Fewer people in the U.S. are getting colorectal cancer (CRC), but that progress is seen much more often in well-off and highly educated Americans. In fact, the gap is widening in rate of colorectal deaths in people with less education and/or who live in deeply disadvantaged communities.

Researchers now have shown that differences in weight, diet and physical activity play a huge role in the higher rates and deaths from CRC among people of lower socioeconomic status.

In a paper published in the Sept. 4 2012 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a careful statistical analysis of  a 10-year observational study of a half-million people indicated that helping people of lower education or income to change their diet, body weight, smoking and physical activity could be nearly as important as improved screening for reducing CRC deaths. Read the rest of this entry »

Are those steaks and hot dogs bad for you?

Several studies have found a connection between eating red and processed meat and colorectal cancer.  But the reason for that connection hasn’t been clear.

To answer the question, researchers collected detailed information about the type of meat eaten by a large group of over 300,000 men and women and how the meat was  cooked. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading about why red meat is associated with higher colon cancer risk. Initially it was thought it was because of the fat in the meat, but this has changed. It may due to protein.

Worldwide, red meat consumption in countries matches colon cancer incidence perfectly. Countries where people eat a lot of red meat such as US, Europe, and South America have the highest incidence. Countries like Japan, China, and the Far East, which have increased their intake of red meat with the westernization of diet, have the highest increase of colon cancer incidence. Japan, a country which used to have the lowest incidence of colon cancer, has now a higher incidence than the USA.  Japan has a dramatic shortage of oncologists to deal with the increasing number of cases. Read the rest of this entry »