this is where the actual meaningful data sits - the cause of pretty much all of the health problems we have is not what we eat but how much.

so, if you do a study on meat consumption and conclude that humans that eat a lot of meat are at a higher risk of cancer, you're developing a correlation without asserting a causal force. it may very well be true that people that eat a lot of meat are at a (relatively) higher risk of cancer, but that doesn't mean the cause is the meat - the cause could be the eating. you'd have to figure that out.

what the study i posted this morning, as well as a few others that have been referenced, have demonstrated is that the researchers making this claim haven't done that - they've simply found a correlation and run with it. now, that doesn't necessarily mean their correlation is wrong, it just means they haven't done a sufficient amount of study on it to determine if it's causal or not. it might be, it might not be, we don't know until we can do the proper studies (which are hard).

as it happens to be, it turns out that we have even more research telling us that the eating actually does have a cancer risk attached to it, which has the effect of minimizing the importance attached to eating any one specific thing. we can work this out with a basic syllogism.

1. obesity causes cancer. that is clear.
2. if you are obese, then you have a large amount of food in your diet.
3. meat is food.
4. so, if you are obese, you probably have a large amount of meat in your diet.
5. therefore, high meat consumption is correlated with cancer risk, even though the cause of the disease is over-eating, in general.

if you're concerned about your health, worry less about the what and more about the amount.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27909900