Meat Contributes to/Causes Cancer
1907 New York Times Article Shows that Meat Causes Cancer. A Century Later, Many People Still Haven’t Heard the News By Neal Barnard, M.D. | Posted on January 7, 2014 In a recent NPR debate about the risks of meat-eating , I put forward the proposition that meat causes cancer. Judging by faces in the audience, this was a new idea. While everyone understands the link between cancer and cigarettes, the link with meat has somehow escaped notice. I cited two enormous studies—the 2009 NIH-AARP study, with half a million participants, and a 2012 Harvard study with 120,000 participants. In both studies, meat-eaters were at higher risk of a cancer death, and many more studies have shown the same thing. How does meat cause cancer? It could be the heterocyclic amines—carcinogens that form as meat is cooked. It could also be the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or the heme iron in meat, or perhaps its lack of fiber and paucity of antioxidants. But rea...