Bacon, sausages and ham rank alongside smoking as cancer causes, says WHO

[muriel_volestrangler]

111. The risk: a 0.8% higher chance of coloreectal cancer from 2oz processed meat per day

(with US figures; about 1% higher, with UK figures)

The IARC estimated that eating 50 grams of processed meat daily — one hot dog, say, or two bacon slices — can increase your relative risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent. That's way less scary than it sounds. In the United States, a person's lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 4.5 percent. So eating a hot dog every single day would bump that lifetime risk up to 5.3 percent. Eating more processed meat would nudge those numbers up further. But the overall risk is still fairly low.

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9617928/iarc-cancer-risk-carcinogenic

There’s now a large body of evidence that bowel cancer is more common among people who eat the most red and processed meat. As this evidence has steadily built up, we’ve blogged about it several times – and it’s covered on the NHS Choices website and by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF).
...
The most convincing overview of the evidence of a link to bowel cancer comes from a 2011 analysis by researchers at the WCRF, who combined the results of a number of previous studies, to try to get a clear sense of the overall picture.

They were able to group the data according to those who ate the most red and processed meat and those who ate the least. A key finding from the WCRF analysis is that red meat and processed meat aren’t equally harmful: processed meat is more strongly linked to bowel cancer than red meat.
...
We know that, out of every 1000 people in the UK, about 61 will develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives. Those who eat the lowest amount of processed meat are likely to have a lower lifetime risk than the rest of the population (about 56 cases per 1000 low meat-eaters).

If this is correct, the WCRF’s analysis suggests that, among 1000 people who eat the most processed meat, you’d expect 66 to develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives – 10 more than the group who eat the least processed meat.

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/10/26/processed-meat-and-cancer-what-you-need-to-know/

The classification means that they are very confident this link is real - like they're confident the link between alcohol and some cancers is real. They're also sure the link between tobacco and cancer is real, but that's a far greater risk. See the Vox article for more.