You may not like the truth, but the evidence is clear – meat causes cancer
Dr Vernon Coleman
Every time I point out that eating meat is a major cause of cancer (and causes more cancer than tobacco) I am attacked by the bigoted and the ignorant who refuse to accept simple truths when they find them inconvenient.
Please read on.
There is a food which has been proven time and time again to cause cancer of the breast, cancer of the prostate, cancer of the bowel, many other types of cancer and numerous other disorders including asthma, heart disease, constipation, high blood pressure, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
It is a food which most people eat at least once every day. And it is a food which governments know is potentially lethal but which they support (with subsidies) and actively promote.
The truth about this deadly food is suppressed for purely commercial reasons. Governments (and the medical profession) say nothing because the people selling the food have too much power and too much money.
The name of the food is meat.
Now that many people have given up smoking, meat causes more cancer than tobacco.
It is, I believe, the fat in meat which is the most significant cause of cancer. The fat in meat isn’t just the white stuff that is easy to cut off. The fat is spread throughout the meat and is invisible to the naked eye.
The fat in meat is particularly likely to cause cancer because the carcinogenic chemicals fed to animals accumulate in the animal’s fatty tissues. When the fatty meat is eaten the carcinogenic chemicals easily accumulate in the parts of the human body with the most fat. Breast cancer is a particular risk because breast tissue contains a considerable amount of fatty tissue. The incidence of breast cancer is rocketing (as are so many other cancers) because of chemical toxins in the fatty meat we eat. Clear scientific evidence shows that women who eat lots of fat, and/or eat lots of meat, are more likely to get breast cancer. It really is that simple. The incidence of breast cancer among Japanese women was low when they ate a traditional Japanese diet (which contains very little meat). When Japanese women started eating fatty hamburgers (food which I long ago christened harmburgers) the incidence of breast cancer rocketed.
There is plenty of evidence proving that meat causes cancer (there are summaries of 26 scientific papers relating meat to cancer in my book Meat Causes Cancer) but, despite this, there are many doctors, dieticians and nutritionists around who still don’t seem to understand the importance of this link. Despite the firm evidence showing that meat causes cancer the majority of hospitals still serve their patients (and staff) meals which are built around meat. We think it strange that just a relatively few years ago patients and staff in hospitals were allowed to smoke on the wards but in a few years’ time our descendants will surely regard it as just as odd that hospitals should have served meat to people entrusted to their care. In my view, any nutritionist, dietician, cookery writer or chef who advocates eating meat should be doing something else for a living. I believe it is as absurd and as indefensible for a chef, nutritionist or dietician to recommend eating meat as part of a healthy diet as it would be for a doctor to recommend smoking as part of a healthy lifestyle.
The list of diseases known to be associated with meat, or commoner among meat eaters, looks like the index of a medical textbook. Anaemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostate, constipation, diabetes, gall stones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, piles, strokes and varicose veins are just some of the well-known disorders which are more likely to affect meat eaters than vegetarians.
There is too, the problem of the adrenalin in meat. When animals are killed they are inevitably terrified. They have a good deal of adrenalin running through their veins. When the animal is eaten the person who eats the animal consumes that adrenalin. What are the consequences of this? No one knows.
To all these hazards must be added the fact that if you eat meat you will be consuming any hormones, drugs and other chemicals which may have been fed to the animals before they were killed.
No one knows precisely what effect eating the hormones in meat is likely to have on your health. But the risk is there and I think it’s a big one.
And there are other hazards. Some farmers use tranquillisers to keep animals calm. Others routinely use antibiotics so that their animals do not develop infections — and to boost the rate at which they put on weight. In America over half of all antibiotics are fed to animals, and I don’t think it is any coincidence that the percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin has risen dramatically since farmers started doing this. Animals which are lucky enough to spend some of their time out of doors eating grass will often eat grass which has been sprayed with all sorts of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals.
If you care one jot about your health then the very best thing you can do is to give up eating meat. Giving up meat and eating a vegetarian diet will now have as dramatic an effect on your health as not smoking.
When the meat industry made a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about my book about food, I offered a number of scientific papers as evidence that I was simply telling the truth – that meat is a major cause of cancer.
The ASA refused to look at the evidence I provided, found in favour of the meat industry and tried (unsuccessfully) to ban ads for the book. Below, in a brief extract from my book (`Meat Causes Cancer – and more food for thought’) I’ve included basic details of a few of the scientific papers which I submitted to the ASA.
Incidentally, the now defunct Press Complaints Commission in the UK also refused to look at this evidence when the meat industry complained about an article I had written about meat.
(The last time I looked at the fake encyclopaedia Wikipedia – which was six years ago - I noticed that the site quoted the fact that both the ASA and the PCC had supported complaints against me. What Wikipedia forgot to mention was that both organisations had refused to look at the scientific evidence I offered which proved that my argument was correct.)
There is clear medical and scientific evidence available to show that nothing, not even tobacco, influences your chances of developing cancer as much as the food you choose to eat. It is estimated that between 30% and 60% of all cancers are caused by what you choose to eat.
Back in 1982 the National Research Council in the United States of America published a technical report entitled Diet, Nutrition and Cancer which showed that diet was probably the single most important factor in the development of cancer, and that there was evidence linking cancers of the breast, colon and prostate to particular foods or types of food.
