"If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero."

Walter Willett, M.D., Chairman of the Nutrition Department, Harvard School of Public Health; Director of a study of 88,000 American nurses that analyzed the link between diet and colon cancer;
Winner of 2003 Linus Pauling Institute Prize for Health Research.
( lpi.oregonstate.edu/f-w03/prize2003.html)
          New England Journal of Medicine, Dec. 1990

"When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings."
William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of Cardiology 

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in Britain, accounting for 25% of all deaths. It has been estimated that diet may be linked to 30-70% of cancers ¹. Certain cancers, such as colon, breast and prostate are clearly diet related ².

Sir Kenneth Calman, Chief Medical Officer, has stated (1997) that "there is a relationship between eating red meat and cancer".

The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39% lower among vegetarians compared with meat-eaters ³ .

References:

1.     Doll, R. (1990) Symposium on diet and cancer.
Proc of the Nutrition Society v.49 p.119-31.

2.     Cummings, J & Bingham, S. (1998) Diet and the Prevention of Cancer BMJ v.317 p.1636-1640.

3.     Thorogood, M et al. (1994) Risk from death from cancer and ischaemic heart disease in meat and non meat-eaters.

"Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening. They are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go.... We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods....

"Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's when the mischief starts."

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., of Cornell University, director of a study of 6,500 Chinese that found a close correlation between meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer.  

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of `real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."

Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, D.C. 

"All red meat contains saturated fat.  There is no such thing as truly lean meat.  Trimming away the edge ring of fat around a steak really does not lower the fat content significantly.  People who have red meat (trimmed or untrimmed) as a regular feature of their diets suffer in far greater numbers from heart attacks and strokes."

Michael Klaper, M.D., Medical Director, EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California 

Beef contains the highest concentration of herbicides of any food sold in America, according to the national Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences. Eighty percent of all the herbicides used in the U.S. are sprayed on corn and soybeans, which are used primarily as feed for cattle. When consumed by cattle, the chemicals accumulate in their bodies and are passed onto consumers in finished cuts of beef.

-- from National Research Council,
Board on Agriculture, Alternative Agriculture, 44;
National Research Council, Board on Agriculture,
Regulating Pesticides in Food, 78, Table 3-20 to 22.