I said “no”, but I don’t eat bacon that much. Maybe once a month?
But I’ll be trying to limit my consumption of red meat going forward. I like hamburgers and hotdogs. I like steak and roasts. I like sausage. But I also like chicken, turkey, salmon, and shrimp. I’ll probably like grasshopper meat, once they start selling it. If I can limit my red meat consumption to once a week for most weeks of the year, then why not? I’m always up for a challenge. And I know it won’t hurt me none.
Cancer scares me. Especially cancers of the digestive and reproductive systems. Ever since I read this graphic yet touching account, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how horrible it is to deal with the disease. Yes, we’re all going to die of something. But personally, I’d rather not die that way.
Yeah, something’s gonna kill me. Might as well be something delicious. Would be a shame to strike out every potentially unhealthy thing from my life, only to then die perfectly healthy of nothing at all. Whatever would they put on the death certificate?
Nitrite is a common preservative and is known to cause cancer.
What’s interesting is that you can prepare many of these meats without nitrite. For example, my wife and I do home-made corned beef and pastrami. If you leave out the nitrite, the only difference is that the meat cooks and turns brown rather than staying red/pink. We kind of enjoy making our own, and making our own bacon is a project for someday soon. I’m not sure I’d trust my homemade product to have the same shelf life as a commercial one, but that’s not much of an issue.
So… I might be persuaded to change my buying habits, but my solution will never be to give up bacon.
I remember when every cancer study involved Canadian rats. “Tab found to cause cancer in Canadian rats” “Processed sugars found to cause cancer in Canadian rats”. I didn’t panic then and I don’t plan on panicking now.
In your case, it would probably be some quantum weirdness resulting from a malfunction in a high-energy particle accelerator, wherein you suddenly started to glitter like Captain Kirk in the Enterprise transporter room, and vanished from the known universe with an audible “pop”!
I really don’t know what they’d put down on the death certificate. “Natural causes” just doesn’t seem to cut it, even though we all acknowledge that quantum behavior is part of nature.
P.S.- the above is my humble tribute to your many informative and much valued posts on these subjects.
The answer stating that 176 slices of bacon is equivalent to 1 cigarette has at least two false assumptions: (1) that the effect (for both bacon and cigarettes) is linear with dose and (2) that there is no threshold below which the cancer either is not created or that the humans have so much variation in cancer rates that you would not be able to statistically measure it. The linear-no threshold (LNT) assumptions are made for regulatory purposes because it is easy to calculate (as the article shows) and because it is conservative and overstates the true but unknown risk. This is done to ensure that an exposure would be considered acceptable. A correct answer would be to state that the example of 176 slices of bacon less than (and not equal to) 1 cigarette. I acknowledge that my comment ignores the issue of variability in sensitivity between humans, but this would not change my conclusions.
