Dr. Shawn Baker on health: what the evidence says · JRE #2069

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Baker's argument treats population-level cancer incidence as evidence against any causal link between meat and cancer, but this conflates a low absolute/lifetime risk across a population with the epidemiological question of whether an exposure raises relative risk. In 2015 an IARC Working Group (WHO) reviewed over 800 epidemiological studies and classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen (sufficient evidence it causes colorectal cancer in humans) and red meat as Group 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans (limited evidence, mainly for colorectal cancer, with associations also reported for pancreatic and prostate cancer). WHO explicitly cautions that this classification describes the strength of the evidence that an exposure causes cancer, not the size of the risk; the studies underlying it found modest relative-risk increases (about an 18% higher risk of colorectal cancer per 50g/day of processed meat) rather than near-universal causation. That most meat-eaters never develop cancer is consistent with a modest elevation in relative risk against a backdrop of many contributing causes and is not evidence against the epidemiological findings, so Baker's inference does not follow from the "most people eat meat and don't get cancer" premise. Current scientific consensus, per WHO/IARC, is that processed meat consumption is an established (though modest) contributor to colorectal cancer risk and red meat consumption a probable one, alongside many other risk factors.