Smoking tobacco and eating processed meat are both dangerous, but not on the same scale. Either way, this misinformation has the potential to make thousands of people unwell. Saltpetre – sometimes called sal prunella – has been used in some recipes for salted meats since ancient times. The AMI managed to get the FDA to keep delaying its three-month ultimatum on nitrites until a new FDA commissioner was appointed in 1980 – one more sympathetic to hotdogs. The World Health Organization's decision puts bacon, hot dogs and sausages in the same category of cancer risk as tobacco smoking. We are sentimental about bacon in a way we never were with cigarettes, and this stops us from thinking straight. The warning applied not just to British bacon but to Italian salami, Spanish chorizo, German bratwurst and myriad other foods. So it’s not surprising that when the World Health Organization announced that processed meats cause cancer—and that red meats probably cause cancer—we wound up with headlines like “Bacon & Hot Dogs Are Just as Dangerous as Cigarettes.”. The first attempts to fight back were simply to ridicule the scientists for over-reacting. Most of what we know about processed meat and cancer in humans comes from epidemiology – the study of disease across whole populations. As Joshua A. Krisch explains at Vocativ , right now, your lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about five percent . The WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) released a report evaluating the link between the consumption of red and processed meat and cancer. Chemicals used in processed and cured meat such as some brands of bacon, sausages and ham may produce carcinogens. In the years since, researchers have gathered a massive body of evidence to lend weight to that assumption. The problem with this reasoning, as I see it, is that it can’t account for why processed meat is so much more closely linked to cancer than cooked red meat. The World Health Organization may be about to make itself a lot of enemies, especially among carnivores. The WHO announcement came on advice from 22 cancer experts from 10 countries, who reviewed more than 400 studies on processed meat covering epidemiological data from hundreds of thousands of people. Eating processed … ow do you choose a pack of bacon in a shop, assuming you are a meat eater? But something different happens when nitrates are used in meat processing. Pork ribs and beef sirloin are grouped into the same category, but they’re very different foods. Men’s Health nutrition advisors Michael Roussell, Ph.D., and Alan Aragon, M.S., are both skeptical. To put it in context, around 86% of lung cancers are linked to smoking, whereas it seems that just 21% of bowel cancers can be attributed to eating processed or red meat. Related: 32 Ultimate High-Protein Recipes. 11 Simple Health Habits You’re Doing Wrong, Top Cancer Doc Gives 5 Lifestyle Strategies That Help You Avoid Cancer. And it classifies red meat as a probable carcinogen, something that probably causes cancer. In an ideal world, we would all be eating diets lower in meat, processed or otherwise, for the sake of sustainability and animal welfare as much as health. Nearly three years on, it feels like business as usual for processed meats. But the average British sausage – as opposed to a hard sausage like a French saucisson – is not cured, being made of nothing but fresh meat, breadcrumbs, herbs, salt and E223, a preservative that is non-carcinogenic. We now know that the colour in Parma ham is totally harmless, a result of the enzyme reactions during the ham’s 18-month ageing process. But there are other things that could be done about the risk of nitrites and nitrates in bacon, short of an absolute veto. While I was researching this article, I felt a rising disgust at the repeated dishonesty of the processed meat industry. On the WHO website, the harmfulness of nitrite-treated meats is explained so opaquely you could miss it altogether. The typical British sausage does not fall into the ‘processed meat’ category. Ketchup and HP sauce were served in miniature jars with the sandwich, so you could dab on the exact amount you liked. Many of us seem to have got over our initial sense of alarm. The study’s lead author, Jill Pell from the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Glasgow University, told me that while it can be counterproductive to push for total abstinence, the scientific evidence suggests “it would be misleading” for health authorities to set any safe dose for processed meat “other than zero”. Two Numbers: Bacon Is Carcinogenic, but So Is the Air You Breathe By Zoë Schlanger On 10/30/15 at 2:18 PM EDT Jungyeon Roh The fumes generated by frying pork and beef were mutagenic, especially the bacon—found 15 times worse than the beef, but no mutagenicity was detected in fumes from frying tempeh burgers. 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. Our exclusive interviews with the scientists behind the World Health Organization’s report reveal the truth about meat and cancer. Over the years, the messages challenging the dangers of bacon have become ever more outlandish. But in the world we actually live in, processed meats are still a normal, staple protein for millions of people who can’t afford to swap a value pack of frying bacon for a few slivers of Prosciutto di Parma. British supermarkets reported a £3m drop in sales in just a fortnight. Bacon, ham and sausages rank alongside cigarettes as a major cause of cancer, the World Health Organisation has said, placing cured and processed meats … In theory, our habit of eating salted and cured meats should have died out as soon as home refrigerators became widespread in the mid-20th century. As Corinna Hawkes of City University comments, “The researchers don’t ask you if you are eating artisanal charcuterie from the local Italian deli or the cheapest hotdogs on the planet.”