The Cancer Project in America has sued McDonald’s, Burger King and Friendly Ice Cream Corp over the sale of chicken containing PhIP, a chemical which forms during the grilling process, that can cause cancer. The companies were accused of concealing the fact that the grilled chicken contained PhIP to avoid financial losses.

From Bloomberg:-

The residents who filed the Connecticut suit, Rebecca Delio, of Stamford, and Mary-Ann Ellison, of Meriden, want the court to force the companies to include warnings in their restaurants, menus and advertisements that the food is known to contain chemicals that cause cancer.

Delio ate grilled chicken from one of the three companies’ restaurants once a week, and Ellison four times a month at a McDonald’s in Wallingford, according to the complaint. Both stopped buying the grilled chicken about a year ago when they learned of the cancer risk, they said in the complaint.

Delio, 66, was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago, she said in a phone interview. She can’t blame her diagnosis on eating grilled chicken, she said. “It’s a possibility,” she said, adding that cancer runs in her family.

“I happen to like grilled chicken,” Delio said. “I checked it out on the Internet, and I learned that this is true, that grilled stuff is really no good for you.”

Ellison’s boyfriend was diagnosed with colon cancer, Kinburn said. He has other medical issues and the couple turned to grilled-chicken salads for what they thought would be healthful meals, the lawyer said.

A spokesperson for the Cancer Project said “We’re not looking to have them stop selling the product. The product is a legal though dangerous product that should be sold with a warning, like a chainsaw.” Burger King has apparently agreed to put warning on the product in its California outlets.

In a separate case last month, KFC was also accused of knowingly selling chicken that contained PhIP.

Read the Bllomberg report here.

A major new study released today yet again indicates that red meat consumption results in a shorter life.

Meat Intake and Mortality; A Prospective Study of Over Half a Million People, from the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, USA, involved more than 500,000 American people aged 50 to 71. Each person had to fill in a questionnaire about diet, exercise, smoking, education and other things that could affect their health. There were 47,976 male deaths and 23,276 female deaths during follow-up period of 10 years. Through analysing the results, the researchers came to the conclusion that “red and processed meat intakes were associated with modest increases in total mortality, cancer mortality, and cardiovascular disease mortality”.

Using the word ‘modest’ seems misleading when you look at the figures. Male participants in the study who ate the most read meat per day, about 5 ounces (roughly the equivalent of a small steak), had a 31% higher risk of death over a 10-year period than men in the study who ate the lowest amount of red meat. For women, those who ate the most red meat had a huge 36% increase in death over a 10-year period compared with women who ate little red meat; eating lots of meat was associated with a 20% higher risk of dying of cancer and a 50% higher risk of dying of heart disease.

The researchers calculated that 11% of deaths in men and 16% of deaths in women during the study period could have been prevented if people had decreased their red meat consumption to the level of those in the lowest intake group.

To lower your risk of heart disease and cancer, the study advises an average daily limit of about 19 grams (0.7 ounces) of red meat for women, or 25 grams (almost an ounce) for men. But since red meat is so clearly damaging to our health, why eat any at all?

Following the World Cancer Research Fund report released in 2007, one in ten people have tried to cut down on their meat intake.

The World Cancer Research Fund report revealed that eating two rashers of bacon and two sausages a day resulted in a 63% higher risk of bowel cancer.

As you would expect, of the 2,124 people who took part in the online survey, those over 55 were most likely to have tried to cut down on their processed meat intake. Of those over 55, 37%  said they had tried to reduce their intake compared to just 6% of younger people.

It is encouraging to see that people are taking notice of the advice in the report. However, as long as supermarkets continue to offer cheap meat, such as Asda’s 2p sausages, young and low income people are unlikely to change their dietary habits.

The subsidies and environmental destruction that allow cheap meat to remain on our shelves needs to be stopped. If we sold meat at it’s true cost, we would see a reduction in meat consumption simply because people would not be able to afford it any more. In the report ‘Eating More Veggies Can Help Save Energy’, Simone Spearman points out ‘If water used by the meat industry [in the United States] were not subsidized by taxpayers, common hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound’. This is just taking in to account water use, let alone pollution, energy use, climate change… McDonalds charges around $3.50 for a quarter pounder with cheese in the US.

Another new study, from the Oxford University, has shown that high consumption of meat and dairy increases the chances of men developing prostate cancer. The scientists believe that high levels of a hormone, Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1), which speeds up cell division and thus is necessary for children to grow also for promotes the growth of cancerous tumours.

The scientists compared the results of 12 studies, involving almost 9,000 men, and concluded that higher levels of IGF-1 results in a 40% higher incidence of prostate cancer. Previous studies have shown that levels of the hormone are higher in men who eat a lot of meat and dairy, while strict vegetarians have low levels.

This is nothing new. IGF-1 is well-known for it’s link to cancer, and not just prostate cancer, but all forms of the disease.

