A new study of half a million people from the National Cancer Institute finds that red and processed meat not only promotes colon cancer--which everyone knew--but esophagus, liver, lung and pancreas cancer!
Grilled meat, the study found, is especially bad because it produces heterocyclic amines--linked to breast, colon, stomach and prostate cancers--and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, another class of carcinogens formed from dripping fat.
Much to the chagrin of cattlemen, in the last two decades red meat has gone from good-for-you to do-it-if-you-feel lucky. Not as kamikaze as smoking or eating a Lake Michigan fish but getting there.
In fact the all American meal of roast beef swimming in a moat of gravy and mashed potatoes, rolls, butter and pie for dessert is now regarded as a coronary waiting to happen.
And that's before we get to the all American breakfast of sausage and bacon.
No, for anyone who wants to live past 40 today the four food groups are no longer cholesterol, salt, calories and fat. There's a new sheriff in town and he's called fiber.
It's got to be rough on the Department of Agriculture these days--promoting beef and the beef industry while safeguarding the population whose health it destroys.
USDA can't come right out and say red meat causes heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, obesity and most of the other neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases that are known to man.
So it says a low fat diet prevents them--the same way low tar cigarettes prevent lung cancer and low ultraviolet exposure prevents melanoma.
Instead of saying get your affairs in order before eating this product, it does a little diplomatic dance and says red meat can be a valuable contribution to a well balanced diet when used in moderation. So can saw dust.
And the problems don't end there.
Thanks to the "honor" system enacted in slaughterhouses, HACCP-- Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point or Have A Cup of Coffee and Pray--in which packers inspect their own operations with no onsite federal inspectors to stop the line and lose the company money, e Coli is another red meat "perk."
How do you convince people the meat is perfectly safe when they have to disinfect their hands, cutting board and utensils after handling it?
And speaking of biohazards, does anyone really think mad cow disease has gone away?
You can lead a horse to water, OR, aim a flood to the horse
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Such good overview articles as this -- which shows the cover-up of red meat dining as the fuelfood of America's cancer epidemic -- often go by without my commenting. Which comment normally is, Hear! Hear!.
Instead of commenting to the article, I often take the article (link) to apply as a comment to someone else, who didn't see the article and might learn something, new to them. Also often, that person intends to keep themself from seeing such articles, in order to preserve a 'not-knowing' (ignorance) deliberately, and so the link I pass along is never linked and goes unread.
This time -- switcheroo -- let's see what happens if all the OpEdNews folks who read this article, here see a link to a young person who risks her health chowing down baskets of burgers, keeping reality's facts from fazing her.
She's a crime reporter at a small town newspaper. The newspaper profits on selling ad space to burgerbomb franchises; the newspaper provides her a blog space, which approximately no one reads, where she tells about her burger diet and collects all comments coming in.
So I'm curious what happens when a worldwide audience here, floods a sleepy small town naive shelter, in the internet current, with facts about fetid red meat.
Here's her magnum opus to the savor of Big Max, careful not to drip the secret sauce on her desk, reporter's notes, and keyboard, with the Whole World Watching.
And the wider scope of her rightwing non-sensibilities, kept in the artificial atmosphere of truthlessness behind the barricades against real world war crimes of the adored US Administration, at this rightwing propaganda newspaper, is on display here:
She and other up-and-coming newspaper crime reporters might be unaware of what butcherbush police have in store for them in their careers ahead. Quite likely she was blocked from ever seeing this veteran crime reporter's eyewitness account of being tortured:
Editor's Note: This is a first-person account of Bill Lawson's arrest by a state trooper while attempting to take pictures at a house fire in Maumelle on Monday evening.
MAUMELLE -- Having lived 59 years, battled cancer, worn the country's uniform for 26 years and proudly worked as a journalist -- a profession I always admired -- I thought I'd seen it all. That is until Monday night, when I was arrested and charged with a criminal offense just for trying to do my job and take photos of a residential fire in Maumelle.
Being arrested, searched, having my camera, reporter's notebook and billfold confiscated, humiliated in front of friends and people I write about every week was a difficult way to be arrested for the first time in my life. ...
I knew I'd done nothing wrong. But I knew better than to argue with a sate [sic] trooper who obviously had an attitude. ...
That would be an Arkansas state trooper, by the way, so disconnected from human reality that he thinks militaristic fascism can block truth of Human Rights war crimes from reaching small town journalists and coming out in the paper.
by
meremark (1 articles, 3 quicklinks, 23 diaries, 440 comments)
on Saturday, December 15, 2007 at 6:46:20 PM
