On various places I see Vegans etc claim meat is actually bad for us and the cancer risk. We know some studies show a ‘link’ between processed meat and cancer (but of course lets ignore the side orders of carbs !!). However I have never seen any actual real science on this.
@Richard @carl maybe this could be a section of the show to debunk this but I suspect there is no science that shows this and I would love to be able to debunk with some actual science that disproves it !
To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
There is no evidence beyond junk epidemiology to suggest a meat/cancer causal link; however, there is plenty of strong clinical evidence to explain how hyperinsulinemia and hyperglycaemia and an overload of omega6 seed oils sets up a metabolism ideal for the establishment of cancer.
And yet the nutritional e$tablishment obsesses about the junk science around meat and ignores the rest. I can’t think why!
Yeah all to do with agenda !! Of course if we had proper science to show this I am open minded but until then the option is easy !
it seems that most of the studies / trials done are all in the context of higher carb diets / in the presence of omega 6’s etc and nothing concrete isolates meat as the cancer candidate - along the lines of “subjects were fed a standard food pyramid and it was found that risk of cancer went up”
therefore it has to be the meat, it cant be anything else! right?
(excellent science right there)
we have to remain open minded though and for me, I really don’t see how cancers can grow in the absence of sugars / in the presence of ketones when it has been displayed they do not cope well in that environment.
I have read nothing to persuade me otherwise, YET!
but, ever the sceptic, im always on the lookout for something to disprove.
vegans have one thing right; eat real food. we cant lambast them for that!
we always have to be mindful of peoples lifestyle choice.
Eat Real Food is a terrible slogan, because it begs the question. I assure you that many vegans will call a large lump of tofu “real food” and decry a ribeye as a murder scene.
Sentimentalists like Michael Pollan explicitly call artisanal stone-ground loaves of home-made bread “real food”! But eat some and you’ll enjoy it getting real with your blood glucose meter.
The phrase falls apart, because I it allows for infinite re-interpretation to our own biases, and we get nowhere!
Let’s stop with the appeal to nature sloganeering and instead focus on metabolic effect. I don’t care if you call a food “real” that nevertheless promotes inflammation and crumbles my bones. I don’t care if you call a food “processed chemicals” if it nevertheless has no deleterious effect on my healthful longevity.
My wife has a nut allergy. If she eats those “real” foods, she’ll die.
Diabetics who mainline on raw maple syrup (a “real” food) will be thanked by amputations and worse; but those who instead add highly-processed erythritol to their coffee won’t.
So no. The kumbaya big tent of “just eat real food” hides confusion - and even a modicum of cynically-manipulated danger.
We will cover this in next week’s podcast with @bokkiedog. Thanks for a very timely question!
look forward to it @carl !
totally with @bokkiedog on this as I could claim my lovely clotted cream is processed food and not ‘real’
It is why I stick with Keto and LCHF as terms …
Well That told me didn’t it.
Now I’m not sure whether the post was on about cancer or ripping me to bits for my poor choice of phrase at the end of a hard day.
Needless to say, the thread wondered off topic.
Hey I can’t make everyone happy I guess.
Sorry if my post pist you all off.
If someone wants to point me in the direction of a more user friendly term then I’ll be more than happy to use that in future.
I don’t think anybody was angry or ripping you to bits. You opened up a fruitful discussion, for which I thank you.
We can disagree robustly but respectfully. It doesn’t mean anyone’s pissed off 
Good stuff @bokkiedog !
Can’t be too careful these days.
People get offended at the drop of a hat!
In the meantime, please don’t let your wife eat nuts, nor let diabetics “mainline maple syrup”
Haha 
The keyword for people to look for here is “association,” as in, “we found an association between X and Y” where when X moves in a certain direction, Y moves as well. Often the claim is that the direction and magnitude of the moves suggest that one may have a role in causing the other, but there is no way to prove or disprove an associative relationship such as this because these studies are observational/retrospective, not controlled.
I think “junk epidemiology” might be a mild overstatement, as it’s these observational studies that can be used to justify doing a controlled study that might actually isolate causal relationships. But relying on associations found by such studies to inform how we eat is probably unwise.
Yep. And in many cases, such studies rely on food questionnaires, often administered long after the time period being asked about. How reliably could you tell someone what you ate last month, six months ago, or a year ago?
Trouble is that interventional studies are tremendously expensive, so we’re not likely to see a significant increase in those kinds of studies. So we’re left with observational, and have to do the best we can to interpret the results, along with our own n=1 experiments.
This is sort of funny but not. My dad was T2 diabetic and living in a retirement home. Last Christmas the home gave all of the residents a bottle of maple syrup with the home’s name etched in the glass. All of the residents eat in a dining room so I have no idea what they expected the residents to do with it. I noticed my dad’s was half empty, and I asked him what he did with it. With advancing dementia he didn’t think it through, and he drank it! I took the bottle when he wasn’t looking.
IS maple syrup a US thing, when I tried it in NY (pre keto days) could not stand it, so sweet
It’s definitely a Canadian thing and I indulged in it often before keto. Wasn’t too sweet for me then, and I suspect I’d still love the taste now, but I’m not going there.
I wonder if part of this question comes from the new documentary on Netflix called “What the Health”. I got about thirty minutes in and decided it’s really a documentary about a self proclaimed hypochondriac who calls various cancer societies and harasses them about why they are suggesting that people eat meat.
Also, according to them, there is no science behind restricting sugar or carbs.
For this claim, there have been actual clinical studies on this that have formed that link. The problem is that the definition of red meat is overbroad. It is any food that contains red meat rather than just the steak or what have you. When later studies eliminated that variable and focused on just red meat, they found that the cancer risk in the red meat group was lower than the control group.
“Probably” unwise? Claiming causation based on association is nothing less than anti-science. Let’s not let them off the hook here – even if they use weasel words to cover it, they are at least strongly implying causation.
remember they linked bacon but the quality of bacon varies greater with many at the cheap end having sugar added, same with sausages which often have wheat based crap added.
Yes the situation that I mentioned had a common link that red meats often were served with processed carbs. Once those were eliminated, the cancer risk went away.