Industry News - AM

October’s gonna be scary: NAMI’s Betsy Booren on upcoming IARC review


By Lisa M. Keefe on 7/27/2015

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is planning to evaluate red and processed meats as a possible human carcinogen in mid-October — with the group’s report due out around Halloween — and Betsy Booren anticipates a ghoulish result.

“IARC is going to make the Dietary Guidelines (process) look easy,” the North American Meat Institute’s Vice President for Scientific Affairs told a meeting of the Southwest Meat Association here late last week.

Together, NAMI, the National Pork Board and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. already have spent between $500,000 and $1 million on preparing scientific materials and experts to the agency, which is a unit of the World Health Organization.

This, although IARC is not required to consider information presented by industries that may be affected by its decisions or allow them to participate in the discussions.

“It’s our 12-alarm fire, because if they determine that red and processed meat causes cancer — and I think that they will — that moniker will stick around for years. It could take decades and billions of dollars to change that.”

Essentially, at the end of the evaluation process, IARC’s panel of experts will assign red and processed meats a category indicating the meats’ likelihood of being a human carcinogen, from Category 4 (balance of evidence indicates it is not a carcinogen) to Category 1 (balance of evidence clearly indicates a human carcinogen). Booren said she expects the meats to garner a Category 1 or 2a designation (2a meaning evidence is inconclusive, but indicates a probable carcinogen).

“If [the designation] is a 2b that’s a win for our industry,” she said.

IARC’s decision has a domino effect on policy and responses by other organizations, such as the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Cancer Society, and by governments such as the state of California.

“We have seen how NGOs and media groups have picked up on (other IARC decisions recently) and we are fully ready for this,” Booren promised. The meat groups’ emphasis will be on understanding the science in context, and that any chemical substance, such as a medication, can be beneficial or toxic depending on how it’s used.

In her presentation, Betsy Booren included a video on the IARC process that was created and produced by Andrew Maynard, director of the Risk Innovation Lab at Arizona State University, and posted to his Risk Bites channel on YouTube. You can see the video here:


 
Loading Comments