bacon causes cancer! WHO!

[Aractus]

You made a few significant errors in your post.

The WHO said today that eating all meats, but in particular processed meats will increase your chances of getting cancer x2 (smoking = x50).

No they didn't WHO said that processed meats are a class-1 carcinogen, and that red meats are probably carcinogenic as well (class-2A). The only type of cancer associated with the consumption of processed meats is colorectal cancer. It doesn't double your chance of getting cancer, WHO said that daily consumption of 50g of processed meat a day increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%.

There are valid reasons to be sceptical of their conclusions, which I'll come to in a moment.

Smoking and Lung cancer is another issue entirely. The mean time between a person starting to smoke and being diagnosed with lung cancer is 20-30 years. As most people begin smoking as adults, this means lung cancer overwhelming affects older people, as so:



As you can see, the majority of lung cancer cases is in people 70 years and older. This is a statistic you very rarely hear talked about, because many smokers quite frankly don't care if they get cancer when they're over 70.

I have no idea of where you got your "50 times more likely" figure from. The only figure I know is that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by 23 times for males, and 13 times for females , and that figure is based on a person smoking one pack a day for 40 years. A person who smokes more than that will be at increased risk, and a person who smokes less will be at decreased risk.

I would like to know if we started off as meat eaters in the jungle or as herbivores?
Most primates don't eat meat naturally (as a staple diet), do they?

We know we share a common ancestor with chimps, and that makes us closely related to other primates. Chimps as you should know hunt and eat meat, as do we.

Also, if we evolved without intelligence and didn't learn to make fire, would we still be meat eaters today?

We have been cooking meat for at least 2 million years.

Have we cheated evolution (so to speak) through the gift of intelligence and morphed into the homo sapiens so we can now cook and eat meat, or because of it?

No we haven't. Humans and Chimps both eat meat, and we share a common ancestor around 7.5 million years ago. Anyone who argues otherwise is wilfully ignorant that out closet genetic relatives are also omnivorous.


Now I'll get back to the problems with the IARC/WHO report.

The problem is they aren't talking about any new information. All other cancer organisations have access to exactly the same information, the information showing a correlation between processed and red meats and colorectal cancer, and none of them have reached the same conclusion as IARC/WHO. I have yet to see how they controlled for possible confounders, bearing in mind that people who eat more processed foods are often associated with living a more unhealthy lifestyle overall, and there's no comprehensive data on what processed foods in particular pose a risk for the development of colorectal cancer. To simply make the claim that the risk is going to be the same for bacon as it is for ham as it is for sausage as it is for salami as it is for frankfurt as it is for devon as it is for spam and all other forms of processed meats is completely disingenuous to say the least. If there is a proven link you should be able to clearly and articulately say what products it is most associated with, and what area of the world that association was strongest, and what area of the world that association was weakest.

The nutritional value of bacon, for example, is different here in Australia as it is in India, or the United States, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Furthermore the additives are different, the food composition itself is different not just between countries but between brands as well. The data showing a correlation between colorectal cancer and red and processed meats isn't new, it's been known for a long time. But the claim that any of them are actually carcinogenic in and of themselves has never been made before.

And the other problem is that the data itself shows that high amounts of red meat consumption has a much higher correlation to cancers than processed meats does (see this article). So how exactly the IARC decided that processed meats are carcinogenic but red meats are "probably" carcinogenic is anyone's guess at this point.