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BBC propoganda

So the BBC News website has a headline - "Vegetarians get fewer cancers" .

All very interesting until you actually read it and find out that this is not the whole story:



......surprisingly, the researchers also found a higher rate of colorectal cancer - a disease linked with eating red meat - among the vegetarians.


epidemiological studies are always a bit dodgy, but it is amusing that the headline was as it was rather than saying: Vegetarians get more cancer!
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SoftAce said…
"but it is amusing that the headline was as it was rather than saying: Vegetarians get more cancer!"

Huh? According to the article:

"Analysis of data from 52,700 men and women shows that those who did not eat meat had significantly fewer cancers overall than those who did."

and this:

"But surprisingly, the researchers also found a higher rate of colorectal cancer - a disease linked with eating red meat - among the vegetarians."

So yeah, the *only* kind of cancer which is more prevailing among vegetarians is colorectal - and if you count *all* cancer cases, vegetarians beats meat eaters hands down.

Am I missing something here? There is nothing wrong with headline as far as I'm concerned and your comment about it is rather sensitive (as it appears you prefer publishing meat eating favoring findings and ignore ones opposite to it)
March 16, 2009 at 5:40 PM
Chris said…
I do have a bias towards pro meat stories - there is enough bias out there against meat.

What I was pointing out was that there was a clear finding - vegetarians get more colorectal cancer but that was not in the headline.

If you look at the stats in the study things are not so clear anyway.

Correlation doesn't equal causation in any case and epidemiological studies are about correlation.
March 17, 2009 at 12:36 AM
Chris said…
I've just been looking at the full study and it is really unclear.


For the cohort in the study both vegetarians and non vegetarians actually had fewer cancers than the national average. For example meat eaters had 74% as many of the national average for cancer while vegetarians had 65% of the national average. Meat eaters had 84% of the national average of colorectal caners while vegetarians had 102%.

Vegetarians drank less too - that may be a big factor. In other studies you find that vegetarians tend to be more affluent too - how is that factored in?

All these big epidemiological studies shows is association, not causation.

The point is that it is really simplistic to say that vegetarians get fewer cancers - in this study for some reason everyone got fewer cancers!
March 17, 2009 at 4:10 PM
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