Global Health Conundrum: Gastrointestinal Cancer and Meat Consumption During the Last Six Decades

This past century has seen the most advancement in medicine, leading to an almost thirty year increase in the average life expectancy. This increase in life expectancy has also increased cancer incidence in the global population. Cancer is a multifactorial disease, and thus its origin cannot be directly correlated with just one cause. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating how global meat consumption has influenced various cancers’ incidence rates across the world. Although the correlation between meat consumption and cancer risk has been investigated, a global temporal study investigating the national mortality rates of gastrointestinal cancers relating to meat production remains unexplored. We researched causes for the trends between meat production and GI cancer mortality in affluent nations of both the Eastern and the Western hemisphere including: the USA, Canada, Japan, France, and Singapore. Data was collected from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization Cancer Mortality Database. Meat consumption data was unavailable between the 1960s-2010, so meat production data was used instead. Interestingly, the pancreatic cancer mortality rate increased in each country except Canada. The spike is due to increased meat consumption, obesity, lack of screening modalities, poor prognosis, and late diagnosis of the disease. Canada’s 1% drop in mortality rate can be attributed to a decreased smoking rate amongst men (62% to 16% from 1965-2017) as well as an overall decline in meat consumption. The mortality rates of gastric and colorectal cancer (CRC) have decreased despite a meat production increase. Decreased H. pylori prevalence (Europe: 48.8% to 39.8%, North America: 42.4% to 26.6%, and Western Asia: 53.6% to 54.3%), better food preservation, and improvement in environmental conditions have lowered gastric cancer incidence. The CRC mortality rate in the USA, Canada, Japan, and France decreased mostly due to colonoscopy screening measures, better treatment, and decreased red meat consumption. In Singapore, increased obesity and a poor, high caloric diet accounts for an increased CRC mortality rate despite decreased meat production. This rate is exacerbated by lower screening rates due to decreased CRC risk awareness. Gastric and CRC mortality rates decreased despite increases in meat production, while pancreatic cancer incidence rates have increased. These trends are further investigated and necessary to understand in order to lower the mortality rates of GI cancers on a global scale.