Well-Done Beef Hikes Cancer Risk

Like your steak well done? Lots of pan drippings? Not a healthful choice, says the National Cancer Institute.

The latest research suggests that cooking meat too long - and at too high a temperature - increases the risk of cancer.

And pan gravy? Better not even think about it.

Red meat has long ridden high on the list of questionable foods, largely because of its high-fat link to heart disease. But meat-eaters are also known to have a higher-than-usual risk of some kinds of malignancy, especially colon cancer.

So researchers set out to see if the way people fix their steaks and hamburgers has a bearing on this risk. Their study was conducted on Nebraska farmers - 176 stomach cancer victims and 503 healthy people.

“We found increasing risk with increasing doneness,” said Mary H. Ward, a cancer institute epidemiologist who presented the findings Monday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Her team discovered that folks who prefer their meat medium, medium-well or well-done are about three times as likely as those who eat their beef rare or medium rare to get stomach cancer.

Why? Stuff with the decidedly unappetizing name of heterocyclic amines may be the key. These are carcinogens - cancer-causing agents - and they are formed when animal protein known as creatinine is heated to high temperatures.

They found that people who eat mostly roasted meat, which cooks at a much lower temperatures than frying or grilling, have no increased risk of stomach cancer, even if they like their roast beef well done.

However, even though roast beef does not have heterocyclic amines, the juice that bubbles in the bottom of the roasting pan does. So gravy made from these drippings is high in carcinogens.

For those who enjoy steaks, the researchers said a prudent choice is to cook meat through - blood-dripping rare isn’t a good idea either - but not so it’s well done.

When the researchers looked at beef consumption without considering how it was cooked, they found a clear association between the amount eaten and the risk of stomach cancer.

Those who ate beef at least once a day had about double the risk of those who had it just once a week. However, they found that cooking duration turned out to be more important than the amount eaten.