So there’s a new study out which is linking eating red meat to an increased risk of colon cancer, which I’m not terribly surprised by. What I’m really curious about though is how long it will take the meat companies to retaliate and/or suppress this information. Right now, it’s the first link on MSN’s main page. But I’m sure it won’t be for long. It reminds me of a post I did a while ago, wondering if the Atkins diet was brought into popularity as a PR tactic by meat companies losing money to the rise of vegetarian meat-alternatives. Here’s a snippet from that:

We wondered how much of the popularity of this mostly-meat diet was in fact brought about as a direct result of the beef and meat industries. No doubt these flesh-peddlers started to really feel the crunch as vegetarian replacement meat and other products’ sales started to “bite” into what had before been monopolized by meat.

Imagine the panic these companies felt as they started to lose millions to all this hippy veggies crap. They started casting about for some kind of idea to bring meat back into popularity. I’d wager a healthy sum that they hired some kind of PR firm to figure out what to do. Then they had the bright idea to revive a 30 year old relatively obscure set of research, the book Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, which proved that you could lose weight by eating meat. Eating meat = losing weight! Perfect! What better scam could they have come up with in this diet-crazed culture than to bring meat back to center stage. I bet now they’re selling even more meat than they did before.

Apparently food companies do this kind of shit all the time. A rival company or industry will fund a study to “scientifically prove” that a competitor’s entire class of products is unhealthy. But I mean, shit! There’s pretty much no way the Atkins diet can be healthy, and anyone with fucking half a brain can see that.