Does a Red Meat Diet Increase the Risk of Pancreatic Cancer?

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of death among people who die of cancer, and because it’s usually not diagnosed until the tumors have begun to spread elsewhere in the body, survival rates are especially low. That is why people who have known risk factors for pancreatic cancer (a parent, grandparent, or sibling who had the disease, work in the petrochemical industry, work with solvents, smoking) may benefit from dietary changes that lower the risk of the disease. Or at least lower the risk of the disease on a population-wide level.

Red meat has long been suspect as a source of pancreatic cancer risk. Physicians at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston interviewed 626 people who had pancreatic cancer and 530 healthy controlled and learned that people who develop this condition tend to eat more

:

Bacon, Grilled chicken, Fried chicken, and Well-done pork, but

Increased risk was not associated with:

Hamburger (with one exception, listed below) or Steak.

People who develop pancreatic cancer were more likely to prefer crispy bacon and very well done chicken than people who didn’t develop the disease.

Why don’t we go forward with this piece of content. The specific carcinogen most associated with cancer of the pancreas was the mindbogglingly named 2-amino-3,4,8-trimethylimidazo[4,5-f]quinoxaline (DiMeIQx). This chemical is formed when hamburger is “charred” so that its edges are burnt. Baked, fried, or medium rare hamburgers produce only small amounts of this chemical, but char-burgers are measurably carcinogenic.

What most afficionados of grilled meat and barbecue don’t know is, the heterocyclic amines, the chemically modified proteins of meat cooked at high temperatures, have to be detoxified with the same enzymes the liver uses to detoxify tobacco smoke or chemicals from gasoline or solvents. Eating well-done red meat on a regular basis may take so much of the liver’s enzyme capacity that it’s not able to deal with the toxic load coming from elsewhere in the environment.

There was one silver lining in the dark cloud of the findings of this study. The MD Anderson researchers learned that people who had a family history of pancreatic cancer weren’t at elevated risk for getting the disease if they avoided well-done meats.

Robert Rister is the author or co-author of 9 books and over 2,000 articles on natural health including an article on Vitamin D and the Risk of Pancreatic Cancer.