Yes, iron. The stuff that is central to haemoglobin, that is necessary for red blood cells to transport oxygen around your body so you don’t die. That nutrient which will cause anaemia if you are short of it. An absolutely essential element of your diet now gives you cancer.
Who says? Well, the CRUK scientists, who else?
Red meat contains large amounts of iron and is also known to increase the likelihood of bowel cancer.
1. It has iron in it.
2. It has been linked to (not proven to be) an increased risk of bowel cancer.
Therefore, iron causes cancer. If you donate money to CRUK, THAT is the kind of primary school logic your money is paying for.
The truth is, of course, that red meat has been on The List for a long, long time. They’ve worked through smoking, drinking, fast foods, salt, and have now come up with something utterly stupid to justify meat controls.
There was a perfectly good and reasonable argument concerning the formation of acrylamides in the surface of a meat product, where the surface is cooked until black and crispy. That was even actually true! Too much of the crispy bits and you had more acrylamides and therefore, by a process that was genuinely logical, a higher risk of setting off a cancer.
Oh, but that’s not good enough, oh no. Now it has to be the iron that does it.
Watch all those anaemics and elderly throwing out their iron supplements because they now think iron is a carcinogen. Watch the Pharmers try to recover from this by claiming the pills contain ‘good’ iron while meat has ‘bad’ iron. It’s an element. It’s like saying there is good arsenic and bad arsenic, or good oxygen and bad oxygen.
Ah, but all that chemistry teaching has long since been closed down, so who is to gainsay The Experts?
Wait a minute, there’s a real gobsmacker in the comments -
Quote: we sholdn’t eat our greens either ‘ause we’re told they are full of iron? Answer: Meat iron , heme iron , that iron found in meat is not controlled but the iron from plants , is. The iron from meat has also been shown to CAUSE other iron ingested to be absorbed NOW too because of the inclusion of meat iron. In effect you can eat spinach , till the cows come home , and it won’t build to toxic levels , but including meat WILL raise the iron levels to high levels. This iron is why bloodletting used to work for everything , and why NOW bloodletting is coming back ‘in vogue’. – Tom Hennessy, calgary , canada, 10/8/2012
The good iron – bad iron stage is set, and medicine is returning to… bloodletting, because it works for everything.
So that’s okay. We can replace the entire NHS administration and all of CRUK with a jar of leeches.
Nobody will notice.
You missed this one LI
“As a nutritionologist, I can inform you that there are four different types of iron: wrought iron, pig iron, cast iron and any old iron. What this study does not do is differentiate between these four different types of iron. More research is required so may I request that you send your cheques made out to Dr Quack to PO Box 123, Cayman Islands. Thank you in advance.
- Dr Quack, PhD in Armchair Nutritional Junk Sciences, Bought on the internet, 10/8/2012 16:30″
This guy gets my vote.
That one made me laugh too.
Dr Quack forgot the most dangerous iron of all, leg iron
Hey, that’s funny!
A conspiracy theorist might suppose that science teaching was deliberately messed up in order that the upcoming generation would believe all this crap.
Leeches are probably very good for preventing heart attacks and blood clots – I think I would choose them over statins so don’t knock them
Actually, now the red mist has descended, I think that iron experiment deserves a more detailed shredding. I’ll see if I can get hold of the original paper.
It certainly doesn’t seem (from that report) to take account of the source of the iron, which is what the Canadian vampire was going on about. It does matter: if the iron was elemental iron, then by the time it reached the upper intestine it would have been rust.
Perhaps the Daily Wail will find an “expert” who “calls for” rust-controls, and “clear labelling of products containing rust, that could pose a risk of being bought by children”.
…and certain ‘experts’ they might meet could well be inclined to explain to them that rust will make their joints seize up, and that they must spray themselves with WD-40 after showering.
It’s my civic duty, I feel.
Oh yeah – leeches. They do inject some kind of anti-clotting agent, I believe, and they don’t eat much. Also, maggots are good at cleaning out wounds because they only eat dead meat. In both cases though, you need hygenically-produced ones. The wild ones can carry all kinds of nasties.
The leeches would certainly smell better than the typical Antismokers…
- MJM
They’d take less, too.
kill em all, iron maiden.
The irony is, lack of iron will kill them all faster.
