University of Texas Study Links Meat to Kidney Cancer

Another study has shown people who eat more meat have a high risk of cancer. This time, it's kidney cancer, researchers reported Monday. And it's not just people who eat red meat, as many other studies have shown. People who eat more so-called white meat, such as chicken, have the higher risk, too.

Dr. Xifeng Wu and colleagues at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston studied 659 patients just diagnosed with kidney cancer and compared them to 699 similar people without cancer, NBC News reported.

They wanted to break down not just the link, but to tease out the factors that might explain it. They looked at what kinds of meat people ate, how they cooked it, as well as people's genetic makeup to see if certain genes made them more susceptible.

People who said they ate the most grilled meat — red meat and chicken alike — had a higher risk of kidney cancer, they reported in the journal Cancer. And those with two genetic mutations that already put people at higher risk of kidney cancer were most affected by the grilled meat risk.

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