Health aNd Fitness Guide

Beef, pork, lamb and processed bacon, red-meat sausage, and poultry sausage can increase risk of cancer. The more red and processed meat you eat, the greater your risk of having a variety of cancers, said a study published in online journal PLoS Medicine from the National Cancer Institute, US. “Red and processed meat have been associated with an elevated risk with colorectal cancer. We investigated if this association was also evident for cancers at other anatomic sites”, said Amanda Cross, epidemiologist at the institute. Cross and her team analyzed health data of about half a million people aged between 50 and 71. During an eight-year observation period, 53,396 of them developed cancer. The researchers found that colorectal and lung cancer were high among those who consumed greater quantities of red and processed meat. Other cancers linked to high intake of such meat are prostate, oesophageal, laryngeal, bladder and liver cancers.