Eating Meat Linked to Cancer—Again

Wait a minute—there’s now another story in the news that links meat eating with cancer?

You can be forgiven for thinking this is déjà vu or that your browser is mysteriously pulling up old news. After all, it was just a couple weeks ago that we were deluged with headlines surrounding the World Health Organization’s controversial announcement that it had decided to classify processed meats such as bacon and hot dogs as carcinogenic and red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Now comes news of a study from researchers at the prestigious MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas that links meat consumption with an elevated risk of kidney cancer, which claims the lives of about 14,000 Americans each year. In particular, scientists say, it appears that meat cooked at high temperatures—grilled, say, or panfried—may increase exposure to certain known carcinogens that form when meat is subjected to excessive heat.

Scientists have long cautioned that cooking meat at temperatures higher than 300 F seems to create a greater number of carcinogenic compounds of the type that have been shown to cause cancer in lab animals. Epidemiologic studies based on people’s responses to diet questionnaires have further established a correlation between high consumption of well-done, fried, or grilled meats and a higher risk for cancers of the colon, pancreas, and prostate, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The latest study, which included nearly 660 patients newly diagnosed with kidney cancer and almost 700 healthy participants, is the first to identify an association between kidney cancer and dietary intake of a particular type of mutagenic compound that forms when meat is cooked. It also suggests that people with certain genetic mutations may be more susceptible to cancer risk from these compounds.

So what does all that mean? At this point, researchers say, they’re not recommending you drop meat from your diet entirely, but neither do they encourage wild abandon when it comes to the sizzling, sputtering, flame-broiled frenzy of seared meat that is more or less a staple of swaggering American food advertising.

As Dr. Xifeng Wu, professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas and senior author of the study, said in a statement: “Our findings support reduced consumption of meat, especially meat cooked at high temperatures or over an open flame, as a public health intervention to reduce [renal cell carcinoma] risk and burden.”