Challenging Cancer Research UK

I, as a farmer and advocate for the public consumption of red meat, was frustrated to read the following on the Cancer Research UK website:

“The less processed and red meat you eat the lower your risk of cancer, so cutting down is good for your health no matter how much you eat.”

Source - cancerresearchuk.org - 2023

Frustrating, yes. But not surprising however. The charity are hardly the first to draw this conclusion.

I’d like to give Cancer Research UK the benefit of the doubt and presume that they are not knowingly disseminating false information, thereby squandering public donations at the risk of human health. Instead, I believe that this is merely symptomatic of a much wider, more complex issue.

Discrediting the data source behind this advice and correcting the flaws in the cited studies has been done in depth by researchers more skilled than me. I would lower the value of their work by an attempt to replicate it. What I shall instead do is explain my perspective on the issue in hope that it is of value to somebody, somewhere:

The incidence of cancer is increasing, as is most inflammatory diseases. The consumption of red meat is decreasing whilst consumption of processed foods, notably sugars and seed oils has dramatically increased. We must draw our own conclusions.

I advise, with the upmost empathy to those affected by cancer or disease, to be careful where you donate your hard earned money. I have huge respect to charities such as Cancer Research UK for their well meaning efforts, however I, for one, will not donate them a penny until they show that they are independently striving to address the root causes of cancer.

Big Cows are not ‘Big Food’

‘Big food’ is the collective term for the corporations that own the majority of the household food brands and producers. They’re the big guys. Think Kellogs, Nestle, Coca-Cola etc.

Food is nothing more than a commodity at this level of industry. These corporations are in the secondary and tertiary sectors. They do not produce a raw product. They put raw product through a series of processes to produce a more marketable, more profitable product. They employ teams of people to make plastic packaging look pretty, more boffins to increase the addictiveness of the product, and more legal professionals to hide up their sins than you can shake a sugar-coated pretzel stick at.

Now, ‘Big Meat’ is not a thing. Meat, in particular the currently more demonised type; red meat, is too hard for corporations to commoditise. Why?

Firstly, it’s hard to mass produce. Beef is the largest and most relevant example to expand. The huge feedlot production method has only become economically viable and therefore widely adopted very recently due to the mass availability of cheap grain for farmers to fatten their animals on in the last period of their lives. Otherwise, to ‘grow’ beef successfully and sustainably takes generations of handed-down knowledge, years of care and attention to animal welfare, and a rich, locally appropriate understanding of landscape and soil function. This means that company money doesn’t easily streamline or ramp up production of beef, as opposed to bread production for example, where more money buys more cheap grain (a commodity), more milling equipment, more lower skilled labour, more ovens to bake it in, and so on.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, red meat is a complete product. No additional processing is required. No extraction, no treatment, no sprinkling with icing sugar. Therefore, no middle level opportunities for companies to add empty value to the product, milking a profit at each stage. Crucially, there is also little to no requirement for fancy marketing.

Not only is red meat ‘complete’ in not needing processing to make it marketable, it is complete nutritionally. Putting dietary preferences and biases aside, red meat is the only food that humans can thrive off independently.

Assuming the meat industry also has a corporate, greedy, ‘Big’ side to it, is easy pickings for journalists to make a catchy headline but it is not applicable. The very method of singling out a food group like red meat disqualifies it from the argument. It’s like saying that the ‘Big Cucumber’ industry is paying of officials in the backroom of a New York court… it’s not and it’s not going to because it has no hidden agenda.