Hey, NY Times: Keep your hands off my smoked salmon

For lovers of smoked salmon, the New York Times featured an alarming headline last week: "Do Lox and Other Smoked Fish Increase Cancer Risk?" The article reported that the American Institute for Cancer Research, a respected nonprofit organization, considers smoked fish (including lox) to be in the same category as "processed meat." The Times answers its own question with "it might."

The Times is wrong. If anything, smoked salmon is good for you. Let me explain.

Where does the concern come from? In 2015, a major report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that red meat and processed meat probably cause cancer, especially colon cancer. To be precise, they wrote that

"there is sufficient evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of processed meat."

And what, you might ask, is processed meat? According to the IARC:

"Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation."

Although the 2015 IARC report didn't mention smoked fish, the NY Times reporter, Sophie Egan, points out that smoked salmon (lox) is also transformed through salting and smoking (or curing, if you consider gravlox). To support this concern, Egan quotes Alice Bender, a dietitian (with a master's degree but not a doctorate) from the American Institute for Cancer Research. According to Bender, who was not involved in the IARC report,

"Even though it’s possible that processed fish and even chicken and turkey could be better alternatives [to processed meats], for now we have to look at all of it as processed meat."

No, we don't.

I read the IARC report, and it doesn't mentioned smoked fish. It states that processed meats usually "contain pork or beef, but might also contain other red meats, poultry, offal (eg, liver), or meat byproducts such as blood." And an earlier report gave these examples of processed meats: ham, bacon, sausages, blood sausages, meat cuts, liver paté, salami, bologna, tinned meat, luncheon meat, and corned beef. Nothing about fish.

However, I wanted to be certain, so I dug down into the original research. The IARC report is based on a whole raft of earlier studies, which they combined and summarized, and it turns out that some of those studies did indeed look at smoked fish.

In particular, this IARC study from 2007–one of the studies that the 2015 IARC report relied upon–looked at both meat and fish and how they affected the risk of colon cancer. The 2007 study found that consumption of fish reduced the risk of cancer. And most important for today's discussion, they stated explicitly that

"Fish included fresh, canned, salted, and smoked fish."

There you have it. Consumption of fish, including smoked fish, reduces the risk of colon cancer. (A minor caveat: smoked salmon does have a high level of salt, which can be a concern for people with high blood pressure.)

So my response to the NY Times: keep your hands off my bagels and lox. Really, you should know better.