. But before you break up with bacon, here’s what you need to know. Then again, the slowness of consumers to lose our faith in pink bacon may partly be a response to the confusing way that the health message has been communicated to us. Environmental tobacco smokeEpichlorohydrinEthyl acrylateEthylene dibromideEhtylene dichlorideEthylene oxideEthyleneimineEthylene thioureaFormaldehydeGallium arsenideGasoline Related: Is There Anything That DOESN’T Give You Cancer? Richard Jacobs, the late chief executive of Organic Farmers & Growers, an industry body, said that prohibiting nitrate and nitrite would have meant the “collapse” of a growing market for organic bacon. The reaction of many consumers to the WHO report of 2015 was: hands off my bacon! Colorectal Cancer: Bacon may be delicious no doubt, but studies have shown that there’s a direct link between processed meats such as this and cancer.Dr. As Corinna Hawkes points out, it is “surprising” that there hasn’t been more of an effort from government to inform people about the risks of eating ham and bacon, perhaps through warning labels on processed meats. 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. The subtitle is “How Charcuterie Became a Poison”. Men's Health participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. How do you choose a pack of bacon in a shop, assuming you are a meat eater? Maybe you seek out a packet made from free-range or organic meat, or maybe your budget is squeezed and you search for any bacon on special offer. One French brand of sodium nitrite from the 60s was called Vitorose or “quick-pink”. But the oldest advice in the book still stands: “I choose to keep everything in moderation, including moderation, since you can meet your death any number of ways in this life,” says Aragon. But looking for clear confirmation of this in the data is tricky, given that humans do not eat in labs under clinical observation. October 26, 2015 Processed Meat, Uncategorized; No Comments There is a lot of media angst being generated by the World Health Organization announcing today that they are classifying processed meat as a carcinogen and red meat as a probable carcinogen. “But I genuinely question how well this works,” says Roussell. 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. The only time that the processed meat industry has looked seriously vulnerable was during the 1970s, a decade that saw the so-called “war on nitrates” in the US. And beef, pork, … First, you opt for either the crispy fat of streaky or the leanness of back. By Scott Oneto, Farm Advisor, University of California Cooperative Extension Last year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) made a determination that glyphosate…the active ingredient in Roundup® and other similar herbicide products…”is probably a human carcinogen.” And Bacon too! (“It was very detrimental,” said Kirsty Adams, the product developer for meat at Marks and Spencer.). “None of the big guys wanted to take it,” claims Lynn. 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. For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto di Parma. A fresh pound of beef mince isn’t processed. Related: The Men’s Health Better Man Project—2,000+ Scientific Tricks For Always Looking and Feeling Your Best. The WHO panel wasn’t unanimous in its decision to deem meats carcinogenic. Under EU regulation, this bacon would not be allowed to be labelled “nitrate-free”. Health scares are ten-a-penny, but this one was very hard to ignore. To many consumers, bacon is not just a food; it is a repository of childhood memories, a totem of home. An explainer article by the Meat Science and Muscle Biology lab at the University of Wisconsin argues that sodium nitrite is in fact “critical for maintaining human health by controlling blood pressure, preventing memory loss, and accelerating wound healing”. For years, Lynn had been hoping to diversify into bacon and ham but, he says, “I wasn’t going to do it until we found a way to do it without nitrates.”. Then you decide between smoked or unsmoked – each version has its passionate defenders (I am of the unsmoked persuasion). It could have happened 40 years earlier. You Deserve a Seafood Tower. It’s made with nitrates taken from celery extract, which may be natural, but produces exactly the same N-nitroso compounds in the meat. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s not important, says Theresa Norat, Ph.D., a coauthor of the study that assessed risk. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this controversy is how little public outrage it has generated. Researchers still don’t know what it is about red and processed meats that could be causing cancer. But soon the meat lobby came up with a cleverer form of diversion. Nitro-chemicals have been less of a boon to consumers. When you take a food that billions of people eat regularly and deem it a carcinogen, you’re going to set off a panic. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-pink colour. Just because something is a carcinogen in rats and other mammals does not mean it will cause cancer in humans, but as far back as 1976, cancer scientist William Lijinsky argued that “we must assume” that these N-nitroso compounds found in meats such as bacon were also “carcinogens for man”. Bacon took a hard blow in October 2015, ... Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, named processed meat -- which includes bacon -- a “group 1 carcinogen. The answer was none. Despite everything, most of us still treat bacon as a dear old friend. By the 1980s, the AMI was financing a group of scientists based at the University of Wisconsin. The first move is: attack the science. What about paint? 