Reuters News Service
4 October, 2007


Fats, meat unlikely to impact prostate cancer risk

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New data from a large ethnically diverse group of men provides no evidence that eating a lot of fats and meat substantially affects a man's risk of developing prostate cancer.

In an email to Reuters Health, principal investigator Dr. Laurence N. Kolonel and first author Song-Yi Park of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, said: "Although diet is likely to influence prostate cancer risk, the intake of total and saturated fat do not appear to be important contributors. However, because high intake of fat can lead to obesity as well as other cancers, the consumption of high fat foods should be limited."

Fat and meat in the diet as potential risk factors for prostate cancer have been the focus of numerous studies, but the results have been inconsistent, the study team notes in a report of their study published in the International Journal of Cancer. Some studies have found a positive relationship between prostate cancer and diets high in fat and meat, while others have found no relationship.

Kolonel, Park, and their colleagues looked for ties between prostate cancer risk and the consumption of different fats (including total, saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fat, and n-3 and n-6 fatty acids), cholesterol, meat (including total, red, processed and poultry), fish and fats from meat in 82,483 men enrolled in a study of diet and cancer. The men were age 45 or older at enrollment between 1993 and1996 and they resided in Hawaii or Los Angeles.

During 8 years of follow-up, 4,404 men developed prostate cancer, including 1,278 advanced tumors. According to the research team, intake of the different types of fat and meat showed no association with overall prostate cancer risk or with advanced tumors.

"Furthermore, we found little evidence of any relation of fat and meat intake with prostate cancer risk within any of the four racial/ethnic groups (African American, Japanese Americans, Latinos and Whites)," they point out.

There was a suggestion of a "weak protective effect" of n-3 fatty acid consumption on prostate cancer that was limited to Latinos and Whites.

Overall, "our findings did not support any association between intake of fat, fatty acids, cholesterol, or various meats and prostate cancer risk," Kolonel and Park told Reuters Health.


http://www.reuters.com/article/heal...L45795620071004

Taubes cover the whole thing about fat and cancer in his book. There is no link between saturated fat and cancer. We can stop studying it, it is another red herring.

I think the processed food industry has so much money to throw at "research" that "scientists" will keep on searching for which evil fat does.

Until then, the media will keep on insisting that even if fat doesn't cause one type of cancer it causes another type/leads to obesity/causes heart disease.

No matter what the research shows, the conclusion is that you shouldn't eat saturated fat. It's like Alice holding a conversation with the Red Queen.

This seems like the formulaic kind of BS that is stuck to the end of just about every study that shows that fat and meat do not have the bad effects the study was looking for.

It reminds me of when I was a grad student studying Chinese archaeology. You'd read this perfectly straight-forward, scientific archaeological article in a mainland Chinese journal, and then at the end they'd insert some boilerplate claptrap about how this showed the oppresion of the people by the monarchy, or the glorious ingenuity of the working masses, etc... It was obviously put in there without much conviction, but purely because it is considered "what you must do". It was always so funny and incongruent and we could point to it as evidence of a failed dogma that was on its way out.

Plane