Processed Meat: Definitely Will Slightly Increase Your Cancer Risk
Looking past the headlines, how dangerous is meat really?
The WHO notes that eating 50 grams, or 1.75 ounces, of processed meat a day “increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%.” For comparison, smoking a pack of cigarettes each day increases a person’s risk of developing lung cancer by about 2400%, according to a 2005 study in the British Journal of Cancer.
“The effect of red meat is surprisingly weak, far weaker than the effects of tobacco,” Johnson said.
In the UK, people have a 5% risk of being diagnosed with colon or bowel cancer during their lifetimes. Assuming they ate 50 grams of bacon each and every day of their lives, a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that their lifetime risk of these cancers would rise to 6%.