New Study Shows Vegetarians Less Likely to Develop Cancer

by Ingela Johansson, citizen journalist – NaturalNews

In a fresh study of food habits and cancer, 61,566 British meat eaters, fish eaters and vegetarians were followed by scientists for 12 years. The study showed that vegetarians have a smaller risk of developing cancer compared to their meat eating counterparts.

“This is strong evidence that vegetarians have lower rates of cancer than meat eaters” said co-author of the study, Dr Naomi Allen.

The study included people between 20 and 89 years old. Nearly half of the participants were vegetarians. The researchers took into account many different variables such as lifestyle, age, body mass index, alcohol intake, contraceptive use in women, smoking, and physical activity. The results of the study were adjusted accordingly after these variables. This is the largest report so far on food habits and cancer and is part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Of the British population today, one out of three persons develops cancer in their lifetime, and according to this research more than 2 million people could avoid cancer by changing their diets. The overall risk for cancer was decreased by 12 % in vegetarians compared to the meat eaters. There was an even bigger difference in some cancers, like stomach, bladder and leukemia, where vegetarians were affected up to 45 percent less. The biggest difference was the risk of a quite rare cancer of the bone marrow, multiple myeloma, where the vegetarians had a decreased risk of 75 percent. The vegetarians did not have a reduced risk in all cancers though; breast and prostate cancer were at about the same rate as for carnivores, and the risk for cancer in the bowel was slightly higher.

As for the fish eaters (those who ate fish but no other meat), they actually had the lowest rate of cancer, 18 percent lower than meat eaters. But they were also the smallest group in the study and possibly a less trustworthy statistic.

The director of health information at Cancer Research UK, Sara Hiom, said: “These interesting results add to the evidence that what we eat affects our chances of developing cancer. But the links between diet and cancer risk are complex and more research is needed to see how big a part diet plays and which specific dietary factors are most important.”

“The relatively low number of vegetarians who developed cancer in this study supports Cancer Research UK’s advice that people should eat a healthy, balanced diet high in fibre, fruit and vegetables and low in saturated fat, salt and red and processed meat.”

Sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h…
http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v…

 

 

Red meat consumption doubles risk of colon cancer, says study; is it time to go vegetarian yet?

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows a doubling of the risk of colon cancer for people who are heavy consumers of red meat. More specifically, it shows that the risk doubles compared to those who consume smaller quantities of red meat. But how does this compare to people who consume no red meat at all?

This is conjecture, but I’m willing to bet that heavy consumers of red meat probably have quadruple the risk (or more) of colon cancer compared to vegetarians or people who consume no red meat. By the way, you don’t have to be a vegetarian to boycott red meat. You can still be a consumer of other sources of animal protein (fish, seafood, etc.) while avoiding red meat.

There are plenty of health reasons to avoid eating red meat, and a higher risk of colon cancer is just one of them. The saturated animal fat found in red meat products contributes to heart disease and atherosclerosis. In addition, red meat can contain contaminants such as heavy metals, pesticides and undesirable environmental pollutants that tend to collect in the fat tissues of cows, which are absorbed into your body when you eat cow fat. And you can’t eat red meat without getting some animal fat.

Then, of course, there’s what I call the vibration of red meat, which concerns the homeopathy of the meat, or the environment in which the cow was raised. Was it a natural environment? Did the cow have access to open fields, sunlight and clean water? Or was this a cow raised as part of a slaughterhouse operation, produced for the sole purpose of generating profits? If you eat cows’ meat that has undergone that kind of experience, you are consuming a product that is tainted with the negative experience of the animal from which it came.

There are a lot of negative effects associated with the consumption of red meat, and this is why more and more people are now giving up red meat and moving to healthier foods like fish, free-range chicken, or better yet, plant-based proteins. This is where you’ll get your best protective effect and disease prevention, and you will be helping protect the environment at the same time. After all, it’s far less stressful on the environment to produce food as plants than as animals.

It takes 10 acres to produce the same amount of red meat protein as it does to That will be very important to realize as our world population grows and it becomes increasingly difficult to produce the protein required by the population.

How to make the transition away from red meat

These are all reasons to avoid an animal-based diet and pursue a plant-based diet. Many people reading this are already following a plant-based diet, but some of you who might be considering making the change probably aren’t sure exactly how to do it.

Perhaps you want to merely reduce your consumption of red meat but not give it up completely yet, which is fine, since that’s the way all of us ex-meat-eaters got into plant-based diets to begin with. Few people ate more meat than I did because I grew up in an environment where we had all the red meat we wanted at no charge (my grandfather was a cattle rancher). We had a freezer full of red meat at all times, and we could have as much hamburger, steak or other cuts of meat as we wanted. I consumed large quantities of red meat for nearly 30 years.

I found the transition away from red meat to be difficult at first. I started consuming less of it and eating other meat alternatives, and pretty soon I began to view red meat in a different way, because if you eat less of it, you eventually start to lose your appetite for it. And within less than a year, any time I would see red meat at the grocery store, it would gross me out. I look at it and I realize what it is: a chunk of flesh sliced off the carcass of a living creature that has been ground up and stuffed into a box. Usually there’s some blood running around in the container as well. Every time I would look at that I would get grossed out and think to myself, “Gee, is this really what I want to eat for the rest of my life? This sliced up chunk of a dead cow?” And the answer was, “No.” So it didn’t take very long before I didn’t want any red meat, and now I can’t imagine eating it.

That’s one way to get rid of red meat in your diet, but there are many other ways and I encourage you to experiment and see how you’d like to approach it. But the bottom line on red meat is that there is an increasing body of evidence supporting the notion that you can prevent cancer by pursuing a plant-based diet. If you want to be healthy, it’s time to join the vegetarians.