Latest red-meat-causes-cancer study is more junk science

Before you panic about the latest food scare -- a study purporting to link consumption of red meat with colon and rectal cancer -- you might want to take a bite or two of common sense from this Center for Consumer Freedom article.

As in many junk-science consumer scares, the results in this study were "cherry-picked from largely inconclusive evidence." But that's not the only reason to be suspicious:

The red-meat-causes-cancer scare story is further undermined by several additional factors:

• Despite an increase in the relative risk of cancer in a small proportion of the author's findings, the actual risk -- even at high rates of consumption -- is still very low. Even one of the study's co-authors corroborates this point in today's Wall Street Journal, which reports: "Dr. [Eugenia] Calle explained that actual risk is relatively small."
• The authors relied on a questionnaire that asks participants to report how much red and processed meat they consumed over the course of the previous year. These surveys are notoriously unreliable. A JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] editorial accompanying the study notes that "case-control studies of diet, in which patients with cancer and a control group are asked about their diet years in the past, can be misleading."
• One survey used by the authors failed to ask how many servings of meat were eaten each day. Another survey didn't ask about family history of cancer, which is critical in predicting the disease.

In other words, the research was sloppy, and the results were twisted. Next!


UPDATE: Steven Milloy over at JunkScience.com also has a few choice words for this study and its researchers.