“Eating a bacon bap every once in a while isn’t going to do much harm – having a healthy diet is all about moderation”.
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Although the World Health Organization unit has said that the risk of developing colorectal cancer from processed meat products is small, it increases with the amount of meat consumed by a person.
“Until they actually come up with the evidence and the proof, I won’t believe it and I don’t think a lot of consumers will”, said Aldape.
“It is not yet fully understood” how cancer risk was increased, the agency added – speculating about the potential role of chemicals that form during meat processing or cooking.
Sellers of processed meats prolong shelf life by curing or smoking them and adding preservatives, which increases cancer risk.
“We simply don’t think the evidence supports any causal link between any red meat and any type of cancer”, said Shalene McNeill, executive director of human nutrition at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
WHO’s cancer agency, the worldwide Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), analyzed 800 scientific studies dating back to 1966 about the effects of eat red and processed meat and found that red meat consumption is “probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A), based on limited evidence that the consumption of red meat causes cancer in humans and strong mechanistic evidence supporting a carcinogenic effect”.
The meat industry calls the new findings “alarmist” and argues cancer isn’t caused by a specific food, but also involves lifestyle and environmental factors.
“There is sufficient evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of processed meat”, the group concluded in its statement.
“What in this day and age doesn’t cause cancer?” he said.
While chicken constitutes over 80 per cent of the processed meat industry in India, the remainder consists of mutton, lamb and pork. To contrast the figure, about 1 million cancer deaths are accounted due to tobacco smoking.
Bacon and sausage are delicious, but it’s no secret that processed meats are bad for your health.
“This is an important step in helping individuals make healthier dietary choices to reduce their risk of colorectal cancer in particular”, said Susan Gapstur of the American Cancer Society, which has recommended limiting red and processed meat intake since 2002, and suggests choosing fish or poultry or cooking red meat at low temperatures.
“Three cigarettes per day increases the risk of lung cancer sixfold”, or 500 percent, compared with the 18 percent from eating a couple slices of bologna a day, said Gunter Kuhnle, a food nutrition scientist at the University of Reading.
Independent experts stressed that the World Health Organization findings should be kept in perspective.
“This is still very relevant from a public health point of view, as there are more than 30,000 new cases per year” of colon cancer, he said.
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Experiments to test whether a food causes cancer pose a massive logistical challenge – they require controlling the diets of thousands of test subjects over a course of many years. “But it should not be used for scaremongering”.
