Barbecue meats linked with prostate cancer

Well, I'm probably screwed here. I love a good barbecue. I love charred meat. As a matter of fact, my friends just took me to a Brazillian BBQ joint in my old hood of Long Island. This is the place that has put me in a meat coma for three consecutive birthday celebrations. Hot stuff, I know.

Obviously I'm not the only one who indulges on BBQ'ed meat. The outdoor BBQ is a staple of suburban Americana along with apple pie and Nancy Reagan. This picture of the dad at the grill while the kids play in the yard is probably one of the few wholesome images I have left of traditional family life in America. Once again, another good memory is shot to hell.

Who knows whether or not this will turn out to be true in humans as to date they tested this theory on rats but I suspect that my prostate has as much chance in staying free from cancer as Tom DeLay has of running for President of the United States.

A compound formed when meat is charred at high temperatures — as in barbecue — encourages the growth of prostate cancer in rats, researchers reported on Sunday.

Their study, presented at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, may help explain the link between eating meat and a higher risk of prostate cancer.

It also fits in with other studies suggesting that cooking meat until it chars might cause cancer.

The compound, called PhIP, is formed when meat is cooked at very high temperatures, Dr. Angelo De Marzo and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported.

It appears to both initiate and promote the growth of prostate cancer in rats, they said.

"We stumbled across a new potential interaction between ingestion of cooked meat in the diet and cancer in the rat," De Marzo said in a statement.

"For humans, the biggest problem is that it's extremely difficult to tell how much PhIP you've ingested, since different amounts are formed depending on cooking conditions."

For the study, Yatsutomo Nakai and other members of De Marzo's team mixed PhIP into food given to rats for up to eight weeks, then studied the animals' prostates, intestines and spleens. They found genetic mutations in all the organs after four weeks.