panic on a plate

Here’s the argument:

1. people who deliberately do things that are bad for them, despite being told time and again that they should not, are now lectured, restricted and even have their basic rights taken away;
2. eating meat - and particularly ‘processed’ meat - increases your risk of getting cancer and is bad for you;
3. therefore, people who eat meat should now be lectured, restricted and even have their basic rights taken away.

Now, this is a shocking argument. It is also quite logical, given the petty authoritarian mindset that flourished under New Labour and is still going strong under the Lib-Con coalition (and, indeed, around the world). But Barbara Ellen is wrong on both the science and the politics.

The science

Ellen’s tirade is built on the publication of a report in the British Journal of Cancer Research which suggests that eating processed meat increases the risk of pancreatic cancer by 19 per cent for each 50g of processed meat consumed daily. In addition, the paper found a weak link between pancreatic cancer and eating red meat for men, but no such link for women.

However, it would be wrong to assume such claims about risk are set in stone.

First there is the question of whether the association claimed is real. Epidemiological studies like the ones brought together by these researchers will typically find out what participants ate for a day or a week using a questionnaire or a food diary. Then, the participants will be checked some years later to see who has succumbed to the disease in question.

Did people remember what they ate correctly? It would be unusual for anyone to have weighed the food, so the amounts could be inaccurate, too. What else did the participants eat? And what the hell is ‘processed’ meat, anyway? Unless you slaughter your own animals, your meat will have been processed to one degree or another. Where’s the dividing line?

There are so many ways in which the crude tools of epidemiology could screw up the result that it is normal for fairly small risks - like the 19 per cent in this case - to be treated with a massive pinch of salt. The authors of this study even note: ‘All studies controlled for age and smoking, but only a few studies adjusted for other potential confounders such as body mass index and history of diabetes.’

Secondly, even if the association is not simply an artefact of the study design, we still don’t know if correlation equals causation. The best we can say is that the kind of people who like to eat processed meat are a bit more likely to get pancreatic cancer than the people who don’t eat meat at all. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist - or a professor of epidemiology - to think that vegetarians are quite different in lots of ways from people who eat a lot of burgers and kebabs.

Thirdly, even if this study has somehow managed to be supremely accurate and found a real risk, we have to ask if such an increase is of any practical significance in the real world. Cancer Research UK gives statistics on pancreatic cancer. For the UK, the age-standardised rate is 9.3 cases per 100,000 people per year - roughly one person in every 10,000. Even if we assume that vegetarians have the average rate of pancreatic cancer, then even those people who really like processed meat and eat 150g per day would have about a 50 per cent increased risk. Instead of it being 10,000-to-one that these bacon-and-sausage lovers develop pancreatic cancer in any particular year, it would be 6,666-to-one.

[Postscript, 16 January: the nice people at Sense About Science have provided some useful additional material, pointing out that it would take 36,000 people to eat one fewer sausage per day (or equivalent) to save one extra life.]

It’s hardly the kind of risk to make you skip your favourite foods, is it?

The politics

Given the tone of the piece, I was really hoping that Ellen would end by saying: ‘Of course, telling people not to eat meat is stupid - every bit as stupid as telling them not to drink or smoke or telling them not to be fat. The government should just butt out.’ Sadly, there is no note of irony anywhere. She really does want to stick it to meat-eaters.

So, Ellen seems to think that the meat-and-cancer link is just common sense (rather than being at the very least controversial and probably of great significance anyway). ‘This information has popped up regularly for years in all forms of popular media. Indeed, in this era of info overload, if you’ve never come across the “burgers and kebabs are unhealthy” revelation, one would have to presume you’ve been lying in a coma. With this in mind, isn’t it time to ask, exactly how thick, how hard to educate, are meat eaters and why aren’t they held accountable in the same way everyone else is?’

She continues: ‘Sympathy is in short supply these days. You can’t move for people being blamed for their own miserable situations: smokers who “burden” the NHS; alcoholics who don’t “deserve” liver transplants; obese people who “should” pay more for flights. Even those poor terrified women with the faulty breast implants are said to have “brought it on themselves”. By this logic, people who’ve been regularly informed of the dangers of meat, particularly the cheap processed variety, but who continue to wolf it down should be held just as accountable.’

Now that the precedent has been set for the government to lambast those who engage in unapproved habits, it’s open season on any habit that a campaigner or columnist disapproves of. Ban it! Tax it! Make them get a prescription for it! Deny them medical care! Ellen’s article is utterly objectionable but it only follows the remorseless logic of so many others.

The only proper response to this junkscience-based illiberalism is to defend everyone’s right to indulge in these petty vices.