The disclosure that Elizabeth Edwards’ breast cancer had returned has raised national awareness of this dreaded disease that will kill nearly 41,000 American women this year.
Fortunately, along with heart disease and other killer diseases, cancer is largely preventable. The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 60 percent of all cancer deaths could be prevented by regular screenings, exercise and quitting tobacco and meat products.
Yes, meat products. A Harvard study of more than 90,000 young nurses, published in last November’s Archives of Internal Medicine, found that their risk of developing breast cancer was linked directly to meat consumption. Those who ate the most meat had nearly twice the risk of those who ate meat infrequently.
Two studies published in the July 2003 Journal of the National Cancer Institute and the The Lancet reported that consumption of animal fats raised the risk of breast cancer, while consumption of vegetable fats did not. A Danish study of 117,000 women in the October 2004 The New England Journal of Medicine implicated milk consumption.
The medical evidence should provide women one more incentive to explore the rich variety of meat and dairy alternatives in their supermarkets’ frozen foods, produce and dairy sections.
Here here!
Food consumption and safety needs to become a high priority of our government. If we are what we eat – and what we eat is harming us – then the government has a responsibility, a duty as it were, to keep us from harming ourselves or others.
May Carl Mumpower needs to retreat from the failed drug-war efforts and turn his attention to meat and milk products causing cancer in the mass population.
Not a single one of the studies mentioned in Alex Chilter’s letter take the time nor have the intellectual curiousity to review the production methods of the animals who were slaughtered and then eaten by the participants in the study.
How animals are raised has a proven impact on the relative components in the suite of fatty acids found in the meat. If you’re making the point that we are what we eat, well then so are the animals. Livestock raised on grass (for meat or milk) have much higher levels of Omega-3 fatty acids and much lower levels of Omega-6 fatty acids, to name but one example. This has been proven time and again in peer reviewed literature.
Yet none of the studies about meat and health, of which many are suspect anyway for other reasons, look at this most critical point. Red meat isn’t the same across the board. How could think it was?
If your agenda is to eat right for your own health, then good for you. If your agenda is to tell someone else how to eat for their health, then it would pay to delve a bit deeper into the complexities of the issues at hand. And there are many of them.
Separately, Chilter modifies the language used in the study in the Archives of Internal Medicine to make his letter sound more convincing. There is no “twice” used, no “directly linked”. It’s more “may be linked”, etc.
Just ‘cuz it’s in a letter to the editor and the person took the time to type out a journal name and it appears to sound legitimate doesn’t make it so.
Johnny if meat doesn’t cause the disease in question why not back it up with some studies or facts of your own (perhaps because none exist and you know it?) You responded with your slanted opinions when confronted with clearly defined studies. Not a very convincing act I’m afraid.
Sheesh…
I’m not using studies to make any argument here about whether it’s “OK” to eat meat.
You are.
I showed what I feel are some of a series of regular problems with long term studies about meat consumption by humans. Your repsonse, instead of addressing this, was to say I have slanted opinions and you demanded my own studies.
You think it’s wrong for me to eat meat, and wrong for the rest of the world to eat meat. Yet, when using one of the predictable arguments, and then having it pointed out that those studies — which of course you never read — are (nearly) universally flawed, that’s all you got?
Sorry, that ain’t gonna cut it.