Meat industry slams cancer study
raise the risk of pancreatic cancer was 'not capable of proving
cause and effect', claims the American meat association.
The meat industry was quick to respond to findings released this week that linked processed meats to pancreatic cancer.
"The most important fact is that the larger body of evidence has shown processed meats are a healthy part of a balanced diet," said the American Meat Institute Foundation yesterday.
The meat group claims the study was not a laboratory-based study and therefore "does not provide scientific explanation about the mechanism of observed effect."
Epidemiological studies also are not capable of proving cause and effect, they say.
The study that provoked this reaction from the meat industry was led by Ute Nöthlings at the Cancer Research Center of the University of Hawaii .
His team investigated the relationship of diet to pancreatic cancer among 190,545 men and women of African-American, Japanese-American, Caucasian, Latino and Native Hawaiian origin.
An average follow-up of seven years yielded 482 incident cases of pancreatic cancer.
The researchers found those who consumed the greatest amount of processed meats had a 67 per cent increase in risk over those participants with the lowest intake of this food category.
Consumption of poultry, fish, dairy products and eggs showed no link to pancreatic cancer risk, nor did overall intake of total fat, saturated fat, or cholesterol.
"An analysis of fat and saturated fat intakes showed a significant increase in risk for fats from meat, but not from dairy products, indicating that fat and saturated fat are not likely to contribute to the underlying carcinogenic mechanism," said Nöthlings.
But the meat industry unequivocally rejected the findings, saying "this study is an epidemiological study, which means it involved clipboards, calculators and interviews with people about foods eaten in the past."