I notice that once again in this story that we also need to have a faulty gene to enable the iron to start the process. I’ve been noticing this requirement with scare stories for a while. SO what we need to know is: On average how many faulty genes are we likely to have? Obviously too many and we would not be a viable human, too few and we live for ever? Then we can actually approximate a proper risk factor. e.g. we have 20,000-ish genes according to the Genome project. With the meat-iron-gene risk we are talking about 1, one gene! which looks like a 20,000 to 1 chance of having the meat-iron one faulty. Then we read that 41,000 out of 60,000,000 get bowel cancer and 16,000 die from it. So that’s a 1463 to 1 chance of getting cancer via he red-meat-gene AFTER you have got past the hurdle of the 20,000 to 1 chance of having it.
Surely, while collectively there is risk, on an individual basis it is infinitesimal ..
The problem is, they can only think collectively. Some people die after taking one single ecstasy tab, so the call goes out that everyone will die after one. But Ozzy Osborne has pumped himself full of drugs and booze and appears almost indestructible.
I can still type legibly after a good session on whisky, I know people who fall over after a couple of glasses. We’re all different, but the Righteous don’t see that. They treat us as a herd of cloned cattle, all the same.
So if a few are at risk of something, we all are. A smoker gets lung cancer therefore all smokers get lung cancer. In fact, the risk isn’t much higher than that for non-smokers and probably has more to do with vehicle exhausts these days. Nobody wants to hear that, nobody cares. They have their culprit and they ignore the herd of elephants around them.
I won’t be at all surprised to see one size of boiler suit provided for us all in future. The British Standard Human size, and if you don’t fit the suit, then you must be adjusted until you do.
Isn’t the act or replacing CRUK with a jar of leeches redundant? After all, they are certainly leeches already. You would simply be replacing one leech with another. Granted, it would be a lower cost variety than the current species
Slamlander, but at least they’d all fit in a smaller space, we could put them in a cupboard and close the door.
Don’t forget to have a plain label on that jar.
Ha Haaaah. I gave blood this morning and during the iron test, where they drop a sample of your blood into a small beaker of mysterious fluid, my blood hung around in suspension and couldn’t make up it’s mind whether to fall to the bottom or not.
They had to prick my finger again and test it in a machine before giving me the all clear.
The young lady who went after me and smiled smugly as her sample dropped like lead to the bottom doesn’t know the imminent danger she’s in.
Of course Jesus found iron (nails) were harmful, so it must be true.
Iron was supposed to stave off evil in the old religions. Interesting, considering its place in the electrochemical series, but that’s a whole damn book’s worth of argument!
“Iron was supposed to stave off evil in the old religions.”
That’s what I’d heard, but I don’t quite understand why, could it be because iron and steel replaced the bronze weapons? And I’m not sure where silver comes into it.
LI
The reason I’m particularly interested is that I got through my Art History exam on the ancient belief in the magical properties of stones, I can remember a few, like the garnet was supposed to stop bleeding, turquoise to protect you from falls, amethyst supposedly prevents drunkeness and the image of bird carved on a sapphire (lapis lazuli back then) should make you invisible, but I can’t remember much of the rest.
(we had a fabulous library at our school and I was one of the librarians, one particular advantage was that I didn’t have to stand outside at lunchtime)
Silver first appears as an anti-vampire bullet in one of the Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee Hammer films. I think its use as anti-werewolf goes back further but haven’t delved into it.
LI, if you want, I will tell you about “Davis Science Powder”. It contains appreciable amounts of ferrous sulphate, and makes plants go like shit through a goose. (It also contains, magnesium (as sulphate), zinc(who cares what so long as it’s soluble?), cobalt (traces, ditto as zinc), manganese (ditto as before), copper (more than just a trace), calcium and PO4(3-)).
Oh, do tell. My plants could do with a boost this year.
The LLLLL&L* would like to lodge a strong and clear protest against the defamatory nature of some of the comments here. Please be advised that action WILL be taken unless corrective measures are applied. We shall NOT sit idly by and be compared to Antismokers and their ilk.
- MJM
* League of Litigiously Leprous Leech Legislators & Lawyers
Dear LLLLL&L
Better still – sue CRUK and their friends for unauthorised imitation of your clients with a view to achieving monetary gain from their actions …