Author: Natasha Taylor

Will Processed Meat Cause You To Get Cancer?

Natasha Taylor / / Europe, North America, UK

The World Health Organisation (WHO) have recently claimed that processed meats such as bacon, sausages and ham can cause you cancer.

The report claimed that consuming more than 50g of processed meat a day – which equates to around 2 slices of bacon – increased the change of people developing colorectal cancer by 18%.

This is in fact a real finding but what should we make of it?

The main thing is to remember that although this is a real finding, it’s a narrow finding that hasn’t just come to the surface. In fact links between certain types of meat and some forms of cancer – notably bowel cancer – isn’t ‘new’ news. The evidence surrounding this study has been building for decades, and is supported by a lot of careful research.

First of all, it’s important to understand the definition of what the study is saying.

Cancer Research have highlighted the difference between the meats highlighted in the study, and their definitions are as follows:

‘Red’ meat is (as you might expect), any meat that’s a dark red colour before it’s cooked –  this obviously means meats like  beef and lamb, but also includes pork.

‘Processed’ meat is meat that’s not sold fresh, but instead has been cured, salted, smoked, or otherwise preserved in some way (so things like bacon, sausages, hot dogs, ham, salami, and pepperoni). But this doesn’t include fresh burgers or mince.

The WHO’s study didn’t claim that if you eat any sort of meat then you can cause yourself to get all or any kinds of cancer. And it also didn’t claim that processed meat is just as, or even more dangerous than smoking, or anything else linked to cancer. The conclusions from the study were a lot narrower in that they have to do with cancer (mainly colon and rectal cancers) and meat.

According to Cancer Research,  in 2011 scientists estimated that around 3 in every hundred cancers in the UK were due to eating too much red and processed meat (that’s around 8,800 cases every year). This compares against 64,500 cases every year caused by smoking (or 19 per cent of all cancers).

They’ve also said that none of this means that a single meat-based meal is ‘bad for you’. What it does mean, however, is that eating large amounts of red and processed meat, over a long period of time, is probably not the best approach if you’re aiming to live a long and healthy life. Meat is fine in moderation. Cancer Research have said that it certainly is a very good source of some nutrients which you need – including protein, iron and zinc.  It’s just about being sensible, and not eating too much, too often.

So fear not, you’re free to eat a bacon sandwich every once in a while without worrying about the long-term state of your health.

 

Photo by: Kjetil Ree

 

 

Why Abolishing Their One-Child Policy May Not Help China

Natasha Taylor / / Middle-East, UK, Uncategorized

4011344291_527f42d20b_oClaims have been made that China abolishing their one child policy won’t help the country.

The policy will come into effect from March 2016 but it is unclear whether ending China’s more than 30 year-long child policy will trigger a demographic change that the Chinese Communist Party hopes for.

The East Asia Forum have reported that the abandonment of the one-child policy may not cause a significant rise in the population of China.

They’ve said that Yuan Xin, an expert in population studies at Nankai University in Tianjin, has observed that the traditional Chinese concept of having multiple children has changed alongside developments in China’s economy and society over the past few decades.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) itself has agreed that, ‘it has been a mainstream concept among Beijing residents to give birth to fewer and better children after decades of the family planning policies the city adopted in the 1970s’.

The one-child era prompted both a change in mind set more people are opting for fewer children, especially in big cities such as Beijing. Couples with only one child mainly live in the cities, where the cost of housing and education is comparatively high. Most of them tend to choose not to have a second child owing to financial pressures.

Figures released in a survey conducted by China Youth Daily, 84.9 per cent of respondents reported worrying about the financial pressure of raising a second child. Couples who are wealthy enough that they can afford to bring up a second child are usually over 40 years old and are confronted with difficulties in giving birth.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Most Chinese families spend more proportionately. It costs on average about 190,000 yuan, or about $30,000 to raise a child through age 18 in China, according to researchers at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu. That’s about 15% of the average Chinese household income.

Hopeful estimates say the new relaxation will bring between 3 million and 6 million babies a year in the five years from 2017 and 120 billion yuan to 240 billion yuan in additional spending, according to Credit Suisse, though the last birth-policy relaxation, in 2013, yielded far fewer second-child applications than expected.

 

Photo by: joan vila

China Ends One-child Policy. But Why Was It Introduced?

Natasha Taylor / / Asia

2514981377_7a52e8c635_oChina has officially ended their one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children for the first time in over three decades.

The announcement followed a four-day Communist party summit in Beijing where China’s top leaders debated financial reforms and how to maintain growth at a time of heightened concerns about the economy.

But why was the policy first implemented?

In the late 1970’s China introduced the one-birth policy as a measure to reduce the country’s birth rate and slow down the population growth rate.

In 1950, China’s rate of population change was 1.9 per cent each year. This may not sound too high, however, a country needs a growth rate of only 3 per cent for the population of the country to double in less than 24 years.

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Previous Chinese governments had had encouraged people to have a lot of children to increase the country’s workforce, but by the 1970’s the government realised the current rates of population growth would soon become unsustainable.

Benefits promised by the policy included increased access to education for all, plus childcare and healthcare offered to families that followed this rule. However, it was largely resisted in rural areas where it was traditional to have large families.

Couples who did not follow the one-child policy didn’t receive the benefits and were fined. People in China also claimed that some women who became pregnant after they had already has a child were forced to have an abortion and many women were forcibly sterilised.

Due to the traditional preference for boys in China, large numbers of female babies have ended up homeless or in orphanages. In 2000 it was reported that 90 per cent of foetuses that were aborted in China were female. As a result of this, gender balance of the Chinese population has become distorted and it is thought that today, men outnumber women by more than 60 million.

Although there were many problems that came from the introduction of the policy, the birth rate did subsequently fall, and the rate of population currently sits at around 0.7 per cent.

But will the change in policy be good for China?

 

Photos by: Osrin and BBC