bacon causes cancer! WHO!

[ApeNotKillApe]

We must organize a music festival to raise awareness of bacon, all proceeds will go to bacon. We shall call it BACONAID.

[AFTT47]

Various types of mushrooms and others yeah those types of vegetables will definitely suck when eaten.

Does mushroom qualify as vegetable?  They are not plants.

They sure as hell aren't meat. I think they are technically a fungus. I love them, personally. I once knew a guy who refused to eat them based on them them being classed with athlete's foot.

[ignoramus]

Yeah, I won't eat anything that grows in shit, comes out of a chicken's arse or pigs arse, but I sure love me some bacon and eggs with fried mushrooms for breakfast!

[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.

[Aractus]

Old news. Eating meat isn't good for you. Our intestines are short enough that we are capable of eating meat and surviving to well past reproduction age and that gives us an evolutionary advantage but we are better off as vegetarians. Vegetables can be metabolized with less issues than meat. We already knew this. Our intestines aren't long enough to derive sufficient nutrients from simple vegetables as are those of true herbivores such as as cows and elephants but we do better on a diet of complex vegetables than we do on meat. No new news here.

Completely uninformed bullshit.

[Fake Messiah]

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

Humans were probably eating meat since they were apes, but still it's not good to eat meat anymore because these animals that "we" eat today are not the same animals. For starters today's cows and pigs have something like 50% of fat to meat ratio, while wild animals have 5% so that's one of the reason why so many people suffer cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and mental illnesses. Other reasons are truly appealing conditions livestock is being held in: they frequently walk in their own shit to their knuckles (if they are allowed to walk at all) and pumped with steroids and antibiotics and other stuff.

I mean if you eat meat you eat it for proteins and today you can get them from other sources, it's not stone-age anymore. For instance there are protein powders. I've been vegetarian for many years and for breakfast and dinner I blend some fruit and vegetables with a cup (usually 25 grams) of protein powder and it's more energetic, tastier and not to mention healthier.

[LastPoet]

I prefer a short life, fully lived, than to wait for a long death.

And bacon. I can live without it... but then what is your life taste?

[Aractus]

Humans were probably eating meat since they were apes, but still it's not good to eat meat anymore because these animals that "we" eat today are not the same animals. For starters today's cows and pigs have something like 50% of fat to meat ratio, while wild animals have 5% so that's one of the reason why so many people suffer cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and mental illnesses. Other reasons are truly appealing conditions livestock is being held in: they frequently walk in their own shit to their knuckles (if they are allowed to walk at all) and pumped with steroids and antibiotics and other stuff.

I mean if you eat meat you eat it for proteins and today you can get them from other sources, it's not stone-age anymore. For instance there are protein powders. I've been vegetarian for many years and for breakfast and dinner I blend some fruit and vegetables with a cup (usually 25 grams) of protein powder and it's more energetic, tastier and not to mention healthier.

Great. More uninformed bullshit.

No one forces us to eat cattle and pig meat. We can eat horse, kangaroo, venison, rabbit, lamb, duck, seal, chicken, fish, snail, marine mammalian meats. 50% fat is a figure you pulled out of your ass, and the fat content of meat is dependant not just on the source of the food, but also the breed. For example, American mince (they call ground beef) on average contains around 10% or so more fat than Australian mince does. So while the average fat content for Australian mince is something like 15%, for American ground-beef it's more like 25%. But that's just the average, it's up to you which you want to buy.

The majority of the world's plant species are either poisonous to us, or inedible. While there are plenty of "wild" meats we have to chose from, and only a handful of domesticated species (like pig and cattle), the vast majority of plant foods we consume are artificially-selected and domesticated. This includes: Wheat, Maize, Rice, Banana, Tomato, Cornflour, Broccoli, Orange, Apple, Pear, Lemon, Figs, etc. It includes the vast majority of plant foods. If your argument is that you want to avoid domesticated foods then you have far more plant foods you'll need to avoid compared to animal foods.

Nutrients found only in meat include B12, Vitamin D, and cholesterol. Meat/animal foods are the best source of Vitamin A and calcium. Animal foods are the only foods that provide high quality protein. Protein from soy-bean is not high-quality, and raw soy is poisonous to humans. We can only consume processed or fermented soy. Cholesterol deficiency directly causes mental illness, and it's nearly impossible to raise LDL levels without animal foods. And calcium or vitamin D deficiency as you would well know causes osteoporosis.

Plant foods contain lectins. All plant foods do, but the ones with the highest concentration of lectins are grains like wheat and maize. Lectins bind to nutrients and inhibit the absorption into the body of key nutrients. If you were to consume raw grains you would absorb almost nothing from them and pass them straight out your rear end. We generally pulverise the grains and make the nutrients more absorbable, but they're still inhibited by them. There's also gluten which causes digestive problems for some people.

Your advice is completely wrong, and the scourge of all dieticians. You might know a couple of things, but 99% of your vegetarian beliefs are based on inference, anecdotal evidence, or other non-dietary concerns such as moral or environmental concerns (which are also misplaced).

Animals are not shot-up with hormones. They're only given antibiotics, by a vet, if they need them. They are not held in "appalling conditions" in a first world country such as Australia. The very suggestion is not only completely ignorant, but deeply offensive to many people. Breaches of animal welfare are treated very seriously.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

[Excited Penguin]

It's really hard to tell who's right in this debate. I still eat meat and everything but of late I've been feeling kind of guilty for doing it and also kind of thinking about going vegetarian for maintaining a good health - are you saying that's a myth somehow? Then how come so many reasonable people do it?