In a press release Beyond Meat and the American Cancer Society (ACS) today announced a multi-year agreement to advance research on plant-based meat and cancer prevention, as well as to help ACS continue to build the foundation of plant-based meat and diet data collection.
The commitment aims to advance the understanding of how plant-based meats contribute to healthy diet patterns and their potential role in cancer prevention and is a crucial step towards long-term research in the plant-based protein field, states the news release.
“American Cancer Society guidelines have long recommended a diet rich in plant foods with limited intake of processed and red meat,” said William L. Dahut, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer at the American Cancer Society. “While short-term research studies have shown that switching to plant-based meat improves risk factors for heart disease, including cholesterol levels and body weight, research in this area is still in its early stages, particularly in relation to cancer.”
The agreement will help enable a continuation of ACS’ ongoing data collection in its Cancer Prevention Study-3 (CPS-3) and help build a downstream cancer research portfolio that is critical to understanding whether plant-based proteins, including plant-based meat, can play a role in cancer prevention. ACS’ Cancer Prevention Studies help researchers identify cancer risk factors among its pool of more than 300,000 participants.
“We are honored to enter this agreement with the American Cancer Society, a leading authority on cancer research,” said Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown. “One of our core goals at Beyond Meat is to positively impact human health – and we’re committed to taking action by supporting trusted, scientific and evidence-based research on the benefits of shifting the protein at the center of the plate from animal-based meat to plant-based meat.”
As noted by the press release, since 2015 “the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified red meat as a carcinogen that increases the risk of colorectal cancer, and recent studies also suggest a possible role of red and/or processed meats in increasing the risk of breast cancer and certain forms of prostate cancer.”
