Bacon cigarettes. Duh! 
So for those of you who have never smoked, the number of cigarettes in a normal pack of cigarettes is 20. So it’s not “1 pack” but “20 cigarettes”. Then you can compare the risk per cigarettes vs the risk per slice of bacon. After all, I know most people only smoke one cigarette at a sitting, but few people only eat one slice of bacon at a sitting.
It may seem to be picking nits, but a pack of cigarettes is a lot of cigarettes (at 3 to 5 minutes per to smoke each), but six slices of bacon isn’t a lot of bacon. A pack of cigarettes compares more to a pound of bacon, IMO.
Both of which, in excess, will kill you prematurely.
How many cows
Does anyone remember that math problem about cows in a pen? There are x number of cows, and they leave the pen at y interval, and you solve for how many cows are left in the pen after z time.
I forget where I first read about/heard it, but it was used at the time as the shining example of how some testing (and now statistics, or mathematical calculation) is prone to disconnect from the real world, and/or confuse people who actually are familiar with the real world (cows are herd animals, not the cast at the closing scene of “Ocean’s Eleven”).
Forgetting the cows for a moment, anyone who eats 176 pieces of bacon a day will die in very short order. I thoroughly enjoy TSD and Cecil’s clever, witty, and snarky responses to all manner of questions, while casually maintaining very convincing arguments.
His “176 pieces of bacon” argument however, have left me just feeling sorry for the big lug. Does he own a controlling interest in a bacon conglomerate or something, what gives?
He said nobody does that. What are you contesting? He only even mentioned it as a practical way to explain what it means for a slice of bacon to have 1/176th the risk of a pack of cigarettes.
But that’s the thing, the risk is nowhere near that ratio. The calculation obviously invalidates itself. You can’t say “one piece of bacon contains 1/176th the risk of a cigarette” and then contradict yourself by saying: but if you eat 176 pieces of bacon, you die.
Rather than using vague statistical models, and then bending their calculations around in ways that may very well invalidate them, let’s take a far more practical approach: Let’s ask ourselves: which will kill you faster, 20 cigarettes a day or 20 pieces of bacon?
Caloric intake itself is deadly, in the form of obesity and the various threats obesity poses to health. Caloric intake wasn’t figured into the equation.
This site: Calories in Bacon, broiled or pan fried | CalorieKing
Claims one piece of bacon contains 46 calories, 6% saturated fat allowance and 8% sodium allowance. So 20 pieces of bacon puts you at 920 calories on top of whatever else you eat during the day, that’s almost half the total caloric intake of an adult. Also, 160% of daily sodium allowance (assuming the person consumes no other sodium) and 120% of saturated fat (assuming the same for sat. fat).
And that’s just 20 pieces. We see that the danger of a single strip of bacon far outstrips that of a cigarette, because bacon isn’t depositing infinitesimal amounts of poisonous chemicals by way of smoke, it is depositing a huge load of calories along with unhealthy amounts of sodium and saturated fats.
There, grade school math and common sense tells us that one strip of bacon, in the “real world” is much more dangerous for health than one cigarette.
“To put it another way, one cigarette is roughly as dangerous as nine slices of bacon…”
If for some crazy reason I was to be forced to smoke 5 cigarettes every day for the rest of my life, or eat 45 pieces of bacon every day, I would choose the cigarettes in a heartbeat (I don’t smoke btw), because that way at least I would live to see my next birthday.
Don’t get me wrong, Cecil’s the man, I love me some Cecil, but this particular answer of his is a colossal blunder of reasoning.
Your argument is absurd. Cecil isn’t saying you should eat 45 slices or 176 slices or some other huge amount of bacon per day. He’s saying you take an equivalent risk by smoking 5, 20 or some other small number of cigarettes. In other words, smoking a few cigarettes is as bad as eating an enormous quantity of bacon.
Suppose Cecil said the risk of 1 cigarette = 1,000 slices of bacon. Using your logic, you’d now be saying, “If I were forced to smoke 5 cigarettes every day for the rest of my life, or eat 5,000 pieces of bacon every day, I would choose the cigarettes, because that way I would live to see my next birthday.” You’d be convincing yourself bacon was crazy dangerous compared to cigarettes, when in fact the reverse was true. Cecil is saying the opposite of what you think he’s saying.
The column says that smoking 1 cigarette is as dangerous as eating 9 slices of bacon.
The column also says the average smoker smokes 20 cigarettes per day. That would mean that the average smoking habit is about as dangerous as eating 180 slices of bacon per day. I’m not sure how else to interpret it if the entire column is to have any meaning.
If the statistics don’t scale up to the actual quantity of cigarettes consumed by an average smoker (because by that point the amount of bacon would be too vast to be realistic), that seems to undermine the entire argument.
You lost me. Cecil says the risk of 1 pack of cigarettes = 176 slices of bacon. The former is a realistic amount; the latter is not. You think this undermines the argument?
If you’re a pack-a-day smoker, and you refer to the column to determine how much bacon you might need to eat to equal the same health risks as smoking, the conclusion would be 176 slices per day. The next conclusion would be “wait, that can’t be right”. But there are millions of pack-a-day smokers out there in their 70’s still puffing away. (and eating bacon too… but that’s another issue - in the big picture the argument is already undermined because genetics - luck - trumps the risks of both).
To be fair I’m really criticizing the question more so than the answer. I don’t think it’s possible to provide a factual answer to the question.
Missed the edit window, but I meant to add: if the reason the latter isn’t realistic is because it would kill you sooner than the smoking, then yes I think the argument of the comparative risks would be undermined.
