Niman Ranch/Pederson's Bacon- still carcinogenic?

[gkm]

I'm on day 27 of my first Whole 30 and feeling really good about it. My one concern is about bacon and red meat in general, which I've been enjoying a lot of the last month. I'm remembering the World Health Organization study that was released in 2015 which said that bacon and probably most red meat is carcinogenic. 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/26/451211964/bad-day-for-bacon-processed-red-meats-cause-cancer-says-who

I'm wondering if any of the moderators here know if any follow-up research has been done about high quality bacon/red meat? I'm HOPING that buying antibiotic-free, vegetarian-fed, etc. bacon/meat might ameliorate the risks? Anyone know?

[SugarcubeOD]

The moderators here are volunteers.  In general we don't follow up on studies and reports unless it's of specific interest to us personally.  We would encourage you to research - any studies or reports that would be available to us would be available online to anyone who is looking for them.

You can start with the response that I believe Mark Sisson made to that article by googling.  I think some other big names in the paleo community also refuted that article as bunk which can also be found with a little bit of google research

 

[Sideshowpt]

One has to read a wide spread of studies and read the complete text to understand what the authors are truly saying. I for one think it is almost impossible to rule out confounding variables - other things the researchers couldn't control but may have affected the result- when studying the relationship between eating animal proteins and cancer. One might say, for example.... "cancer rates rose during the 20th century. Indoor plumbing increased during the 20th century. Therefore indoor plumbing causes cancer". Another example of a confounding variable came to light in the mid 20th century. It was found that smokers recovered faster then non-smokers after heart attacks. Turning out, the smokers would get out of bed frequently to walk to the smoking lounge back when hospitals had them. The non-smokers got out of bed much less frequently. We now know that early out of bed activities aids recovery, but back then it was reported that smokers recovered faster. So you see that one can't take just one media report of one study and base robust inform on that. It was good that you asked, as we need to continue to question conventional wisdom.