Jonathan Steedman (00:01.486)
18 let's talk about ham what a fun topic I mean broadly this is going to be more of a talk about processed meats but particularly around ham just given the a lot of the coverage the media attention and the social media furo that seems to be around ham in particular you've probably seen

Maybe you're lucky and you don't see the same crap that I see, but you probably have seen things like increases your cancer risk by 18%. It's a group one carcinogen. It causes cancer. I've seen people talk about it being like, it's like smoking cigarettes. It's just as bad. And you know.

probably not going shock you to hear that a lot of those claims are massively exaggerated. So what I want to do today is just give you the facts, let you know what we actually know.

You will see that I'm not completely pro everyone eat as much ham as you want all the time. That's not evidence-based either. I want to give you the facts so you can decide what you are comfortable with. There are so many scenarios in nutrition that you are tossing up. It's like a cost-benefit analysis and you have to find...

what you are comfortable with. I'm hoping that by giving you the facts, you can then make an informed decision that you're comfortable with. The first thing we need to talk about is the fact that it is labeled as a group one carcinogen, because that sounds pretty serious. A carcinogen is something that increases your risk or causes cancer.

Jonathan Steedman (01:42.862)
WHO, World Health Organization, the band, they rank certain foods and chemicals and things based on their level of carcinogenicity. How carcinogenic they are, that's what I should have said. Group one is the highest ranking, okay? That's not like a good ranking, you don't want to be the highest, it's like golf, you want to be the lowest. And so if something's in group one, you know, it's the highest level of...

being a carcinogen that you can be. So, processed meat is in that level, which sounds scary, right? But what we need to understand is to be in the group one, carcinogen group, we need to be confident that...

it has an impact. We need to be confident that this thing increases your risk of cancer. And we need to be confident based on the evidence that it increases the risk of cancer in humans. Okay. Lower groups, we see it increasing the risk in animals, but not in humans. So that's more of a like, let's keep an eye on that. But, for group one, it's where we have evidence that it increases your risk and it increases the risk in humans. Right. So stuff like cigarettes and asbestos and I think aloe vera and things as well.

in there. There's some pretty serious stuff in there, but what is missing from that is how much it increases the risk. Just because it increases the risk and it increases it in humans doesn't actually really tell you much of anything really. And so no.

eating ham does not increase your risk of cancer in the same way or to the same severity or extent that smoking a cigarette does. They're in the same group because we're confident that they have an impact in humans. Cool? So to put some numbers around it, the actual risk increase that we see with regular consumption of processed meat

Jonathan Steedman (03:52.494)
is it increases your risk of getting bowel cancer because that's the main cancer associated with processed meats. A little bit stomach cancer but we're going to focus on bowel cancer today. It increases your risk by 1 % and so what that means is you're at a risk, 4.5 % of us

are going to get bowel cancer by the time we're 80. Okay, so four and a half people of every 100 are going to get bowel cancer. That's the statistic. That's the likelihood. Now, if we, if you regularly eat processed meats, that jumps from four and a half percent to five and a half percent. So it is an increase in risk in humans, hence why it's in group one. Now you need to decide whether that severity

with whether the severity of that increase is worth reducing your processed meat intake. And if you think it is, then please go for it. I'm not trying to talk you out of that. If you want to maybe moderate your intake down to a level that is safer, the recommendation is 50 grams or less per day. So 50 grams is actually not that much. So you might be looking more at like 100 grams twice per week or something like that. At that level, we see

They definitely on the lower end of the increase in risk.

And so you might be like, but John, if there's an increase in risk, why don't we just, shouldn't we just not eat it at all? firstly, some people like myself think processed meat is delicious and I like to eat it sometimes cause it's fun. Okay. So there's that. The second thing is particularly in kids, ham can be a really good food to get them to eat other foods. Right. and so like, for example, you're struggling to get your kid to eat their sandwich. they're not going to eat a cheese and tomato sandwich, but they ate a ham cheese and tomato sandwich. Right. And so all of sudden the calcium.

Jonathan Steedman (05:48.928)
the fiber, so the calcium from the cheese, the protein from the cheese, the fiber from the bread, you know, the lycopene and the potassium and the vitamin C from the tomato, they wouldn't be getting that.

if they weren't also eating the ham. So it's not as clear cut or black and white as ham is bad, we shouldn't eat it. Ham is good to eat it all the time, okay? It is situational and context dependent. And yeah, if you have a high family risk of bowel cancer, you might be extra sensitive to this and extra cautious. And that's so fine. I'm not gonna try and convince you to eat ham. But if you're someone who likes ham and you're freaking out because you've heard that eating ham is the same as smoking a cigarette, I've got some pretty good news.

for you. Right? So I want to leave you with I'm going to literally read what the World Health Organization put on their website just to show you how dumb some of the social media people have been because the answer was right there on the website and they couldn't even read this. processed meat was classified as carcinogenic to humans group one.

Tobacco smoking and asbestos are also both classified as carcinogenic to humans, group 1. Does it mean that consumption of processed meat is as carcinogenic as tobacco smoking and asbestos? That was a question that someone asked.

The response on the website was, no, processed meat has been classified in the same category as causes of cancer such as tobacco smoking and asbestos, IRAC Group 1 carcinogenic to humans, but this does not mean that they are all equally dangerous. The IARC classifications describe the strength of the scientific evidence about an agent being a cause of cancer rather than assessing the level of risk. All right, that's it.

Jonathan Steedman (07:35.727)
If like ham, keep having it. Don't go overboard. If you don't like it, don't eat it. If you're freaking out, don't eat it. But let's just all stay calm, hey? All right, chat to you next time.