Bacon Causes Cancer – World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified processed meats including ham, bacon, salami and frankfurts as a Group 1 carcinogen which means that there’s strong evidence that processed meats cancer.

Eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel and stomach cancer. Red meat, such as beef, lamb and pork, has been classified as a Group 2A carcinogen which means it probably causes cancer.

WHO gives much stronger credibility to Random Clinic Trials (RCT) that other forms of evidence such as Epidemiolocal Studies.

It is possible to have a very short-term RCT where the participants and researchers do not know the differences in the diet. This can be done by feeding the participants drinks containing a powder with different ingredients that that taste and feel the same for each meal. This is only practical for possibly 3 weeks. See “Intervention Studies” below.

Any longer it can be a challenge. It can be difficult to learn what really constitutes a healthy, whole-food, plant-based diet. It really needs a supportive partner and learning how to shop, cook and manage changes to social interactions. It is much easier if the participants are living by themselves.

Epidemiolocal Studies are just as valid.

Taiwanese Buddhist Study

A Taiwanese Buddhist study ¹ with 4,384 participants compared type 2 diabetes outcomes for lacto-ovo-vegetarians compared with those who consumed meat. The meat-eating group ate only a very small amount of meat.

The cause of type 2 diabetes has been known for decades.

Search the website for “intramyocellular” for more details.

One Big Mac, with 2 meat patties, contains 90 g of meat—so the participants were consuming only a very small amount of meat. Three garden peas weigh a gram.

Seventh-day Adventists and Longevity

Much publicity is given to the longevity of the people of Japan and Okinawa (an archipelago that stretches from southern Japan to Taiwan). However, it is vegetarian Californian Seventh-day Adventists that have the longest lifespan and the highest levels of health on the planet.

Vegetarian Californian Adventists have a higher life expectancy at the age of 30 years than other white Californians by 9.5 years in men and 6.1 years in women, giving them the highest life expectancy of any formally described population. ²

Note that Californians are much healthier than the average American being in the top five states for longevity with an average life expectancy of 5-6 years greater than the Mississippi states.

Intervention Studies

A number of researchers studied the relationship of saturated fat to serum cholesterol during the 1950s. J Groen, LW Kinsell, EH Ahrens, A Keys, JM Beveridge and B Bronte-Stewart replaced saturated fats in the diet with polyunsaturated fats. All other components of the diet remained the same and the total fat content of the diet did not change..

Brian Bronte-Stewart replaced unsaturated fats, such as corn or safflower oil with butter, lard, or coconut oil, and the serum cholesterol rose. ³

In all the above studies, the serum cholesterol fell when the polyunsaturated fats were reintroduced. The experiments were repeated, and whilst there was variability with the amount of change for different individuals, the results were consistent for each individual.

The changes occurred rapidly within one or two weeks. Ahrens’s study kept the total fats at 40%, which was the average fat intake of the U.S. at that time.

The average fat intake as well as the mode, in both the US and Australia is currently 33% which is not a low-fat diet.

The mode is the value that appears most often in a set of values.

A whole-food, plant-based diet (with no add oils) contains less than 10% fat.

There are a number of studies, documented on the website, that links increased serum cholesterol with an increase in heart disease, cancers (particularly sex-hormone related cancers), high blood pressure and obesity.

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Last updated on Thursday 17 July 2025 at 07:41 by administrators

1. Chiu, T. H. T. et al. (2014) Taiwanese Vegetarians and Omnivores: Dietary Composition, Prevalence of Diabetes and IFG Marià Alemany (ed.). PLoS ONE. 9 (2), e88547.
2. Fraser, G. E., & Shavlik, D. J. (2001). Ten Years of Life—Is It a Matter of Choice? Archives of Internal Medicine, 161(13), 1645–1652.
3. Truswell, A. S. (2010). 4. Diet Can Have Worthwhile Effects on Human Plasma Cholesterol. In Cholesterol and Beyond: The Research on Diet and Coronary Heart Disease 1900-2000. Springer Netherlands.