At 44, she got bowel cancer — and blames a sandwich

Lucie Morris-Marr was a healthy, active 44-year-old mother of two.

An award-winning investigative journalist based in Australia, she had just published her first book — an exposé on abuse in the Catholic Church — and was preparing for a whirlwind tour.

Then everything stopped.

“I was flying high,” Lucie told Nine to Noon. “My book had just come out. I was invited to festivals and speeches. I was really excited and happy, and then all of it got cancelled and I felt like my identity had been cancelled.”

Doctors delivered the shocking news back in 2019: Lucie had stage-four bowel cancer.

The diagnosis came after a year of worsening pain and a mistaken diagnosis of diverticulosis. By the time she finally had a colonoscopy, it was too late for early treatment. The cancer had already spread to her liver.

Looking for answers

Lucie didn’t smoke. She wasn’t obese. She rarely drank and ate a high-fiber diet. So how did this happen?

”Before I was diagnosed I thought I’d been relatively healthy – I drank very little alcohol, I often cycled, swam and always ate fruit, salad and vegetables as much as possible. But was I consistent? Not really,” she told Primer.

With treatment underway and time at home, she began digging. As a journalist, she wasn’t content to simply accept her fate — she needed answers. And what she found left her horrified.

“All that kept coming up was processed meats and the link with bowel cancer,” she said.

She thought back on her habits. “I started to go, ‘I did like the prosciutto on the melon on the charcuterie boards, I did have the odd sausage at Bunnings,’ and I started to think yes, it was in my diet.”

“Where were the warning labels?”

Pepperoni pizza on Fridays, nearly a kilo of ham each Christmas, bacon sandwiches on camping trips — they were all part of her life. It added up.

“I still, to this day, don’t claim that was the cause of my bowel cancer, because I’ll never know. There’s lots of other factors it can be. But I started to think, ‘Look it’s in the frame, it’s one of the suspects’ and I just felt very angry about it.”

Her anger turned to frustration.

“Where were the warning labels? Where were the health campaigns? I’m not starting this food scare but someone needs to amplify it.”

Lucie’s investigation revealed what many still don’t know: in 2015, the World Health Organization classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen — right alongside tobacco and asbestos. According to studies they reviewed, every 50-gram serving of processed meat per day — about two rashers of bacon — increases your risk of colorectal cancer by 18%.

Although American adults are eating less red meat than they did 18 years ago, processed meat intake hasn’t changed — and it still makes up about a quarter of all red meat and poultry consumed in the U.S. each year. In fact, the average American still eats around 284 grams of unprocessed red meat and 187 grams of processed meat per week — much higher than recommended health guidelines.

You see them everywhere

The irony hit hard in a hospital room post-surgery. After surviving a 12-hour liver resection — a last-ditch effort to remove cancer from her body — Lucie awoke in intensive care.

Next to her, on the hospital tray, sat a sandwich: white bread, and cheap, thin ham in plastic wrapping.

“You see them everywhere,” she said. “Especially in hospitals and school canteens.”

Stunned, she asked to meet the catering manager.

“I asked him if he knew that processed meat was linked to bowel cancer by the World Health Organization,” she said. “He didn’t. I told him ‘that’s why I’m here’.”

Lucie has now channeled her pain into purpose. Her new book, Processed, is both personal testimony and deep investigation. In it, she shares the science, her story, and what we should all know about the meat we casually consume.

Lucie’s message

Still recovering from a life-saving liver transplant, she is now cancer-free. It’s a miracle she doesn’t take for granted.

“For someone who got diagnosed over five years ago with stage four bowel cancer … when you get told it’s in your liver as well, it was a terminal diagnosis. To now be sitting here saying I am cancer-free is a miracle.”

Lucie’s message isn’t about fear — it’s about being informed.

“I also say in the book this is your body, your rules. I’m not a nutritionist, it’s not my place to tell people what to eat. I just want people to be informed… and then make their own decisions.”

She now swaps deli meat for organic chicken, cheese, mushrooms, or halloumi.

“It just works really well,” she says of her new brunch orders.

But she’ll never forget the moment her favorite sandwich — the one everyone eats without thinking — suddenly became a suspect in her own survival story.