How does bacon effect your health

When it comes to cooking meat , it is important to find balance. Overcooking is unhealthy, but undercooking can also be a concern.

If you use too much heat and burn the meat, it will form harmful compounds like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocyclic amines, which are associated with cancer All meat should be cooked well enough to kill potential pathogens, but not so much that it gets burnt. For the past decades, nutritionists have been concerned about the health effects of bacon and other processed meats.

Many observational studies have associated a high intake of processed meat with cancer and heart disease. In particular, processed meat has been associated with colon, breast, liver and lung cancers, as well as others 15 , A large analysis of prospective studies found that processed meat was significantly associated with both heart disease and diabetes However, people who eat a lot of processed meat tend to follow an unhealthy lifestyle in general.

They are more likely to smoke and exercise less frequently. Regardless, these findings should not be ignored because the associations are consistent and fairly strong. Observational studies consistently show a link between processed meat consumption, heart disease and several types of cancer. All of them are observational studies, which cannot prove causation.

Nonetheless, their results have been fairly consistent. At the end of the day, you have to make your own choice and take a look at the matter objectively. If you think including bacon in your life is worth the risk, then stick to a simple rule that applies to most processed food products: moderation is key. Many people believe that red meat can cause harm.

However, it appears to depend on the type of meat consumed, as well as the cooking method. There are things you can do to ensure that your meat is as healthy as possible. This includes cooking at lower temperatures and eating organs…. Pork is one of the most commonly consumed meats in the world, but it may also be the most harmful. Here are four hidden dangers of pork. Eating processed meat is linked to increased risk of several diseases, including cancer.

This article explores the health effects of processed meat. Your diet includes dozens of fats, each with a different function and effect. Here is everything you need to know about how good and bad fats affect…. The importance of eating enough protein can not be overstated. Here are 20 high protein foods that can help you lose weight, feel great, and gain….

Salt has a bad reputation, but some evidence shows it may not have much impact on heart disease. This article takes a look at the research. People often see nitrates and nitrites as harmful, but this may not always be true. Vegetables, for example, can be rich in nitrates. Getting your meals delivered can save major time on meal prep.

Nitro-chemicals have been less of a boon to consumers. In and of themselves, these chemicals are not carcinogenic. After all, nitrate is naturally present in many green vegetables, including celery and spinach, something that bacon manufacturers often jubilantly point out. But something different happens when nitrates are used in meat processing. When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat haem iron, amines and amides , they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer.

The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. Any time someone eats bacon, ham or other processed meat, their gut receives a dose of nitrosamines, which damage the cells in the lining of the bowel, and can lead to cancer.

You would not know it from the way bacon is sold, but scientists have known nitrosamines are carcinogenic for a very long time. More than 60 years ago, in , two British researchers called Peter Magee and John Barnes found that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver tumours.

By the s, animal studies showed that small, repeated doses of nitrosamines and nitrosamides — exactly the kind of regular dose a person might have when eating a daily breakfast of bacon — were found to cause tumours in many organs including the liver, stomach, oesophagus, intestines, bladder, brain, lungs and kidneys.

In the years since, researchers have gathered a massive body of evidence to lend weight to that assumption. In , to take just one paper among hundreds on nitrosamines and cancer, two American epidemiologists found that eating hotdogs one or more times a week was associated with higher rates of childhood brain cancer, particularly for children who also had few vitamins in their diets.

In , Parma ham producers in Italy made a collective decision to remove nitrates from their products and revert to using only salt, as in the old days. For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto di Parma. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-pink colour.

Slow-cured, nitrate-free, artisan hams are one thing, but what about mass-market meats? But there have always been recipes for nitrate-free bacon using nothing but salt and herbs. Bacon is proof, if it were needed, that we cling to old comforts long after they have been proven harmful.

T he most amazing thing about the bacon panic of was that it took so long for official public health advice to turn against processed meat. It could have happened 40 years earlier. The US meat industry realised it had to act fast to protect bacon against the cancer charge. The first attempts to fight back were simply to ridicule the scientists for over-reacting.

This was an outrageous fabrication. But soon the meat lobby came up with a cleverer form of diversion.

The scientific director of the AMI argued that a single cup of botulism would be enough to wipe out every human on the planet. So, far from harming lives, bacon was actually saving them. In , the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture gave the meat industry three months to prove that nitrate and nitrite in bacon caused no harm. Instead, the argument was made that nitrates and nitrites were utterly essential for the making of bacon, because without them bacon would cause thousands of deaths from botulism.

The first move is: attack the science. These meat researchers published a stream of articles casting doubt on the harmfulness of nitrates and exaggerating the risk from botulism of non-nitrated hams. Does making ham without nitrite lead to botulism?

If so, it is a little strange that in the 25 years that Parma ham has been made without nitrites, there has not been a single case of botulism associated with it. Almost all the cases of botulism from preserved food — which are extremely rare — have been the result of imperfectly preserved vegetables, such as bottled green beans, peas and mushrooms.

The botulism argument was a smokescreen. The more that consumers could be made to feel that the harmfulness of nitrate and nitrite in bacon and ham was still a matter of debate, the more they could be encouraged to calm down and keep buying bacon. The botulism pretext was very effective. The AMI managed to get the FDA to keep delaying its three-month ultimatum on nitrites until a new FDA commissioner was appointed in — one more sympathetic to hotdogs.

The nitrite ban was shelved. The only concession the industry had made was to limit the percentage of nitrites added to processed meat and to agree to add vitamin C, which would supposedly mitigate the formation of nitrosamines, although it does nothing to prevent the formation of another known carcinogen, nitrosyl-haem.

Over the years, the messages challenging the dangers of bacon have become ever more outlandish. A French meat industry website, info-nitrites. The bacon lobby has also found surprising allies among the natural foods brigade. The writers often mention that vegetables are the primary source of nitrates, and that human saliva is high in nitrite.

One widely shared article claims that giving up bacon would be as absurd as attempting to stop swallowing. Either way, this misinformation has the potential to make thousands of people unwell. The mystifying part is why the rest of us have been so willing to accept the cover-up.

O ur deepening knowledge of its harm has done very little to damage the comforting cultural associations of bacon. While I was researching this article, I felt a rising disgust at the repeated dishonesty of the processed meat industry. I thought about hospital wards and the horrible pain and indignity of bowel cancer.

But then I remembered being in the kitchen with my father as a child on a Sunday morning, watching him fry bacon. When all the bacon was cooked, he would take a few squares of bread and fry them in the meaty fat until they had soaked up all its goodness. In theory, our habit of eating salted and cured meats should have died out as soon as home refrigerators became widespread in the midth century.

But tastes in food are seldom rational, and millions of us are still hooked on the salty, smoky, umami savour of sizzling bacon.

We are sentimental about bacon in a way we never were with cigarettes, and this stops us from thinking straight. The widespread willingness to forgive pink, nitrated bacon for causing cancer illustrates how torn we feel when something beloved in our culture is proven to be detrimental to health.

The reaction of many consumers to the WHO report of was: hands off my bacon! In , the EU considered banning the use of nitrates in organic meats. By Amanda MacMillan. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address.

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