Studies leave little to chew on

I’m sick to death of studies that make us think we must eat like rabbits or die of some dreaded disease. There was another big one this week and, as usual, it was featured on the television newscasts just as I was sitting down to eat a plate of food that’s apparently as lethal as strychnine.

The latest effort from the American Institute for Cancer Research bills itself as the most comprehensive study ever of the links between obesity and cancer. It turns out that if you’ve been eating any of the foods people actually like to consume, your risk of cancer is up. If you drink alcohol, even that supposedly healthful red wine, you’re definitely in the checkout line. In fact, you might even have been doomed from birth. The study asserts that high birth weight is a risk factor for cancer. So is being tall. Slouching down probably won’t reduce the tall person’s cancer risk, but someone is surely studying it.

This new study, actually a review of 7,000 previous studies, tells us a lot of things we’ve heard before, but it does so emphatically. Red meat is bad. Fish is good. Unless it’s contaminated with chemicals, of course, but that’s a different study. Pastries, french fries and sugary drinks are bad, we’re told. Gee, who would have thought?

If this study had simply said exercise, keep your weight down and drink in moderation, it wouldn’t even have merited a news brief. That’s all just common sense. It’s the link to the ghastly killer cancer that’s really supposed to put the fear of food into us.

The cancer statistic one most frequently hears, usually when people are raising money for cancer, is that 39 per cent of women will develop cancer during their lifetimes, as will 44 per cent of men. Big numbers, but even at that they would justify a headline saying “We’re not all going to die of cancer.”

Let’s look at the statistics another way. About 160,000 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer this year. Again, a big number, but consider that there are nearly 33 million Canadians. This year, cancer will hit less than 0.5 per cent of the population. If you put 200 Canadians into a room, you could predict that one of them would get cancer this year. Still scared to death?

Lung cancer affects the largest number of Canadians, with 23,300 new cases a year. Now we’re talking a really tiny fraction of one per cent of all Canadians.

We also tend to erroneously assume that if cancer wasn’t killing us, we’d just keep on living. As one newspaper rather optimistically put it this week, “Millions of deaths could be avoided, study finds.” Quite a thing, if true. Perhaps “Millions of deaths could be delayed” would be closer to the mark.

In fact longevity has been increasing and now stands at 82.5 years for women and 77.7 years for men. Maybe it’s a tragedy that we’re not all going to live to be 100, but I doubt it.

It’s important to remember that cancer is largely a disease of old age. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, 44 per cent of new cancer cases and 60 per cent of cancer deaths occur among people 70 or older. Not to sound harsh, but if cancer hadn’t killed them, something else would have in fairly short order.

The question we should be asking is to what extent are we prepared to let study-induced disease fear affect the pleasure we take from food and drink. I’m not advocating gluttony and drunkenness, but this new study says we shouldn’t even eat lunch meat.

It does allow that seven 75-gram servings of red meat a week won’t kill us outright but it also suggests that every 48 grams of red meat consumed each day beyond the 500-gram weekly allotment increases cancer risk by 15 per cent. Fifteen per cent, sounds like quite a bit, but you’d have to know what the risk was in the first place. Pretty small, I would expect.

It seems like scarcely a day goes by when we aren’t getting new “scientific” health advice. The only certainty is that the latest study will contradict the one before it. For example, this week yet another study cast doubt on the cancer fighting ability of vitamin D. You’ll remember that this vitamin’s miracle effect was the last big cancer story.

Here’s what I believe. We’re all going to die eventually so we should enjoy our lives while we’re living them. That doesn’t mean a steady diet of cauliflower and broccoli. Give me suicide by steak any day.

Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com

by Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen

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