In October 26, 2015, the International Agency for Research on
Cancer (IARC) issued a press release (No. 240) on the results of the
recent evaluation by this agency, which is the specialized cancer
agency of the World Health Organization (WHO), of the carcinogenicity
of red and processed meat consumption (IARC, 2015).
Based on data of the scientific literature, 22 experts from 10
countries classified the consumption of red meat as “probably
carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A), whereas processed meat was
classified as “carcinogenic to humans” (Group 1). Additional information
on these assessments has been published in the Lancet
Oncology (Bouvard et al., 2015), as an advance of a monograph of
the IARC on this subject, whose publication has been already announced
(volume 114). Bouvard et al. (2015) reported that the
largest body of epidemiological data concerned colorectal cancer.