It is a scandal of astonishing proportions that a majority of the population still do not know about these vitally important and well established links. It is an even bigger scandal that a majority of the medical profession are unaware of these links too. Most doctors I have spoken to — even recently qualified ones — still dismiss the idea of a food/cancer link as mumbo- jumbo nonsense. The average medical student probably spends more time staring down a microscope at histology slides than he or she spends studying the importance and significance of nutrition.
The suppression of this information by a greedy and conscience-free food industry, compliant revenue conscious politicians, a cancer industry dominated by grant hungry researchers and an uncaring, drug company dominated medical profession has, I sincerely believe, led to more deaths than any war in history.
Since the early 1980s the amount of evidence linking diet to cancer has grown steadily. In 1990 even the British Medical Association, hardly an organisation which would be widely described as revolutionary, supported the view that there is a link between food and cancer. Their published view was that 35% of cancers were caused by the natural constituents of food and that another 1% of cancers were caused by food additives.
Other organisations suggest that the link between food and cancer is even higher. The National Academy of Sciences in the United States has reported that researchers have estimated that almost 60% of women’s cancers and a little more than 40% of men’s cancers are related to nutritional factors.
Back in 2015 the World Health Organisation (which was then not the renegade organisation it is today) published an official warning that meat causes cancer.
Title
Calorie-Providing Nutrients and Risk of Breast Cancer
Source
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
Report
The researchers concluded `that during adult life a reduction in dietary intake of fat and proteins of animal origin may contribute to a substantial reduction in the incidence of breast cancer in population subgroups with high intake of animal products.’
Title
Relation of Meat, Fat and Fiber Intake to the Risk of Colon Cancer in a Prospective Study Among Women
Source
The New England Journal of Medicine
Report
The researchers concluded that ‘animal fat was positively associated with the risk of colon cancer’ but that ‘no association was found for vegetable fat’. The researchers found that women who ate beef, pork or lamb as a main dish every day were more likely to develop cancer of the colon than were women who ate beef, pork or lamb as a main dish less than once a month. It was also found that processed meats and liver were also ‘significantly associated with increased risk’.
The ratio of the intake of red meat to the intake of chicken and fish was particularly strongly associated with an increased incidence of colon cancer,’ concluded the researchers, who also noted that ‘a low intake of fibre from fruits appeared to contribute to the risk of colon cancer, but this relation was not statistically independent of meat intake.’
‘These prospective data provide evidence for the hypothesis that a high intake of animal fat increases the risk of colon cancer,’ said the researchers.
Title
Dietary Factors and Breast Cancer Risk
Source
International Journal of Cancer
Report
These researchers found that women who ate beef, pork and sweet desserts were significantly more likely to develop breast cancer than women who did not.
Title
Diet as an Etiological Factor in the Development of Cancers of the Colon and Rectum
Source
Journal of Chronic Diseases
Report
The author concludes: ‘The evidence suggests that meat, particularly beef, is a food associated with the development of malignancies of the large bowel.’
Title
Nutrient Intakes In Relation to Cancer Incidence in Hawaii
Source
British Journal of Cancer
Report
The researchers reported that: ‘significant positive associations were found for six of the cancer sites: breast cancer with fat (saturated, unsaturated, animal and total) and protein (animal); corpus-uteri cancer with the same components as breast cancer, prostate cancer with fat (saturated, animal) and protein (animal, total), stomach cancer with fat (fish only) and protein (fish only).
Title
Epidemiological Correlations between Diet and Cancer Frequency
Source
Cancer Research
Report
The author stated that: ‘Strong and consistent correlations are reported between death rates of cancers of the colon and breast and the per capita consumption of total fat and of nutrients derived from animal sources, especially beef, pork, eggs and milk. Similar but less consistent correlations have been reported with cancers of the prostate, ovary and endometrium.’
Title
Food Consumption and Cancer of the Colon and Rectum in North-Eastern Italy
Source
International Journal of Cancer
Report
The authors studied 123 patients with colon cancer, 125 patients with rectal cancer and 699 patients with no cancer. They concluded: ‘...the present study …indicates that frequent consumption of …red meat is a risk factor for colorectal cancer.’
Title
A Prospective Study of Dietary Fat and Risk of Prostate Cancer
Source
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
Report
The authors found that ‘total fat consumption was directly related to risk of advanced prostate cancer’ and that ‘this association was due primarily to animal fat... but not vegetable fat. Red meat represented the food group with the strongest positive association. …These findings support recommendations to lower intake of meat to reduce the risk of prostate cancer.’
Title
Risk of death from cancer and ischaemic heart disease in meat and non-meat eaters
Source
British Medical Journal
Report
The researchers reported: ‘These data confirm the findings of previous studies that have shown a reduction in all cause, cancer and cardiovascular mortality among people who do not eat meat.’
My book `Meat Causes Cancer’ contains more comprehensive details of these and a number of other scientific papers. The references listed above are just a few of the scientific papers which the Advertising Standards Authority and Press Complaints Commission refused to look at.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that, in view of the overwhelming nature of the evidence, both the UK and US governments have accepted that eating meat is a significant cause of cancer. And there is clear evidence that vegetarians live longer and are healthier than meat eaters.
You can buy a copy of `Meat Causes Cancer – and more food for thought’ via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
I am not suggesting that anyone should or should not eat meat. Like most things in life it is, or should be, a personal decision. But my job as a writer is merely to provide you with the facts.
Copyright Vernon Coleman October 2026
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