Gene increases risk of cancer from meat consumption

One in three people is born with a gene that significantly increases their likelihood of developing bowel cancer from eating processed meat, a study has found.

Compared with those eating little or no processed meat, the heaviest consumers were more than twice at risk of the disease if they had the worst version of the gene variant.

Eating meat — especially processed meat in pies, bacon, sausages and cold cuts — was already known to raise bowel cancer risk, but the gene mutations increase it even more.