COSTELLO: Bacon lovers, listen up. A new warning this morning from the World Health Organization: your extra helping of hotdogs, ham and sausage can cause cancer. And it's not just processed meats, red meat may pose a problem, too. Senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is now here with more. Good morning.</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning -- Carol. Carol, when it comes to those processed meats that you mentioned, the World Health Organization was plain and clear. They are a carcinogen, using the same word they would use, for example, for cigarettes. They're not as risky as cigarettes, but in the same category. Let's take a look at exactly what they found. They looked at more than 800 studies, some of them lasting more than 20 years. They found that at a serving of these processed meats weighing about 1.7 ounces increased the risk of colon cancer by 18 percent They say when you look worldwide, they think the processed meat is responsible for 34,000 cancer deaths every year. We reached out to the meat industry and here's what they had to say. They said cancer is a complex disease that even the best and brightest minds don't fully understand. No single food has ever been proven to cause or cure cancer. The available scientific evidence simply does not support a causal relationship between red or processed meat and any type of cancer.</s>COSTELLO: All right. Elizabeth Cohen, reporting live. I'll be right back.
Processed Meats Can Cause Cancer