How Do I Avoid Pancreatic Cancer: Does a Red-Meat Diet Increase Risk of Pancreatic Cancer?

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of death among people who die of cancer, and because when it comes to the pancreas, cancer warning sigs are hard to find. The condition is usually not diagnosed until the tumors have begun to spread elsewhere in the body, survival rates are especially low. That's why people who have known risk factors for pancreatic cancer (a parent, grandparent, or sibling who had the disease, work in the petrochemical industry, work with solvents, smoking) may benefit from dietary changes that lower the risk of the disease. Or at least lower the risk of the disease on a population-wide level.

Red meat has long been suspect as a source of pancreatic cancer risk. Physicians at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston interviewed 626 people who had pancreatic cancer and 530 healthy controlled and learned that people who develop this condition tend to eat more:

• Bacon,
• Grilled chicken,
• Fried chicken, and
• Well-done pork, but

increased risk was not associated with:

• Hamburger (with one exception, listed below) or
• Steak.

People who develop pancreatic cancer were more likely to prefer crispy bacon and very well done chicken than people who did not develop the disease.

The specific carcinogen most associated with cancer of the pancreas was the mindbogglingly named 2-amino-3,4,8-trimethylimidazo[4,5—f]quinoxaline (DiMeIQx). This chemical is formed when hamburger is "charred" so that its edges are burnt. Baked, fried, or medium rare hamburgers produce only small amounts of this chemical, but char-burgers are measurably carcinogenic.

What most afficionados of grilled meat and barbecue do not know is, the heterocyclic amines, the chemically modified proteins of meat cooked at high temperatures, have to be detoxified with the same enzymes the liver uses to detoxify tobacco smoke or chemicals from gasoline or solvents. Eating well-done red meat on a regular basis may take so much of the liver's enzyme capacity that it is not able to deal with the toxic load coming from elsewhere in the environment.

There was one silver lining in the dark cloud of the findings of this study. The MD Anderson researchers learned that people who had a family history of pancreatic cancer were not at elevated risk for getting the disease if they avoided well-done meats.

You may also be interested in:

Alternative Pancreatic Cancer Therapies
Vitamin D and the Risk of Pancreatic Cancer
Folic Acid and Pancreatic Cancer
Pancreatic Cancer and L-Arginine Supplementation


Reference:
Li D, Day RS, Bondy ML, Sinha R, Nguyen NT, Evans DB, Abbruzzese JL, Hassan MM. Dietary mutagen exposure and risk of pancreatic cancer. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2007 Apr;16(4):655-61.