Cancer and Meat Eating

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 7, 1908

Cancer and Meat Eating

Nothing could seem more definite than the connection between cancer and the practise of eating inferior meat, traced by Dr. G. Cooke Adams in a series of statistical studies given out last month by the Chicago Board of Health. “There can not be the slightest doubt,” to employ the positive language of this expert British investigator, “that the great increase in cancer among the foreign-born in Chicago over the prevalence of that disease in their native countries is due to the increased consumption of animal foods, particularly those derived from diseased animals.” This conclusion substantiates the original deductions made by Dr. Adams from investigations conducted in Australia and London, and extended over a number of years. The foreign-born in Chicago are enabled through higher rates of wages to indulge in a meat diet denied them in Europe. They make use of the supplies derived from condemned animals and from the canned products of establishments handling tubercular and diseased cattle. This increase in cancer is accelerated by the influx of foreigners willing to eat even inferior grades of meat. So much may be demonstrated, insisted Dr. Adams, by a study of the vital statistics of any American city. The tables for Chicago give striking results. In that city, according to official figures, between 1856 and 1866 there was an increase in the death-rate from cancer of 680 per cent, while from 1866 to 1905 the increase was 232 per cent. The mere percentages would be misleading did we not know that in 1856 but one in each 1,000 deaths was from cancer, whereas, in 1866 this had increased to one in each 164. In 1905 it was one in twenty-three deaths, while in 1906 one death in every 21.8 was due to this disease.—Current Literature.