Forget red meat - you're more likely to get bowel cancer from eating CHOCOLATE

Indeed, the Department of Health warns committed carnivores to cut down to 70g a day.

But meat has been unfairly demonised, according to Roger Leicester, Director of Endoscopy at St George's Hospital and director of the SW London Bowel Cancer Screening Programme.

In fact, Mr Leicester, who is also a former secretary of the British Society of Gastroenterology, says cutting out red meat is known to cause iron deficiency.

Here, he explains why chocolate - full of sugar and fat - is a more likely cancer-causing culprit...

The next time you feel guilty about chomping on a juicy steak, don't.

I say this because there has been no clear published evidence to implicate lean red meat in causing cancer - despite the constant warnings from charities and scientists.

In fact, in my opinion, chocolate could be more of a danger. 

Very high intakes of sugar and saturated fat are much more of a problem, but no one ever suggests we should give up chocolate, which is laden with sugar loaded with fat.

That would be too unpopular.

Man is an omnivore. Red meat is very much part of my diet, and I eat it four or five times a week. 

You can’t beat a good steak, or a Sunday roast beef, and a bacon butty is usually on the menu at the weekend.

All the scaremongering around meat seems to have started with a study back in the Seventies which showed that Seventh Day Adventists — who are vegetarians — had a slightly lower risk of bowel cancer than the general population.

But you cannot possibly claim this is proof that meat causes cancer because Seventh Day Adventists don't drink alcohol or smoke and most of them even avoid coffee and hot condiments and spices.

It is very poor science to isolate one aspect of such a restrictive diet and make sweeping claims about cancer risk.

Dietary studies are notoriously inaccurate. 

They rely on people remembering what they ate and they take no account of how foods are cooked, not to mention other lifestyle factors.

Another study that is often used to claim a link between meat consumption and bowel cancer is the ongoing EPIC study.

This is a big European research project which compared southern and northern Europeans and found a small association between consumption of red and processed meat and bowel cancer.

But southern and northern Europeans have very different diets and lifestyles. 

We know that olive oil, which is an important part of the southern European diet, is associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancer. 

People who eat oily fish also get a protective effect - and we know that high levels of omega-3 fatty acids will protect against cancer.

The EPIC study did not compare like with like and when the UK data was analysed separately there was actually no association between meat intake and cancer.

The bottom line, if you will excuse the pun, is that I don't personally feel lean red meat in any quantity is going to be a problem and we should stick to the government's recommendations of not consuming more than 500g of red meat, including processed meat in a week (70g a day).

What is a problem is how people cook - because if you burn anything it produces pyrolysins and we know these cause mutations of the colonic cells. 

So if you are going to have a BBQ, don't burn the meat to death.

And when it comes to processed meat, remember it has a higher salt and fat content.

So have bacon or salami in moderation, and switch to lean red meat products. 

(dailymail.co.uk)