Does pork consumption cause cirrhosis? Perhaps, if people become obese from eating pork
The idea that pork consumption may cause cirrhosis has been around for a while. A fairly widely cited 1985 study by Nanji and French ( ) provides one of the strongest indictments of pork: “In countries with low alcohol consumption, no correlation was obtained between alcohol consumption and cirrhosis. However, a significant correlation was obtained between cirrhosis and pork.” Recently Paul Jaminet wrote a blog post on the possible link between pork consumption and cirrhosis ( ). Paul should be commended for bringing this topic to the fore, as the implications are far-reaching and very serious. One of the key studies mentioned in Paul’s post is a 2009 article by Bridges ( ), from which the graphs below were taken. The graphs above show a correlation between cirrhosis and alcohol consumption of 0.71, and a correlation between cirrhosis and pork consumption of 0.83. That is, the correlation between cirrhosis and pork consumption is the stronger of the two! Combining this with the Nanji a...