USDA official was a dissenter when the International Agency for Research on Cancer linked red meat to cancer
HOUSTON, Texas — When American journalist Nina Teicholz published her book The Big Fat Surprise, she upset commonly held theories about diet and health.
“The low-fat diet cannot be shown to be effective at fighting obesity, diabetes, heart disease or any kind of cancer,” she said at the recent International Livestock Congress held in Houston.
Teicholz is a health reporter and started her research with an article about trans fats. After 10 years of looking at the issue, she found that linking diet with heart disease and other chronic conditions may be weak.
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While some health professionals do not agree, Teicholz continues her crusade and has joined a nutrition coalition to pressure government to use science-based information when developing dietary guidelines and nutrition information.
She cited the revised United States dietary guidelines, which when first released seemed to reject meat. She argued that those proposals were influenced by politics, activist agendas and corporate interests.
She said the process used to develop a food guide is changing. Her website may be viewed at www.nutritioncoalition.us.
The scientific director of human nutrition research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed with Teicholz on many issues.
David Klurfield was one of 22 scientists invited to join the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It published a report in the October 2015 Lancet Oncology that raised international controversy because of commentary associating red meat and processed meats with some forms of cancer.
He was a dissenter among the group meeting in France and continues to criticize the IARC conclusions because he believed the data was not compelling enough to rule that processed meat is a possible human carcinogen and red meat a probable cause of cancer.
“Red meat consumption has been associated with a laundry list of illnesses and death,” he said at the livestock congress.
“One of the things that is ignored in a review like this is a fundamental tenant in toxicology that actually was published 400 years ago: that the dose makes the poison,” he said.
High doses of water, vitamin A, selenium, iron, iodine, manganese, sodium and calcium overdoses can do harm or even kill.
He said the working group assessed more than 800 epidemiological studies that investigated the association of cancer with consumption of red or processed meat in many countries.
Up to a third of committee members voted against the majority view, depending on the questions presented during their debates. Some other epidemiologists proposed using the terms possible versus probable carcinogen but they did not prevail.
“They did go through more than 800 studies but that is not what they used to reach their conclusions,” he said.
They relied on 18 studies of processed meat results that were not consistent in their findings.
“The quality of the studies was not evaluated. Just because it is published doesn’t mean they are equally good studies,” he said.
He argues no valid review was done of all the available studies.
Other studies were conducted on rats who were fed vast amounts of the meat. He said some of the studies could not be extrapolated.
“We don’t know if there is a risk from red or processed meat. This isn’t a pass to eat as much meat as you want. I have reservations about eating too much of anything whether it is water, apples or red meat,” he said.
“My nutrition advice is moderation and variety is the key,” he said.
He argued scientists also have biases.
“I have met plenty of vegetarians on committees who will not be satisfied until we all give up eating meat,” he said.
He also quoted Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis who wrote, “advocacy and activism have become larger aspects of the work done by many nutrition researchers and these should be viewed as conflicts of interest that need to be disclosed.”
He said there are a number of cancer risks in modern life.
Practices like smoking, alcohol use, unsafe sex, obesity and low fruit and vegetable intake can be risky.
Weight, exercise, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, stress, socioeconomic status and education all affect a person’s health and disease risk.
There are also lifestyle or genetic predispositions toward increased cancer risks, he said.
He submitted a rebuttal piece to the peer reviewed journal Meat Science in 2015 to challenge research gaps in evaluating the relationship between meat and health. The paper defends eating meat as a healthy source of protein, iron, zinc and the B vitamins and advised moderation in diet choices.
