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pilsetnieks

Maybe it's the Guardian's fault. The BBC article (http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34620617) does mention some numbers:

> Is meat as bad as smoking?

> No.

> Estimates suggest 34,000 deaths from cancer every year could be down to diets high in processed meat.

> That is in contrast to one million deaths from cancer caused by smoking and 600,000 attributed to alcohol each year.

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  600,000 attributed to alcohol each year.

That number is a bit misleading. Does that include the deaths say due to DUI,, liver damage, poisoning?

It ideally shouldn't as we are discussing carcinogens.

Edit: Added additional alcohol related deaths.

There are only about 30000 fatalities from all car driving per year.

  The report indicates that worldwide the total number of road traffic 
  deaths remains unacceptably high at 1.24 million per year.

http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st...

In America [0] (I thought the other stats were American ones too), it actually says in [1] 480000 cigarette deaths which disagrees with the previous stats of 1 million, but a million isn't enough for the world surely?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/healt...

From the context it seems that it's just about cancer cases but it is very vague and could mean anything.

I found numbers for how many cancer deaths in the US are attributable to alcohol [0] and it puts it at 18 200 to 21 300 deaths. For worldwide figures see Table 1 of this study [1] that breaks down alcohol-attributable deaths by category. It lists alcohol-attributable cancer deaths at 487 000 in the year 2004. So it looks like the number isn't misleading, only unclear. Misleading would have been listing the total 2 225 000 alcohol-attributable deaths.

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3673233/

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673609...

If you count colorectal, prostate and breast cancer as lifestyle diseases and that (a meat) diet is related to those - then the numbers are very high.

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