Study should be wake-up call to agriculture industry

Sat Nov 10 2007
IT'S easy to see why the meat industry and food processors would take exception to the recently-released report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research.

But it is harder to understand why farmers would.

The report, Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer, took direct aim at red meat, processed meat, sugar, salt and alcohol consumption, finding after an extensive literature review that there are clear linkages between our eating habits, level of obesity and risk of cancer.

"To the extent that environmental factors such as food, nutrition, and physical activity influence risk of cancer, it is a preventable disease," the study says.

This ongoing study could have powerful repercussions because it shatters the widely-held belief that cancer is luck of the draw or caused by things consumers cannot control, such as pollution or pesticide use. It puts action and accountability for our health squarely on our plates.

Eat to be lean, limit red meat consumption, avoid processed meat, drink sparingly, be physically active, avoid fatty, sugary, salty, highly-processed foods, and eat more fruits, vegetables and plant-based proteins.

In other words, eat food from the land, not from the factory.

This was the last thing the red meat industry wanted to hear.

According to these researchers, even if the industry manages to keep out the E. coli, listeria and other problematic bacteria behind recent recalls, meat products could still cause sickness and death if consumed over the long-term.

The American Meat Institute lashed out almost immediately, saying the recommendations "reflect WCRF's well-known anti-meat bias and should be met with skepticism because they oversimplify the complex issue of cancer, are not supported by the data, and defy common sense." It cited its own research and said the science is inconclusive.

Canadian meat industry groups were just as defensive.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that consuming red meat, as part of a healthy balanced diet, increases the risk of cancer," the Canadian Meat Council, Canadian Pork Council and Beef Information Centre said in a joint release, also touting meat's nutrient value and the recommendations in Canada's Food Guide.

So which are we supposed to believe -- the alleged anti-meat bias held by 21 scientists who have devoted their lives to studying what makes people sick, or a pro-meat bias held by companies that make money selling it?

If this was about credibility, the meat industry just lost. Fortunately for it, it is not. No one wants to get cancer, but the lineups at the pastry shops, hotdog stands and french-fry counters were just as long the day after this study came out.
What this and other studies like it should do, however, is prompt public policy-makers to rethink some of the predominant economic development strategies for agriculture. Over the last two decades, Canadian agricultural policy has been designed to move this country's industry out of bulk commodity exports and into the world of value-added exports.

It's not a bad concept. Rather than shipping raw ingredients all over the world for someone else to process, why not keep the jobs and the added value at home?

The problem, it seems, is the definition of value-added.

All too often it involves processing the wholesomeness out of raw foods -- turning whole-grains of wheat into bleached white flour, and nutritionally-dense potatoes into starchy, deep-fried gems, or processing lean, grass-fed mature cows into salty, nitrate-ridden frankfurters -- under the guise of value-adding.

The cost of all this value-adding has driven down the price farmers receive for their production. They are still producing commodities. The only way they benefit from a value-added industry is if they own a piece of the processing chain.

Meanwhile, consumers pay a lot more for processed and packaged food than they would for the ingredients to make their own from scratch. Value-adding, as we define it, adds cost to the food system all right, but the extra value comes in the form of convenience and appealing taste -- not nutrition.

In fact, if these researchers are right, we're actually paying a pretty high price for this form of value-added -- our health.

This research adds a new element to the debate over agriculture and farming policy in this country, which until now has been focused on the sector's economic, environmental and social sustainability. This is about public health at a time when health-care costs are spiraling out of control.

The anti-cancer message is that there is real value in eating more grains, protein sources, fruits and vegetables that are as close to their natural unprocessed state as possible -- as in, right from the farm. That can hardly be bad news for farmers.

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 792-4382 or by email: laura@fbcpublishing.com