Dr. Christopher Labos

They're not overly concerned about your long term health and cardiovascular status.

This is a fascinating topic, because when you really look at, you know, various groups that have sort of tried to analyze the data,

You have different groups that can look at the same data and come to different conclusions by emphasizing different aspects of the data and questions of certainty.

If you are somebody who says, I want there to be, you know, double blind, randomized controlled trials where we take one group and give them red meat and we take another group and we give them, you know, a meat substitute that looks identical and tastes identical to me, but isn't.

actually need and i want to follow these people for 30 years to see if they're less likely to get cancer in middle age those types of studies don't exist because it's practically impossible to do something like that it's very hard to do randomized studies in nutrition research because you can't force people to eat a particular way after about a few weeks people are going to revert back to what their normal diet would otherwise be so

If you're somebody who goes and says, I want there to be randomized control data, there isn't very much of that.

And so if that's your camp, you're going to look at the data and say, I am unconvinced by the evidence.

We should still keep eating red meat and make no change.

If you are somebody who's willing to look at what we refer to as observational data, where you compare different people in different countries, some of whom eat a lot of red meat and some of whom who eat less, you see a general association that the groups and the people who eat less red meat are healthier overall, particularly with a decreased risk of colorectal cancer where the strongest association exists.

So it's a question of,

What evidence are you going to use to inform your decision?

How much uncertainty are you willing to tolerate?

And are you willing to change your behavior?

The fundamental...

risk assessment, if you get into it, is that if you're an average risk individual, if you have no family history of colorectal cancer, your lifetime risk of getting colon cancer is about 5%.

And if you're somebody who regularly eats meat, like every day, that risk may go up to about 6%.

So you can look at that number and say, you know, a 5% to 6% increase, that isn't enough for me to change my behavior.

Then that's fine.

You're just going to

have to absorb and tolerate that increased risk of colorectal cancer.