Carcinogens

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mjl1717

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This q is mostly for those who have consumed a American diet for much or most of their lifetime. Besides Hotdogs, coldcuts, bacon, processed meats, what are considered the major carcinogens in the American diet??
Is chicken considered carcinogenic?? (As far as I know chicken is monitored by the FDA) I couldnt get much info about this in my book "Nutrition Secrets."
Thx in advance. {A close relative of mine has the big C -word and is going to have it staged}

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I googled it , this is what Ifound:

1)Eats meat byproducts left over meats , its own feces, anything.
2)Often contains close to the same amount of saturated fat and cholesterol
as red meat
3)When cooked can form more Heterocyclic amines-(CANCER) then red meat
4) Often contains Salmonella. Camplobacter, or Listeria
5)The Salmonella is often resistant to 3 or 4 antibiotics at ONE time
6)Doesnt really decrease the incidence of arteriosclerosis nd heart disease
byt vegatables would.
7) Often you are eating vetenarian (excuse spelling) meds fed to animals.
 
Why would any meat cause cancer? Heterocyclic amines are certainly a problem, as are smoked meats, but Im not sure why we should expect one to be worse than the other. If that were the case, then we should see a huge preponderance of one type of cancer, because 95% of the country at least has a meat-based diet. If we assume that meats increase the risk for colon CA (not that unlikely), then yes, chicken would be a risk factor.

However, it has not been proven that chicken (or beef, for that matter) is a risk factor for CA directly. Anything that makes you fat and unhealthy is, so indirectly there are about one billion CA risk factors.

Aside from a diet based largely on smoked meats and fishes leading directly to esophageal (and sometimes gastric) CA, I cant think of any proof of a direct link.
 
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Very sorry to hear about your relative's condition. I hope everything works out better than you can even expect.



There are problems with chicken. You list some. Most of them have little to nothing to do with cancer.

As for what carcinogens americans eat, different cancers are related to different things. But just to throw things out: Smoking, Air pollution, Alcohol, Fungus (peanuts?), Nitrosamines (pickles, smoked anything), bizarre chemicals? (processed anything?). Some would implicated browned or burned forms of meat. Any meat. Oh and don't forget things like UV exposure, autoimmune conditions, glowing puddles of ooze from industry and a general lack of healthy, protective eating (say, antioxidants and fibre). A lot of these aren't eaten, but still, they are common in the world today.

I'd also say it depends on the cancer. Lung and Stomach have different relations to your diet and carcinogen exposure.

As for chicken's issues:
(1) yes chicken eats anything it wants. So do pigs. So do catfish. (so do humans). I'm not sure how this would relate to cancer.
(2) If you eat dark meat chicken, or fried chicken, vis-a-vis lean red meat, you are correct.
(3) Depends highly on cooking technique. Remember, bread forms acrylamide when it cooks. So do french fries. This doesn't prove they cause cancer.
(4) Yes. Raw chicken = dirty. Cook it well and you won't be sick. And Salmonella hasn't been implicated to cause cancer. Also remember things like fruit and veggies can be teeming with unsavory bacteria/virues too.
(5) Scary ain't it? No chicken sashimi for this guy.
(6) Right. Eating chicken doesn't cure artherosclerosis, or KFC would replace most pharmacies in america with chicken. But I'd still argue a nice lean protein has its place in most diets, and chicken is a highly acceptable and cheap one, for most people.
(7) This is true of any animal meat that is non-organic. Also Milk is full of nasty things. But remember Soy and Soy Milk have human estrogen mimicers. And genetically engineered grain is scary too. And fish are full of mercury. The trick will be figuring out which of these things is most dangerous.


mjl1717 said:
I googled it , this is what Ifound:

1)Eats meat byproducts left over meats , its own feces, anything.
2)Often contains close to the same amount of saturated fat and cholesterol
as red meat
3)When cooked can form more Heterocyclic amines-(CANCER) then red meat
4) Often contains Salmonella. Camplobacter, or Listeria
5)The Salmonella is often resistant to 3 or 4 antibiotics at ONE time
6)Doesnt really decrease the incidence of arteriosclerosis nd heart disease
byt vegatables would.
7) Often you are eating vetenarian (excuse spelling) meds fed to animals.
 
I think the discussion of food products is absurd. Your relative risk of cancer from eating a balanced diet is virtually the same, whether you eat lamb, chicken, beef, fish, etc. Food products are extensively researched by epidemiologists, but that is because the big, proven risk factors for cancer (smoking, etc) have already been discovered.

To put it in perspective, you are ~100,000,000,000,000x more likely to get cancer from smoking than almost anything you can eat or swallow. So walking into a smoky pub once may be worse than consuming smoked beef jerky for breakfast every week.

Remember that epidemiologists need to make a living. They do by finding looking for obscure associations between "X" and cancer, this is their livelihood. But the big risk factors (smoking, UV exposure, etc) have already been discovered. It is much more important to think about your smoking habit or sunblock than the nitrates in your pickles!

I wish your friend the best of luck with the staging process.
 
When we're talking about cancer there's a temptation to try to "explain" it, to answer the "why me?" question. But unless you're someone who's smoked 2 packs/day for 50 years and facing a diagnosis of lung cancer, the cause/effect relationship is generally quite murky. While asking such questions is certainly a normal part of the grief process, I'd encourage you to help your family member to avoid dwelling on such questions, which are indeed unanswerable and generally more grief-provoking than helpful. I've certainly experienced this first-hand, as someone very close to me is currently dying from ovarian CA. Unfortunately, as a "medical person," you'll probably be asked lots of questions about the "why," and like me, you'll be VERY frustrated at your inability to provide any answers...truthfully, no doctor could provide such answers, but patients nonetheless seem to expect it, especialy when they're family. I think it's very important for patients to realize it's nothing they did or didn't do, but that sometimes bad things happen to good people. Or perhaps if they don't think of themselves as "good," they'll be able to use the experience as a transformative, life-changing one...cancer has the amazing power to truly change lives in a very positive way, by flipping a person's backwards priorities, changing their life focus, and giving them enough time to "make things right" before they pass. It's one of the reasons I'm so interested in oncology...no other field allows you to share such powerful, intimate, transformative moments with patients and families.
 

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