2020 Was Hell. For a few weeks in October 2015, half the people I knew were talking about the news that eating bacon was now a proven cause of cancer. More than 60 years ago, in 1956, two British researchers called Peter Magee and John Barnes found that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver tumours. The real victims in all this are not people like me who enjoy the occasional bacon-on-sourdough in a hipster cafe. We’re talking about a difference of less than half a percent. But there’s no proof yet that nitrate- and nitrite-free products are safer, he says. In fact, the report by a WHO research arm found that all processed meats, including sausages, ham, and hot dogs, are carcinogens, reports the … The WHO advised that consuming 50g of processed meat a day – equivalent to just a couple of rashers of bacon or one hotdog – would raise the risk of getting bowel cancer by 18% over a lifetime. Decades’ worth of research proves that chemicals used to make bacon do cause cancer. The researchers behind the World Health Organization’s announcement that bacon and red meat are carcinogenic explain what that means for you. The trouble, as Jill Pell remarks, is that most of the bacon labelled as nitrate-free in the US “isn’t nitrate-free”. Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. That was all there was to it: just bread and bacon and sauce. And then, all of a sudden, the bacon sandwich stopped being quite so comforting. A few weeks after publishing the report, the WHO issued a clarification insisting it was not telling consumers to stop eating processed meat. But just when it looked as if this may be #Bacongeddon (one of many agonised bacon-related hashtags trending in October 2015), a second wave of stories flooded in. “It is very difficult to separate red meat intake from other adverse lifestyle habits that contribute to disease,” says Aragon. Technically, processed meat means pork or beef that has been salted and cured, with or without smoking. If you're feeling freaked out by this news, you're not alone. Sure, researchers try to adjust for those factors. “Without a satisfactory response,” Coudray writes, “these additives would have to be replaced 36 months later with non-carcinogenic methods.” The meat industry could not prove that nitrosamines were not carcinogenic – because it was already known that they were. The nitrite ban was shelved. According to Cancer Research UK, if no one ate processed or red meat in Britain, there would be 8,800 fewer cases of cancer. Eating one of these sandwiches, as I did every few weeks, with a cup of strong coffee, felt like an uncomplicated pleasure. When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat (haem iron, amines and amides), they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer. But the UK organic industry insisted that British shoppers would be unlikely to accept bacon that was ‘“greyish”. To be told that bacon had given millions of people cancer was a bit like finding out your granny had been secretly sprinkling arsenic on your morning toast. This was an outrageous fabrication. Coudray argues that we should speak not of “processed meat” but “nitro-meat”. A hard stick of cured salami is. To the gastronomic horror of many, The Daily Mail reported this week that the WHO … Prosciutto di Parma has been produced without nitrates since 1993. he most amazing thing about the bacon panic of 2015 was that it took so long for official public health advice to turn against processed meat. Maybe you seek out a packet made from free-range or organic meat, or maybe your budget is squeezed and you search for any bacon on special offer. I don't think the general public knows what "class 1 carcinogen" means. Organic bacon produced with nitrates sounds like a contradiction in terms, given that most consumers of organic food buy it out of concerns for food safety. The World Health Organization has classified processed meats including ham, bacon, salami and frankfurts as a Group 1 carcinogen (known to cause cancer) which means that there’s strong evidence that processed meats cause cancer. Nitrite-free bacon still sounds a bit fancy and niche, but there shouldn’t be anything niche about the desire to eat food that doesn’t raise your risk of cancer. It has been ranked as a group one carcinogen – the same ranking as cigarettes, alcohol and asbestos. (Eating larger amounts raises your risk more.) carcinogen [kahr-sin´o-jen] a substance that causes cancer. This caution has kept us as consumers unnecessarily in the dark. A piece of crispy, overcooked bacon will contain multiple carcinogens, and not all are due to the nitrates. Jill Pell said she was mostly vegetarian and ate processed meats very rarely. In 1993, 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. But then I remembered being in the kitchen with my father as a child on a Sunday morning, watching him fry bacon. It is these that give salamis, bacons and cooked hams their alluring pink colour. It is the use of these chemicals that is widely believed to be the reason why “processed meat” is much more carcinogenic than unprocessed meat. The World Health Organization has confirmed some rather unwelcome dietary advice: Bacon, hot dogs and other processed meats can increase your risk of cancer. Then you decide between smoked or unsmoked – each version has its passionate defenders (I am of the unsmoked persuasion). The two experts at the National Cancer Institute told me that meats containing nitrites and nitrates have “consistently been associated with increased risk of colon cancer” in human studies. It could have happened 40 years earlier. Because anyone who’s ever gotten colorectal cancer will probably tell you: Do whatever you can to avoid it. 