Is it really true that eating meat causes cancer? The argument is vague but this seems to be an important part of it.
What is true, and shown in a lot of research, is that eating a lot of sugar and processed food causes a plethora of health issues. That might include processed meat products, or in other words meat that has fat removed from it (making it taste awful) and sugar added (to make it taste okay again). And most sugar is produced (in the US) from corn syrup, which is also heavily subsidized and thus very cheap, making processed meat much cheaper than selling proper meat.
Prominent scientific and nutritional voices on this topic disagree, and it's frankly confusing and frustrating to me as a non-scientist. But what I can confidently say about the healthfulness-of-red-meat debate is that it's by no means as settled as your "no, it is not true" statement implies.
This Feb 2020 article sums up the scientific debate well: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...
Takeaways copied from the article:
Red and processed meats do increase health risks.
You don't need to eat red meat. "You can get the same amounts — and in some cases even more — from poultry, fish, eggs, and nuts, and as well as by following a plant-based diet."
I don't have a copy handy but I seem to recall the author of "The China Study" making this claim and then presenting his lab evidence to support it. The evidence includes the admission that the laboratory mice used are a specific breed chosen for their predisposition to certain types of cancers and that they are fed diets of protein far in excess of what they would normally choose to eat. With these two factors combined he was barely able to get a statistically significant signal regarding health effects related to the long-term ingestion of protein.
He summarizes that extrapolating his results to human scale would be the equivalent of a person eating something like 2,000 hot dogs a day which he admits is ridiculous. This isn't a one-time event but an ongoing level of protein intake which would result in potentially harmful future health outcomes. His conclusion is that despite all of this, protein is a great risk to human health and the consumption of meat and meat-based products should be reduced if not eliminated.
No evidence is ever given related to normal levels of protein intake in healthy mice or humans. No mention of confounding factors like smoking, exposure to environment, or simply other dietary factors like gut bacteria. The only controls are the fact that the mice used are genetically pure and therefore many of these variables have already been eliminated.
This book has been heralded as a great example of nutrition science and why things like vegetarianism and veganism are superior to omnivorous or carnivorous diets. It has been directly contrasted with Gary Taubes' work who has pages full of analysis on many fairly modern studies using reasoned arguments against the worries about cancer and health related to meat. The laboratory science in "The China Study" was at least 30 years old and did not incorporate new information.
For the record I have been hard-core ketogenic since 2013 and pretty much strictly eat dairy, meat, and meat by-products. I am at the healthiest I have ever been in my entire life by any standard you want to measure and even if I'm wrong I am perfectly willing to continue this way of life because it is higher quality than what I was doing before.
A lot of food research is also just very bad.