DOES MEAT CAUSE CANCER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 3782, 9 January 1908, Page 4

DOES MEAT CAUSE CANCER.

The ranks of those who regard excessive consumption of meat as the cause of cancer have been joined by an English physician, Dr G. Cooke Adams, who is reported to the daily press as having just concluded a two-years’ study of this disease in Chicago. __ Says the Medical Record: — “ This is an old theory, one of the first, indeed, to be offered when investigators began seriously to search for a cause of the increase of cancer in modern times, but Dr Adams varies it somewhat by the suggestion that it is the consumption of the flesh of diseased animals chiefly that leads to the development of cancerous growths. Some time ago, Oldfield had somethiug of the same notion, but his theory was that it was flesh, not of diseased animals (the tuberculosis, the antinomjcotic, etc.,) but of those which had been overfed, that favoured the production of cancer. In other words, it was not autotoxicatiou of the human, but rather that of the animal whose flesh was eaten, which gave the impetus to malignancy of cell growth. Dr. Adams’ theory, if he is correctly reported, would seem to be of the same order—that the toxic principle, whatever that may be, causing the disease £is present in the meat itself, and is not formed by an autotoxic process in the intestines or tissues of the consumer. Dr. Robert Bell, of Eondon, holds the autotoxication theory, but does not regard meat as a special cause, except indirectly as leading to a more ready production of toxic material. Should the autotoxic theory prove to be correc' it may possibly be found that diseased meat differs from sound meat, and both from other food, only in the fact that the elaboration of of a cancer-produc-ing substance from the former is a more rapid process and one requiring a smaller amount of the offending food.”