A reuters article appearing on MSNBC.com cites a new study that, for the first time, shows a definite link between meat consumption and certain types of cancer, including colorectal cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancer, pancreatic cancer, and lung cancer.
The study involved five hundred thousand individuals between the ages of fifty-one and seventy. After an eight-year period, 53,396 individual diagnoses of cancer were made.
In such a large study, focusing on this particular age range, that number may not seem significant. However, the researchers were able to able to find high statistical correlations between meat (particularly red meat) consumption and the incidence of the aforementioned cancers.
To use one example, those individuals whose processed meat consumption placed them in the top twenty percent of meat eaters...had a twenty percent higher risk for developing colorectal cancer and a sixteen percent higher risk for developing lung cancer.