Do Cold Cuts Cause Cancer? The Making of a Misnomer

The problem with most modern 'journalism' is that it's done by people like me.

Writers are, on the whole, an unscrupulous bunch who'll twist the facts like a pretzel as long as it supports whatever attention-grabbing headline it is they're trying to flog.

A good case in point was the recent 'sunscreen controversy' - in which thousands cast aside the SPF 35 in the mistaken belief that sunscreen actually caused, rather than prevented, cancer.

Compounding that problem was the fact that there are reams of people who'll only ever read the headline of an article and never bother to consider the facts themselves.

'Does sunscreen cause cancer?' became 'Sunscreen definitely causes cancer' and before you knew it, people are out in the midday sun cultivating their melanoma with reckless abandon.

For today's post, I thought I'd deconstruct the process and reveal what a crock most of these articles are - and why you should be very wary about how many of these frightening headlines you choose to believe.

A good place to start is this article, released today on Yahoo:

Cold cuts could cause cancer: study

Already linked with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and certain cancers, including cancer of the pancreas, red meat cold cuts were found by a team of US researchers to be a possible cause of bladder cancer, a study published in the journal Cancer said. Full story here.

Based on this article, cue thousands of parents throwing out their cuts of cold roast beef, and banning their kids from eating at Subway and Arbys. Cue officious idiots sneering at strangers: "Oh, you shouldn't feed your child cold cuts. They cause cancer, you know."

But do they? Is there really any weight to this theory at all? What most people fail to do is actually look at the big picture, and work out for themselves whether they really have anything to be worried about.

In this instance, there are certain subtle nuances you won't get if you simply read the headline. For example:

The culprits in the cold cuts are nitrates and nitrites which are added to meat when it is processed to preserve and enhance color and flavor.

So for a start, cold cuts aren't really what causes cancer - a chemical sometimes found in them is. It's also a chemical found in a host of other substances, including wine and even fresh green vegetables (in fact, most nitrate-poisoning occurs amongst vegetarians who have eaten too much green produce, which is fertilized with nitrates.)

But lets dig further into the 'meat' of the study, like this passage:

For the study, scientists assessed the intake of nitrates, nitrites and other components found in red meat, in some 300,00 men and women aged 50-71 year, in eight US states, and its relation to cancer. The study participants were followed up for up to eight years. During that time, 854 were diagnosed with cancer of the bladder.

First of all, what the hell is '300,00' meant to be? Did the journalist mean 30,000? Did he get the comma right, but miss out a final zero - 300,000? Or was the comma meant to be a period, meaning that the study consisted of 300.00 subjects, all of whom died at least twice from bladder cancer (and some more than that.)

The significance is enormous. The study concludes that the subjects who had a high intake of nitrates had a "28 to 29 percent greater chance of developing cancer." Depending on the figures, that's an increase of .5% or .05% - which takes it from a dangerously significant figure to one among thousands (a risk factor that lovers of cold roast beef sandwiches might be willing to live with.)

Finally, the last significant headline omission was this:

The scientists also found that people who ate the most red meat were less educated, less physically active, and had lower dietary intake of fruits, vegetable, and vitamins C and E than those consuming the least red meat. They also found that they were more likely to be current smokers, to have a higher BMI, and to consume more beverages and total energy daily.

That ultimately shows that the group with the increased risk of bladder cancer weren't just classified as those who ate cold cuts. Compared to the group that didn't develop cancer, they were fatter (obesity is a big trigger for cancer) more likely to smoke (another trigger for cancer) and ate less vegetables and fruit (which contain cancer-busting antioxidants.) In short, there were a whole host of lifestyle factors that made these people more likely to develop cancer, so pinning it on cold cuts seems wildly misleading.

In fact, the title of the article should really have been: "Being overweight, smoking and not eating vegetables could cause cancer: study." But that's hardly news now, is it? And not likely to generate the kind of paranoid, misinformed buzz that online journalists are aiming for.

So don't start skipping your turkey and swiss quite yet - as you can see, the facts aren't quite as clear cut as this article would like you to think they are. More importantly, make sure you point out to anybody who's giving up cold cuts because of what they read on Yahoo that they should really stop being such lemmings and have an original thought of their own once in a while.

Finally, a more succinct version of what I explained here today:

How did the Universe Begin?

One of the big theological questions is: "How did it all begin?"

Well, that much is still a mystery. It's entirely possible that some higher power created the universe with one click of his (or her) fingers.

What we DO know is that the universe was created about 14 billion years ago, in an event that most scientists describe as 'the Big Bang.'

Why do I believe this?

Until recently, scientists believed in a 'static' universe - that the current configuration of planets, stars and galaxies were fixed. In 1912, an American called Vesto Melvin Slipher discovered something revolutionary. Peering through his telescope, he realised that objects in space (in his example, a spiral galaxy) were actually moving further away from Earth.


Scientists and astronomers realised that the planets and galaxies weren't moving away from Earth, but rather away from a universal central point.

By calculating the speed and trajectory of the voyaging galaxies' outward journey, scientists worked out that fourteen billion years ago, all the moons, planets, suns and galaxies must have started out from one location, in the center of the 'radius' of the Big Bang. They've been expanding outwards in a 'ripple' ever since.

The Big Question:

This is where my ignorance of scientific matters reveals itself.

I don't know why the Big Bang happened. I've tried reading the theories of primordial nucleosynthesis and it all seems wildly complicated.