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. Yet it is this very colour that we should be suspicious of, as the French journalist Guillaume Coudray explains in a book published in France last year called Cochonneries, a word that means both “piggeries” and “rubbish” or “junk food”. But protecting yourself from cancer is more complicated than simply banning bacon and steak from your diet. But it also remains to be seen how much consumer demand there will be for nitrite- or nitrate-free bacon. The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. Either way, before you put the pack in your basket, you have one last look, to check if the meat is pink enough. But this is about to change. Type “nitrate cancer bacon” into Google, and you will find a number of healthy eating articles, some of them written by advocates of the “Paleo” diet, arguing that bacon is actually a much-maligned health food. At the height of the great bacon scare of 2015, lots of intelligent voices were saying that it was safe to ignore the new classification of processed meats as carcinogenic, because you can’t trust anything these nutritionists say. The report even concedes that the research is mixed: 12 of 18 studies identified a link between processed meat and cancer, and seven of 15 studies found a connection between red meat and cancer. Plus, the definition of “red meat” is so broad that it’s hard to isolate what foods could really be guilty, says Roussell. Bacon without nitrates, says Gower, is nothing but “salt pork”. This, as Guillaume Coudray explained to me in an email, is known to be “carcinogenic even at a very low dose”. We may earn a commission through links on our site. I tried some of the Finnebrogue bacon from M&S. In his book, Coudray points out that in coming years, millions more poor consumers will be affected by preventable colon cancer, as westernised processed meats conquer the developing world. Slow-cured, nitrate-free, artisan hams are one thing, but what about mass-market meats? Last month, Michele Rivasi, a French MEP, launched a campaign – in collaboration with Coudray – demanding a ban of nitrites from all meat products across Europe. Not even the WHO panel is saying that you should give up meat. Vegetarians might point out that the bacon sandwich should never have been seen as comforting. And yet the evidence linking bacon to cancer is stronger than ever. The back bacon tasted pleasant and mild, with a slight fruitiness. Billi_@ LFCT 25th Jan 2019 Blog , News & Events , Research 0 comments The head of the UN agency that provoked a massive outcry and some ridicule when it declared that bacon, red meat and glyphosate weedkiller caused cancer has defended its work, denying the announcements were mishandled and insisting on its independence. Trim the charred parts off your steaks, says Aragon. Coudray notes that ham and bacon manufacturers claim this old-fashioned way of curing isn’t safe. Our deepening knowledge of its harm has done very little to damage the comforting cultural associations of bacon. The bacon, thick-cut from a local butcher, was midway between crispy and chewy. The health risk of bacon is largely to do with two food additives: potassium nitrate (also known as saltpetre) and sodium nitrite. The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) listing of processed meat such as bacon and cold cuts as a “Group 1” carcinogen—the same group that The attachment of producers to nitrates in bacon is mostly “cultural”, says Gower. The most amazing thing about the bacon panic of 2015 was that it took so long for official public health advice to turn against processed meat. Meanwhile, the meat industry was busily insisting that there was nothing to see here. The real scandal of bacon, however, is that it didn’t have to be anything like so damaging to our health. Here are some everyday foods and drinks that are labeled as carcinogenic: Processed meats such as bacon, sausages, hot dogs, pepperoni, prosciutto, beef jerky and salami (any meat that has been preserved by curing, salting or smoking, or by adding chemical preservatives) That was all there was to it: just bread and bacon and sauce. By the 1970s, 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. None of my family noticed the difference in a spaghetti amatriciana. They are wrongly listed as such on the NHS website. So how did the meat industry convince us it was safe? In the weeks following news of the WHO report, sales of bacon and sausages fell dramatically. Surveys indicate that the smell of frying bacon is one of our favourite scents in the UK, along with cut grass and fresh bread. Processed meats - such as bacon and ham - do cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. While I was researching this article, I felt a rising disgust at the repeated dishonesty of the processed meat industry. Is Bacon A Carcinogen Like Cigarette Smoking? Sales of bacon in the UK are buoyant, having risen 5% in the two years up to mid-2016. • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here. Cancer happens due to either DNA changes a person inherited from their parents or DNA changes that occur after they’re born—essentially a question of nature and nurture. When Lynn heard about a new process, developed in Spain, for making perfectly pink, nitrate-free bacon, he assumed it was another blind alley. The technology now exists to make the pink meats we love in a less damaging form, which raises the question of why the old kind is still so freely sold. But instead of spelling this out, the WHO moves swiftly on to the question of how both red and processed meats might cause cancer, after adding that “it is not yet fully understood how cancer risk is increased”. The bacon currently sells in Waitrose for £3 a pack, which is not the cheapest, but not prohibitive either. 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