processed meat every day had an 18 percent higher chance
of colorectal cancer.
Context is key. That may as well become your default man-
tra whenever you absorb new information about what’s
healthy or not, or somewhere in between. In the processed
meat case, an 18 percent increased risk means you go from
the baseline of a 5 percent chance over the course of your
entire life that you’ll get colorectal cancer to about a 6 per-
cent chance.
The chance of getting cancer and dying because of eating
processed meat is not the same as the chance of getting
cancer and dying because of smoking. That both are in the
Group 1 designation by the WHO’s International Agency for
Research on Cancer means they share the same strength
of scientific evidence in terms of ties to cancer. That’s a
pretty wonky classification system for most of us regu-
lar consumers. It basically means there’s a lot of scientific
evidence for the connection to cancer in both cases. This
particular finding came from an analysis of 800 studies by
twenty-two experts representing ten different countries.
But for perspective about the relative magnitude of this
increased risk, the number of cancer deaths worldwide that
can be attributed to eating lots of processed meat is about
34,000 per year. The number of cancer deaths from smok-
ing tobacco is 1,000,000; from excess alcohol, 600,000; and
from exposure to air pollution, 200,000.
Importantly, though, as discussed, there is still plenty of
evidence that consuming high amounts of red and processed
meat (when eaten instead of better protein sources like fish,
poultry, and legumes) can lead to plenty of other diseases—
from heart disease and stroke to type 2 diabetes—and increaseStuff That comes from animals 137Conscious Eater_02 PT_4th patches.indd 137 10/23/19 1:31 PM