08/30/2026
Earlier this month, Cancercare Manitoba launched their attention-grabbing “Cancer Loves Processed and Red Meat” public awareness campaign across the province. The campaign reminds us that “cancer loves junk food, too," and "cancer hates vegetables ".
CancerCare Manitoba is encouraging people to reduce or eliminate ultra-processed foods, processed meats , red meat, and junk food while eating more fruit, vegetables, and fibre.
The science behind this isn’t new but our attention to it may be.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on cancer classifies processed meat as Group 1 carcinogen. This classification means there is strong scientific evidence that proves a direct link between these products and cancer and places these products in the same category as to***co and asbestos.
What are processed meats exactly? Bacon, hot dogs, sausages, ham, salami, pepperoni, deli meats and meat jerky. Staples in many Manitoba homes, school lunches, restaurants, fundraisers and institutional menu offerings.
And that raises some questions.
If our public health authorities are advising Manitobans that processed meat increases cancer risk, why are we continuing to promote and consume these products?
Our society has normalized these foods so much that questioning them at all seems fringe. But perhaps the fact that we continue to promote them when we have better options available, for our health, animals, and the environment, is the extreme part.
Canada’s Food Guide recommends eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and specifically encourages Canadians to choose protein from plant-based sources more often. It also recommends limiting ultra processed foods. Our Food guide was updated in 2019, and Health Canada’s recent review notes that experts developing the guide did not consult with food and beverage industry representatives during the process. In short, the Canadian Food Guide was created free of industry influence and based on scientific evidence.
This provides quite the opportunity for Manitoba’s hospitals and schools to become models for healthy, compassionate and sustainable food. We could reduce or eliminate processed and red meat from institutional menus and offer more vegetables, fruit, whole grains, beans, lentils, tofu and other plant-based protein. We know hospital and school food menus are lacking. We know hospital food options are not created with health and recovery in mind, and that school provided lunches are made with what is cheap and quick.
If governments shape our food environment through subsidies, economic incentives, institutional purchasing, advertising rules and public policy, then surely governments also have a responsibility to help us transition toward healthier and more sustainable food systems.
And, of course, when we reduce demand for processed and red meat, less animals are bred, confined, transported and slaughtered. More and more, we are coming to understand the interconnectedness of it all. Much of what we eat affects more than us; it is animals lives full of suffering, it is pollution, it is the climate crisis, and it is also our physical disease risk.
CancerCare has started an important public conversation. Let’s take it further.
Let’s ask our elementary schools, universities, hospitals, governments and public institutions to:
Put more plant-based protein on the menu
Make healthy food the easy choice
For schools to model the type of food environment we want for our children
Our hospitals to become global leaders to health and recovery through nutrition
And to stop using public money to expand industries whose products our public-health institutions are advising us to eat less of (such as the $1.9 million funding provided from the provincial government to Maple Leaf Consumer Foods Pre-Cooked Bacon Expansion in 2021)
I can post again with a call to action, but to get started you can email:
Minister of Health, Seniors and Long-Term Care Uzoma Asagwara [email protected]
Minister of Education and Early Childhood Learning Tracy Schmidt [email protected]
Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing CancerCare Manitoba’s message reflected beyond advertising and transform the food environments we build across Manitoba and our country.
And of course, I would be very happy to see the Cancercare hot-dog cart fundraisers outside grocery stores become a thing of the past. Those are going to stop, right?
Manitoba can do better. For our health, for the animals, and of course, for our planet.
