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There are sugars in red meat and they can give you cancer.

Roughly this correlation can also be observed between number of colorectal cancer cases between countries where meats can be consumed as ‘rare’ vs counties where it is mostly ‘well done’.

Saurabh Srivastava, PhD
Health and  Science
5 min readJun 26, 2024

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Photo by Sebastian Doll on Unsplash

Red meat, a staple diet in general, has been under interrogation for its potential cancer risks for few decades. There are proven carcinogens in red meats, including heme iron, nitrosamines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heterocyclic amines (HCAs), and certain food processing methods. These molecules directly or indirectly contribute to cancer risk; however, a lot depends on the processing and source of red meats. Most common mechanisms involve chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, DNA damage, and the formation of mutagenic compounds.

But there are a different class of molecules associated with red meats that could even be more deleterious. This lesser-known class of carcinogen represents the sugars which are structurally integrated with protein components of meat.

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Health and  Science
Health and  Science

Published in Health and Science

Curated content from researchers and practitioners

Saurabh Srivastava, PhD
Saurabh Srivastava, PhD

Written by Saurabh Srivastava, PhD

Evidence based perspectives on philosophy, evolution, culture, and science. Plus, some broken poems. Opinions are my own.

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