00:00Let me just preface this by saying that the science behind this is not necessarily sketchy,
00:06but some of the interpretations of that science do venture into sketch territory.
00:11So if you believe the headlines, one of them was the trendy diet that researchers suspect
00:16could fuel bowel cancer cases as cases surge in under 50s.
00:21Now that might be true if you're a mouse.
00:24So a lot of the studies are done in rodents.
00:27And look, mice are a great animal to provide insights into biology and physiology, but
00:34a mouse is not a human.
00:37So this study, which came out of Japan, they got some mice which were genetically engineered
00:41to be more predisposed to get a certain type of small intestine cancer.
00:47And when they fed some of these mice a normal diet, and some of these mice a diet that was
00:52rich in proteins that you find in milk, blood, egg whites, they found that the ones on the
00:58supplemented diet tend to have smaller tumours than the ones with the other diet.
01:02Now, you might say, okay, maybe I should be having more milk, more eggs, more blood.
01:08But really, mice are fundamentally different to humans in so many ways.
01:13And you know, in humans, we tend to get more large intestine cancer, and small intestinal
01:20cancer is actually quite rare.
01:22But in mice, it's the other way around.
01:24They get more small intestinal cancer than large intestine cancer.
01:27So you know, good insights into biology, but am I going to change my diet?
01:32Nah.
01:33Okay.
01:34So basically, the message is for all you mice who are watching at the moment, don't go vegan,
01:39please, because you might get bowel cancer.
01:42All the mice here, very specific.
01:44Yeah, exactly.
01:45Small mice in particular.
01:46Belinda, we want to move on to this other one that's warning that red meat now apparently
01:50can increase your risk of diabetes.
01:55It's always like, I read the other day, red meat can also do bad things and can cause
02:00cancer or can cause, I don't know, constipation or something, but now diabetes as well.
02:05Why?
02:06Oh, look, if it's not cancer, it's diabetes, right?
02:08Right.
02:09This is a couple of research papers that came out last month, which kind of add to this
02:13growing body of evidence that red meat might be linked.
Comments