Processed meat

IARC places processed meat in Group 1, the same confidence category as tobacco smoking, which describes how certain the link is and not how large. The relative increase in colorectal cancer risk is roughly a fifth per 50 g a day, applied to a modest baseline. The evidence is observational but unusually consistent across populations, which is why the classification is firmer here than for unprocessed red meat.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2012 whose title contains “processed meat”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

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