Prepared meats and cancer and an unrelated question

Divia

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I'm new to low carbs and I've been perusing a section of the grocery store I wouldn't have approached in times past. Cold meat, foods like salami and ham.

I remember it was said they caused cancer, due to things added to them (nitrates?).

What is the latest science about this? Is it a fact, or just misinformation?

Do cold meats without the offending substances exist? What should I look for to be safe?

Another question, not related: I've seen a recipe for chia dessert made with chia seeds, almond milk, heavy cream and vanilla extract. The guy said it was 0 carb. Is this possible? Aren't there carbs in these ingredients?
 

Brunneria

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Hi Divia,

The subject of processed meats comes up quite often, and we have had some excellent discussions covering all aspects of the subject. I suggest you do a Search for them, using a few key words, and see what crops up. The last one was only a week or two ago, and considered the evidence used to claim 'processed' meats caused cancer.

Likewise, for chia seed pudding, if you search you will find it mentioned in numerous places on the forum, including recipes.
Or just type 'Chia Pudding recipe low carb' into Google's search function - you will be inundated by recipes and blog articles discussing it. That is what happened when I went looking. My fave is chocolate chia pud... yum. :D
 

Estragon

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Great original question. Sometimes I get lost in the Forest of information that it becomes a fog, but that’s me.
 
M

Member496333

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I'm no expert on the subject, but I believe the link is tenuous at best. Epidemiological food questionnaires pumping out hazard ratios small enough to be virtually meaningless. I am also led to believe that there are as many, or more, nitrites and nitrates in saliva and celery respectively. Happy to be corrected, but as far as I can tell, the body of evidence is weak.
 
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Robbity

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I'll eat cold cooked meat, poultry and fish as part of my low carb diet, Some of these I can cook for myself and keep to eat cold. If I buy ready cooked, then I look at ingredients and make my choices, generally based on the least number of often unnecessary additives - e.g. no added sugar.

Preserving meats and fish is nothing new, and we haven't all been killed off yet, but if you're concerned then choose carefully and eat them in moderation.
 

Geordie_P

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I'm no expert on the subject, but I believe the link is tenuous at best. Epidemiological food questionnaires pumping out hazard ratios small enough to be virtually meaningless. I am also led to believe that there are as many, or more, nitrites and nitrates in saliva and celery respectively. Happy to be corrected, but as far as I can tell, the body of evidence is weak.

Agree with Jim on this one- there's very little meaningful data on the link, considering how it's bandied round as a truism: it's just a popular line of 'popular' science from the minds who brought you 'if it's organic it *must* be good for you' etc.
 

bulkbiker

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I'm new to low carbs and I've been perusing a section of the grocery store I wouldn't have approached in times past. Cold meat, foods like salami and ham.

I remember it was said they caused cancer, due to things added to them (nitrates?).

What is the latest science about this? Is it a fact, or just misinformation?

Do cold meats without the offending substances exist? What should I look for to be safe?

Another question, not related: I've seen a recipe for chia dessert made with chia seeds, almond milk, heavy cream and vanilla extract. The guy said it was 0 carb. Is this possible? Aren't there carbs in these ingredients?

There are some great video talks by Dr Georgia Ede and Dr Zoe Harcombe about exactly how the IARC came up with its anti processed/red meat statements.
They make for very interesting watching and show how poor the research actually was.
 
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I have been eating meat and bacon and other cold meats for over seventy years, and had no problems...
 

Resurgam

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If it is any help, my family all boil bacon for a minute or so, sieve it out and then fry it, and as the salt, nitrates and nitrites are all soluble they go down the drain. My mother's mother used to have a brine tub and would salt mutton and other meats, so I think it comes from her.
 
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ziggy_w

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The link between cancer and processed meats mostly stems from research based on food questionnaires. This type of research is notoriously weak as it cannot rule out any other possible causes of cancer. For example, it has been shown that people who consume processed red meat also tend to smoke more and exercise less. This is also called the healthy user bias in this type of research.

Even so, the link between consuming processed red meat and cancer is very weak -- if I remember correctly it increases the risk of colon cancer (but not most other types of cancers) by around 20%, i.e. your lifetime risk goes from 5% to 6%. Remember however, it might not actually be the processed red meat that causes this, but other unhealthy behaviors that are more common among consumers of processed red meat.

There has been a recent meta-analysis where the authors conclude that this link is not strong enough to make the recommendation to stop eating red meat or even processed red meat. Here is a link to the study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25941850/

At this point, I don't believe we really know what type of food increases the risk of cancer (other than smoking). There are even people who argue that consuming too many carbs is associated with an increased risk of certain types of cancer (e.g., breast cancer, brain cancer).

To establish a link between food and cancer, we would really need a long-term (around 10 years or longer) randomized controlled trial. This, however, imho will never be done because (a) you can't randomly assign a specific long-term diet to a group of people and expect them to follow it for 10 years if they didn't choose this way of eating themselves and (b) this type of study would be prohibitively expensive. So, we might never really know which type of diet lowers the likelihood of cancer and can only guess based on our interpretation of the evidence.

You might want to have a look of the Virta Health study on the benefit of a low-carb diet on diabetes if you are open to looking at other ways of eating.

[Moderator edit of quote from previously deleted post.]
 
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