Vegetables have been proven to cause cancer. In fact vegetable consumption causes more cancer than any other lifestyle factor in the world.
I'm not kidding. It's a simple fact.
And it's not just cancer, it's heart disease too - in fact vegetables cause 1 in 5 deaths in the US, according to the American Cancer Society, or 480,000 early deaths per year.
Consuming vegetables causes orders of magnitude more deaths than consuming processed meat. This despite yesterday's breathless headlines, after the WHO declared that eating processed meats (e.g. smoked meats) can increase the risk of colon cancer by a comparatively tiny 20%.
How vegetables can cause cancer
However - and this is crucial - vegetables will only kill you if you prepare them in a dangerous way. In it's raw form the tobacco plant is completely benign, possibly even healthy to eat. But if you burn the tobacco vegetable and inhale the smoke... as with cigarettes... it's VERY bad for you.
Back to the meat
This gives a much needed perspective to yesterday's cancer alarm. Because it's not all meat that potentially may contain dangerous substances. It's processed meat, smoked meat, and possibly even red meat - meat that's often prepared at temperatures.
These really high temperatures can produce cancer-causing substances in both vegetables and meat. But of the two, the vegetables (smoking) is by far the worst. The risk increase from eating bacon every day is tiny in comparison:
The Guardian: Meat and tobacco: the difference between risk and strength of evidenceA lot of people in the low-carb community go so far as to completely disregard the processed-meat alarm:
ZoeHarcombe: World Health Organisation, meat & cancerI don't think we should ignore this alarm, even if the risk increase is small. It's still likely true, it makes perfect sense.
If you want to be live a healthy life preferably don't eat blackened meat, and go easy on the bacon. And don't smoke vegetables.
