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Does meat consumption cause cancer? Or, put another way… does avoiding meat help prevent cancer?

If you aren't already savvy to the topic, this may sound more absurd than it should. Here's why: there have been many, many, many correlative studies that have found that higher meat consumption is associated with a significantly higher risk of cancer and cancer mortality.

To try to answer this question we end up going deep into discussing plausible mechanisms that might help explain this phenomenon and, indeed, discussing a little bit of cancer biology as well.

Some of the publications mentioned in this podcast:

• Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality
• Effect of aerobic exercise on insulin, insulin-like growth factor-1 and insulin-like growth factor binding protein-3 in overweight and obese postmenopausal women
• Prospective study of colorectal cancer risk in men and plasma levels of insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I and IGF-binding protein-3
• Polymorphic variants of insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) receptor and phosphoinositide 3-kinase genes affect IGF-I plasma levels and human longevity: cues for an evolutionarily conserved mechanism of life span control.
• Functionally significant insulin-like growth factor I receptor mutations in centenarians
• Congenital IGF1 deficiency tends to confer protection against post-natal development of malignancies
• Changes in plasma somatomedin-C in response to ingestion of diets with variable protein and energy content