Now here’s the crazy part. Rather than educating people about this and recommending they cut down on meat and dairy, the scientists are now going to spend more time and money on finding ways to block the effects of the hormone. Where is the sense in that? Or perhaps we have been getting it all wrong all this time. Perhaps instead of encouraging people to stop smoking we should just find a way to stop tobacco from giving people lung cancer? Or instead of trying to stop people drinking excessively we should just find a way of stopping alcohol from getting people drunk and rotting their livers?

Simple, just cut down on red meat and dairy and eat more plant based foods.

A new study yet again proves that the Mediterranean diet can cut your cancer risk significantly. Eating a Mediterranean diet, which consists of six main food types - fruit, vegetables, legumes (peas, beans lentils), cereals (wholegrain bread), monounsaturated fat (olive oil), fish - can reduce your cancer risk by 22%. Just by adding two of these food types to your diet each day can reduce your cancer risk by 12%, make this 6 times a day, and the risk is minimised by 22%.

Over 26,000 Greek men and women were studied over 8 years and the conclusion was that consuming high levels of monosaturated fats (ie the good fats found in plant based foods like olive oil) and low amounts of saturated fats (ie the bad fats found in meat and dairy) was the single most significant factor in lowering cancer risk from the diet.

The study, published in the Journal of Cancer, is part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer, which was set up to ‘investigate the relationships between diet, nutritional status, lifestyle and environmental factors and the incidence of cancer and other chronic diseases. EPIC is the largest study of diet and health ever undertaken, having recruited over half a million (520,000) people in ten European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom’.

How many more studies do we need before the government takes some positive action to improve the health of the nation? Isn’t it about time foods containing saturated fat, and in particular red and processed meats, came with a health warning, like cigarettes?

Researchers at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center are currently feeding gossypol, a cancer-fighting substance found in cotton, to chickens. The idea is that if they feed it to chickens and then we eat the chicken and eggs, we will then have the perfect cancer-fighting food. What absolute lunacy!

We all know that around two thirds of cancers are caused by life style choices - too much red meat, obesity, excessive alcohol, smoking and inactivity increase our risk of cancer. We also know that the foods that help us prevent and recover from cancer are fresh vegetables and fruit, especially those high in antioxidants and phytochemicals. More importantly, there are not any foods which originate from animals which are thought to contain ingredients which fight cancer; quite the contrary - red meat is strongly associated with cancers such as bowel and breast.

It is also important to remember that the vast majority of chickens are reared intensively which means they are fat, unhealthy birds full of antibiotics. To add gossypol to chicken feed and then promote the eggs and flesh of these sick birds as healthy and cancer-fighting would be nothing short of a disaster for our health.

It is not necessary to create the perfect cancer-fighting food. They already exist. What is needed is education, not research. This is seriously the craziest thing I have ever heard, it’s not April 1 is it?

The World Cancer Research Fund advised today that the safest amount of processed meats, such as bacon and sausages, people should consume is none at all. Their research has shown a strong link between processed meats and bowel cancer.

Professor Martin Wiseman, Medical and Scientific Adviser for World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), has warned people that if they eat 50g of processed meat a day then their bowel cancer risk is increased by 20 per cent.

WCRF advise that people avoid all processed meats.

There is also convincing evidence to show that red meat such as beef, lamb and pork cause bowel cancer which is the third most common type of cancer in the UK, with almost 100 new cases being diagnosed every day. Safest option - go veg!

The health section of the Observer magazine today offers advice from a nutritionist, chef and supplements expert to a mother worried about her 17 year old son becoming vegan.

The responses were helpful and positive but there are a few other facts that would have put this mother’s mind at ease.

Foods from animal sources are high in saturated fat, which clogs arteries and can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. Obesity is another problem caused by excess fat in the diet, and as the UK Department of Health advises on it’s website, obesity causes around 58% of type 2 diabetes, 21% of heart disease and between 8% and 42% of certain cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon).

With over 21% of the UK population classified as obese, this mother should be thrilled her son is very unlikely to become one of them, especially at this most important time in his life. Vegans are seldom over weight - population studies show that meat-eaters have three times the obesity rate of vegetarians and nine times the obesity rate of vegans.

The experts also fail to mention all the many ‘meat substitutes’ on the market these days. Everything from vegan mince for spaghetti bolognese, lasagne and chillis, to vegan ice-cream in all kinds of yummy flavours, to fish-free fish fingers, dairy-free cheese and meat-less sausages. Redwood Foods are stocked in most health shops and make a vegan diet both easy and delicious.

As his fellow students grow fat, spotty and sluggish, tucking in to typical student food like McDonalds and KFC, this 17 year old will be bright and healthy and getting in to good habits to ensure a long, disease-free life. And what’s more, what mother could be more proud of a son who is providing a good example to other (often selfish) teenagers by putting his energy in to living with compassion?

Observer article
Obesity ‘as bad as climate risk’ BBC article