Meat intake, cooking methods, dietary carcinogens, and colorectal cancer risk: findings from the Colorectal Cancer Family Registry

Abstract

Diets high in red meat and processed meats are established colorectal cancer (CRC) risk factors. However, it is still not well understood what explains this association. We conducted comprehensive analyses of CRC risk and red meat and poultry intakes, taking into account cooking methods, level of doneness, estimated intakes of heterocyclic amines (HCAs) that accumulate during meat cooking, tumor location, and tumor mismatch repair proficiency (MMR) status. We analyzed food frequency and portion size data including a meat cooking module for 3364 CRC cases, 1806 unaffected siblings, 136 unaffected spouses, and 1620 unaffected population-based controls, recruited into the CRC Family Registry. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for nutrient density variables were estimated using generalized estimating equations. We found no evidence of an association between total nonprocessed red meat or total processed meat and CRC risk. Our main finding was a positive association with CRC for pan-fried beefsteak (Ptrend < 0.001), which was stronger among MMR deficient cases (heterogeneity P = 0.059). Other worth noting associations, of borderline statistical significance after multiple testing correction, were a positive association between diets high in oven-broiled short ribs or spareribs and CRC risk (Ptrend = 0.002), which was also stronger among MMR-deficient cases, and an inverse association with grilled hamburgers (Ptrend = 0.002). Our results support the role of specific meat types and cooking practices as possible sources of human carcinogens relevant for CRC risk.

Human risk of diseases associated with red meat intake: Analysis of current theories and proposed role for metabolic incorporation of a non-human sialic acid

“…Although the most common HCAs found in human diets have been shown to be carcinogenic in rodents (Shirai et al, 1995; Ito et al, 1997), epidemiologic studies have produced inconsistent data regarding associations of HCAs with human cancer (Augustsson et al, 1999; Joshi et al, 2015). In fact, while many authors have found a positive association between HCA’s and breast, prostate, lung, and renal cancer (Ferrucci et al, 2009; Cross et al, 2005; Tasevska et al, 2009; Daniel et al, 2012), a recent prospective analysis revealed that intake of these meat-derived mutagens was not significantly associated with colorectal cancer risk (Le et al, 2016).…”

Dietary and Lifestyle Factors Associated with Colorectal Cancer Risk and Interactions with Microbiota: Fiber, Red or Processed Meat and Alcoholic Drinks

“…However, there are still debates on the potential relationship between red meat consumption and CRC [20,21] . Though some studies found no association between red or unprocessed meat and CRC, high processed meat intake was related with an increased risk of CRC, especially distal colon cancer [21,22] .…”

Dietary Intake of Meat Cooking-Related Mutagens (HCAs) and Risk of Colorectal Adenoma and Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…One article was subsequently excluded because it did not met the inclusion criteria since estimated the exposure to HCAs (low, intermediate and high) on the base of red meat source and preparation but not give their concentrations. Therefore, at the end of the selection process, 39 studies which met the inclusion criteria were enclosed in the systematic review and meta-analysis (Figure 1), 17 on CRA [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46], 20 on CRC [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66], and 2 studies reported data on both CRA and CRC [67,68]. …”

“…Case-control studies were published between 1997 and 2015, 16 were population-based [48-57,62-65,67,68], 2 were hospital-based [47,58] and one was cohort-based [57]. Eighteen studies were conducted in the United States [49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][59][60][61][62][63][64][66][67][68] and one each in Uruguay [47], Europe [48], Japan [58] and Canada [65]. Cohort studies were published between 2010 and 2016, all of them were conducted in the United States [60,61,66].…”

“…The consumption of IQ was reported in two studies [47,48], one of which reported also data on MeIQ [48]. The total amount of HCAs was considered in seven studies [48,51,58,59,61,65,67], similarly the MDM was reported in seven studies [49,52,53,55,60,62,66]. The quality score for each study (see the on line Supplemental Table S2 and S3, for details of quality score calculation in case-control and cohort studies, respectively) is shown in the last right column of Table 5S.…”