Meat, Fat, and Their Subtypes as Risk Factors for Colorectal Cancer in a Prospective Cohort of Women

The authors investigated the association of intakes of meat and fat with colorectal cancer in a prospective cohort of women in the United States. Between 1987 and 1989, 45,496 women completed a 62-item National Cancer Institute/Block food frequency questionnaire, and during 386,716 person-years of follow-up, there were 487 incident cases of colorectal cancer. The authors used Cox proportional hazards regression to estimate relative risks and 95% confidence intervals for total meat, red meat, white meat, processed meat, and well-done meat intakes, as well as for total fat, saturated fat, and unsaturated fat. Relative risks for increasing quintiles of total meat and red meat consumption indicated no association with colorectal cancer (relative risk for high compared with low quintile = 1.10, 95% confidence interval: 0.83, 1.45) for red meat. For total fat, there was also no association with increasing quintiles of consumption (relative risk for high compared with low quintile = 1.14, 95% confidence interval: 0.86, 1.53). Additionally, none of the other subtypes of either meat or fat showed any association with colorectal cancer. This study provided no evidence of an association between either meat or fat (or any of their subtypes) and colorectal cancer incidence, but the authors cannot rule out the possibility of a modest association.