Same old same old. The WCRF bods will be having orgasms over this but it is very poor data. Self-report data needs lots of controls to be of any weight and neither social class nor social desirability responding were controlled for below.
Education was controlled but it alone is not a good index of social class. For instance, many educated people do not even have jobs these days, let alone being rich. And rich people often have poor education. And there are other class variables. Class can only convincingly be measured using several indices. See here for an empirical study of the issues involved in class measurement.
Middle class people are more likely to "say the right thing" and they are healthier anyway. One notes that the British sub-sample was described as "health conscious people", so they would know well what foods are "correct" according to conventional wisdom. Regardless of what they actually did, they knew what to say!
And even if we take the data at face value, the correlation with mortality was marginal for processed meat and non-existent for red meat. A real storm in a teacup
And the study was a Europe-wide one so it would be interesting to see in which countries a statistically significant correlation emerged. My guess: None of them! Statistical significance is heavily dependent on sample size so the much smaller sample size for each nation would be unlikely to show significance, given the weak overall effect
A journalistic summary here
Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition
By Sabine Rohrmann et al.
Abstract
Background
Recently, some US cohorts have shown a moderate association between red and processed meat consumption and mortality supporting the results of previous studies among vegetarians. The aim of this study was to examine the association of red meat, processed meat, and poultry consumption with risk of early death in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC).
Methods
Included in the analysis were 448,568 men and women without prevalent cancer, stroke, or myocardial infarction, and with complete information on diet, smoking, physical activity and body mass index, who were between 35 and 69 years old at baseline. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to examine the association of meat consumption with all-cause and cause-specific mortality.
Results
Until June 2009, 26,344 deaths were observed. After multivariate adjustment, a high consumption of red meat was related to higher all-cause mortality (HR=1.14, 95% CI 1.01-1.28, 160+ vs. 10-19.9 g/day), and the association was stronger for processed meat (HR=1.44, 95% CI 1.24-1.66, 160+ vs. 10-19.9 g/day). After correction for measurement error, higher all-cause mortality remained significant only for processed meat (HR=1.18, 95% CI 1.11-1.25, per 50 g/d). We estimated that 3.3% (95% CI 1.5-5.0%) of deaths could be prevented if all participants had a processed meat consumption of less than 20 g per day. Significant associations with processed meat intake were observed for cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and 'other causes of death'. The consumption of poultry was not related to all-cause mortality.
Conclusions
The results of our analysis support a moderate positive association between processed meat consumption and mortality in particular due to cardiovascular diseases, but also cancer.
SOURCE
UPDATE:
My prophecy about the WCRF has come true. See here, where the BBC reports both unduly expansive and cautious conclusions from the research. They even report that red meat is bad for you, when the research showed that it is NOT! Could the BBC reporter not read what it says in the abstract above: "After correction for measurement error, higher all-cause mortality remained significant only for processed meat". Far from being reliable, it would seem that BBC reporters can't even read!
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).
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