I get the impression the big brainiacs are saying that the mass of the universe was squished and scrunched into such a tiny, atom-sized scale that all that pressure and heat created a spontaneous nuclear reaction that 'exploded' the existence into creation.

I don't understand physics enough to know if that makes sense, it's just as easy for somebody like me to imagine that it was a higher power who lit a 'universe firework' that detonated reality as we know it.

Some conjecture that the universe started with a 'cosmic egg,' which was the prior universe, having expanded to its maximum reach, collapsing in on itself in something called the 'Big Crunch.' This makes sense as it's what scientists hypothesise will happen once our current universe has reached the limits of its expansion.

But at the risk of sounding ignorant, I don't pretend to know why or what caused the Big Bang. I only know that it happened - and that's the biggest window religious people have to argue the existence of God.

What else could explain the sudden 'detonation' of an entire universe?

I don't believe in God, so I don't believe he created the universe. However, I've got an open mind, so when it comes to the Big Bang, I'm not going to tell anybody that they're wrong for attributing the creation of the universe to a higher power.

The age of the Earth? Creationists are wrong.

Evolution vs. Creation Doctrine? Creationists are wrong again.

The existence of God? Nobody can know for sure.

How old is the Earth?

Some Christians believe the world is about 6,000 years old, in accordance with the creation doctrine outlined in the Bible.

These people are wrong.

The world is actually about four and a half billion years old.

Why do I believe this?

Well, I'm not scientist - but if I go to a museum, I can see rocks that are 3.9 billion years old. Some of these rocks contain minerals that are up to 4.2 billion years old.

If the Earth consists of rocks that are over four billion years old, the Earth itself must be at least that old.

But how do we know how old these rocks are?

Through a system called 'radiometric dating.'

Although the science of radiometric dating is very complicated, the concept of it isn't. It's based around measuring how much the radioactive isotopes in the object being dated have decayed.

The principle's much like a candle: Take a ten inch high candle made of wax. If you light that candle and leave it for an hour, it will burn one inch of wax in that time.

Therefore, if you opened a door and found and same type of candle burning, but seven inches of it were melted, you'd know that it had been burning for seven hours.

With radiometric dating, you take a rock and measure how much of the radioactive isotope within it has decayed. Based on the rate that type of radioactive isotope normally decays, you can work out the approximate age of the rock based on the result.

Scientists have found minerals on the Earth that they can prove, conclusively, are 4.2 billion years old. Therefore, the world is at least that old.

B-b-but....?

Some Christians argue that the world is not four and a half billion years old. It's actually six thousand years old, like the Bible said.

They have two common theories to 'support' this:

1: Radiometric dating is inaccurate. Since the science doesn't support their belief, the science must be wrong. This is a fine theory, except it's not true and isn't based on any factual evidence whatsoever. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you can make it 'not true' by refusing to accept it.

Radiometric dating is just as real and observable as the wax candle I mentioned. We know that this hypothetical candle burns down one inch in one hour. Therefore, if it had burnt down seven inches, it must have been lit seven hours earlier. If you can explain how that candle could have burnt any faster (yet keep your answer within the boundaries of scripture) you might have a shot at convincing me about radiometric dating.

2: God created the Earth 'as is.' Some Christians argue that God did create the world six thousand years ago - except he created it to appear as if it was four and a half billion years old. That's a fine theory too, except it trips up.

First off, if God exists, WHY did he make the world appear older than it was?

Secondly, if God had the power to create an 'already old' world six thousand years ago, how do we know he didn't create the world (and all our memories) five seconds ago? Like the best irrational theories, this one can be neither proven nor disproved - but ultimately belongs more in the realms of philosophy than science.

Conclusion

The only rational conclusion, based on the evidence, is that the world has to be at least over four billion years old.

Science for Idiots (Idiots like me...)

Over on Coffee Bean's brilliant 'An Uneducated Housewife's Guide to Politics' there is all sorts of angry debate going on, encompassing many topics, including the perennial discussion about creationism versus evolution.

One of the angriest voices has been mine - simply because the whole existence of 'creationist doctrine' continues to astonish me.

Living in America, I'm often astonished at how similar things are to life in Britain. Oh, sure, the accent and the weather is different, but things are largely the same, aren't they?

Well, it stuff like creationism (and maple syrup on bacon, but I digress) that throws into sharp relief how different things in America actually are.

Here in the United States, people - and I'm talking about a lot of people - actually believe that the world was created in six days, exactly as it's written in the Bible.

This truly astonishes me.

For the most part, I like to think I'm fairly open minded and slip quite effortlessly into the conventions of different cultures. However, I find this particular one very difficult to swallow.

Over on Coffee Bean's blog, I haven't been altogether gentlemanly in my discussions. The words 'religious nutjob' and 'idiot' have passed my (virtual) lips more than once. This really isn't very mature of me. I should simply accept that other people have opinions different to my own (and then I should take the time to explain to them, in very simple terms, why they're wrong.)

Which is the point of the next few posts. I'm not a scientist - but I am a reasonably literate human being. I'm going to explain what I believe and why I believe it.

Now, as arrogant and opinionated as I am, I'm not always right. In fact, I'm not even often right! So there may be typos and errors in the next few posts that people should be more than willing to point out (for example, in a previous post I described the Earth as being 150 million years old. In fact, it's more like 5 billion years old.)

However, everything I write is going to be based in fact and science. I'm sorry, but evidence I can see and touch with my own two hands will always trump what's written in a two thousand year old religious text - no matter how 'inerrant' irrational people claim it to be.

Let the fun begin...