For anyone who's interested. A n excellent study started in China in 1983 and is still underway (I believe), with much bigger population sample and less complicating factors(homogenous pupulation, more standarised diet by region).
The science shows clearly that we don't need meat also the high protein intake exacerbatescreate such problems as cancer/osteoporosis amongst others. The results have been published by the lead scientist T Colin Cambell, in a book called the China Study. Campbell starts out a confirmed meat eater and ends up a vegetarian.
I think "further study required" only applies if you happen to work in meat production/sales. There is in fact no justification to eat meat, nutritional, ecological or moral. There have been so many dodgy practices exposed in commercial livestock rearing and the subsequent preparation of meat that my own opinion is that you simply cannot be confident about what's in the meat you eat unless it was an animal raised, killed and butchered by me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8127215.stm
The science shows clearly that we don't need meat also the high protein intake exacerbatescreate such problems as cancer/osteoporosis amongst others. The results have been published by the lead scientist T Colin Cambell, in a book called the China Study. Campbell starts out a confirmed meat eater and ends up a vegetarian.
I think "further study required" only applies if you happen to work in meat production/sales. There is in fact no justification to eat meat, nutritional, ecological or moral. There have been so many dodgy practices exposed in commercial livestock rearing and the subsequent preparation of meat that my own opinion is that you simply cannot be confident about what's in the meat you eat unless it was an animal raised, killed and butchered by me.
For years, they have boasted of the health benefits of their leafy diets, but now vegetarians have the proof that has so far eluded them: when it comes to cancer risks, they have the edge on carnivores.
Fresh evidence from the largest study to date to investigate dietary habits and cancer has concluded that vegetarians are 45% less likely to develop cancer of the blood than meat eaters and are 12% less likely to develop cancer overall.
Scientists said that while links between stomach cancer and eating meat had already been reported, they had uncovered a "striking difference" in the risk of blood cancers including leukaemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma between the groups. The study looked at vegetarians, fish eaters and people who ate meat.
Co-author Naomi Allen, from the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, said: "Previous research has found that processed meat may increase the risk of stomach cancer, so our findings that vegetarians and fish eaters are at lower risk is plausible. But we do not know why cancer of the blood is lower in vegetarians."
She said the differences in cancer risks were independent of other lifestyle factors including smoking, alcohol intake and obesity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8127215.stm
