Eurocanplus  

A recent study from researchers in Sweden, has suggested a link between pancreatic cancer and eating too much processed meat.  The findings suggested that eating even an extra 50g of meat which has been processed would increase the risk of contracting this cancer by about 19%

Just for information that’s about the amount in a single sausage.  It should be highlighted though, that it is a relatively rare cancer and the chance is still low.  Of course as with all these studies the findings should be viewed with a little skepticism. Isolating the exact cause of any increased results is extremely difficult, in fact the World Cancer reserach Fund has suggested the link may actually be down to obesity rather than the consumption of the meat itself.

However there is already a suggested link between processed meat and bowel cancer.  The UK Government has updated it’s health recommendations in response to these and other studies – people should not eat more than 70g of meat every day.  The professor in charge of the study, Prof Susanna Larsson has informed the BBC that she realised these links were quite controversial.  So how much data was involved in these studies?  Well I checked online and via a couple of videos I was able to access using my BBC Iplayer proxy seemed to be 11 trials and around 6,643 pancreatic cancer patients.

It’s definitely worth considering this research carefully, especially as pancreatic cancer has a very poor survival rate.  But the chance still equates to about 1 in 77 chance for men and 1 in 79 for women for contracting this cancer during a lifetime.