first point to make, therefore, is that all of this is based on notoriously unreliable dietary questionnaires. Many ask what you ate yesterday, over the past seven days, or even over the past year. How accurate do you think your memory would be?
I always wish that these huge and expensive studies would ask what colour socks the participant is wearing. I bet I could find an association between red-sock-wearing and one type of cancer if I looked hard enough. Would the headline be Red Socks Cause Cancer?
MEAT IS A MARKER, NOT A MAKER OF POOR HEALTH
BY SINGLING out red and processed meat in this way, the whole diet and lifestyle of a person is not taken into account. There is a world of difference between the health of a burger- and fizzy-drinkguzzling couch potato and a grassfed-steak-eating, six-pack-sporting ‘paleo’ specimen.
Previous studies have shown that processed-meat-eaters tend to be far less active, have a higher BMI, are three times more likely to smoke and almost twice as likely to have diabetes. But this makes processed meat a marker of an unhealthy person, not a maker of one.
MEAT PROVIDES OUR ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS
I PRETTY much spend my life writing and talking about real food and the nutrition it contains. I am the first to say ‘Don’t eat processed food’ because so much of what you buy from the supermarket is chemically tinkered with.
However, this WHO report describes processed meat as ‘meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation’. But meat has been preserved in many ways since ancient times – by salting, curing, drying and smoking – and to say that makes it bad for us is ludicrous. All the nutrients we need to live (essential fats, complete protein, vitamins and minerals) are found in meat. If there’s any harm in red meat, it will be because manufacturers have got involved and fed the animals grains, which they cannot digest, and then pumped them with drugs to medicate the resulting illness. This should be a call to action to get back to your traditional butcher, know them by name, and make sure you know where your meat comes from.
THERE IS A RISK... BUT IT’S TINY
CANCER Research UK has terrific statistics on all types of cancer. The incident rate of bowel cancer for all people in the UK in 2011 was 47 per 100,000 people (and you rarely see bowel cancer before the age of 50).
I won’t bore you with the maths, but an increase of 18 per cent from the average is going to be tiny – the absolute risk would be 51 people per 100,000. So even if you do eat the amount of processed meat mentioned, this still boils down to a tiny 0.008 per cent extra chance of getting bowel cancer.
That’s what the WHO claim should have been, but then it wouldn’t have made the headlines.
The WHO press release highlighting an 18 per cent increase in the risk of colorectal cancer through eating processed meat was, I think, disgraceful scaremongering.
Personally I still wouldn’t eat any processed meat. I would get naturally preserved – salted – bacon from the butcher and hand-made sausages with meat, herbs, spices and no wheat fillers.
As for you burger-munchers – I don’t think you have got much to worry about either.