Think about it this way. Suppose I have two poisonous liquids, A and B. I feed a teaspoon of liquid A to each of 10,000 lab rats. Five thousand of them die. I feed a teaspoon of liquid B to another 10,000 lab rats, and only one of them dies. Therefore, I say a teaspoon of liquid A is a dangerous as 5,000 teaspoons of liquid B, or to put it another way, liquid A is 5,000 times more dangerous than liquid B. We’re merely establishing relative risk. You now come back and say, baloney, if I fed 5,000 teaspoons of liquid B to the rats, they’d ALL die due to choking, drowning or whatever. Therefore, liquid B is more dangerous. Surely you see the defect in this reasoning.
I do see the defect in that reasoning but I wasn’t reasoning that 176 slices of bacon per day would necessarily kill someone sooner than 20 cigarettes per day just because of a peripheral complication from the volume of bacon needed to make the comparison (like their stomach over-filling with bacon or, in my case, dying of happiness). I meant the sodium, fat, nitrates, etc. accumulating over time, all the risk factors cited in the column. I don’t think the numbers scale evenly in terms of actual risks to life. A thousand milligrams of sodium per day may cause an overall mortality risk of X% but the risk of 20,000 milligrams per day is bound to be more than 20 times X. At least at some point if you scale high enough.
Twenty cigarettes per day is a ‘reasonable’ quantity (if you consider smoking reasonable to begin with), but 176 slices of bacon per day is an unreasonable amount under any circumstances. The studies that **Cecil **presumably pored over (none were cited at the end of this column) to get these mortality statistics for each bad habit were probably not really comparable. The smoking mortality rates were probably based on real smokers, smoking 20 cigarettes per day, and over many years, whereas the mortality rates for sodium, nitrates, etc. were probably not based on a diet of 50-80 times the normal portions over the same time period but were based on a ‘reasonable’ daily intake over time.
Cecil’s assistant Fierra posts the references as time permits. I’m sure they’ll show up in a few days.
As for scaling, you’re quite right that a lot of assumptions, some possibly questionable, are packed into an exercise like this - Cecil admitted as much. In general he’s assuming things scale linearly; if they don’t, his result could be off. Nonetheless, I’d say it’s in the ball park and is surely directionally correct. I doubt anybody could reasonably claim bacon and cigarettes were equally dangerous, which was the issue raised in the question.
The core of the argument here, which is more unhealthy: smoking, or eating irresponsibly.
Calories alone can kill you. The United States is a nation of people eating themselves to death, such deaths however are statistically invisible, being labeled instead under…oh wait, what am I talking about no this is actually known fairly well: Obesity - Wikipedia
Excessive caloric intake, whether it be in the form of bacon or bran oats is just as, if not more deadly than smoking. It makes you fat, then obese, then morbidly obese, then dead.
You cannot distill the toxins from the respective items (bacon and cigarettes) and compare them, that is not realistic. Bacon toxins come in a huge caloric package, that’s the way people consume them, that’s reality. To argue anything else is not realistic.
Fierra has added them just now.
The question for this column says that nobody eats bacon at the rate of a pack a day. Well, it’s no doubt quite rare, but I have heard of one person who did just that. And it killed him, of course.
The person I heard of is none other than Elvis Presley. As I heard it, he consumed something like a pound of bacon a day. And his daily calorie consumption was immense, since that wasn’t the only food he ate. I’ve been meaning to ask Cecil how much truth there was to these stories of Elvis overeating and do we have a good estimate for his typical calorie consumption (I’ve heard some pretty fantastic figures).
So if Cec is reading this, consider this a question submitted for your approval.
I heard he was a big fan of peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
But a pound of bacon per day is just a snack compared to what the column claims is equally as dangerous as 20 cigarettes. If the bacon is thin-sliced that would be about 35 slices per lb., or over 5 lbs. of bacon per day. If it’s thick-sliced (my guess is the The King would have had it no other way) that would be over 10 lbs. of bacon per day.
It’s as though the column were saying “The risk of a pack of cigarettes per day is the same as 176 slices of bacon per day, unless you actually eat 176 slices of bacon per day, in which case obviously that ridiculous amount of bacon would kill you really, really, fast. But for comparative purposes it works.”
We’ve been over this and I want to avoid repeating myself. So I’ll say one last time: yes, of course, if you scale up to absurd levels previously irrelevant factors come into play, in this case the sheer quantity of calories involved in consuming massive amounts of bacon. That doesn’t invalidate the comparison with respect to the factors under scrutiny, namely cholesterol, sodium, etc. As I say, Cecil took some suspect methodological shortcuts and it’s possible someone else taking a stab at this might come up with a different number. However, your point seems to be that it’s not “possible to provide a factual answer to the question.” Not so. It’s not possible to provide an absolutely definitive answer, but it’s possible to come up with an estimate that squares with the facts to the extent they’re known. Researchers do this all the time when computing relative risk.
I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t a factual attempt to answer the quesiton. I meant that the premise of the question created an impossible comparison from the start. Too many of the “irrelevant” factors you refer to are what make the question unanswerable in any real terms - by real terms I mean that someone could walk away saying “My life with be x years shorter if I eat Y pieces of bacon per day”. All the omitted factors are very relevant when it comes to actual health implications after many decades of daily consumption of either one, even if you don’t scale the bacon portion size up to the absurd level required to match the regular habit of a smoker.
Obesity, total calorie intake as compared to the rest of their diet, exercise habits, etc. How many of the smokers in the cited mortality statistics also ate bacon during their lives? And how many that died of heart disease attributed to too much sodium also smoked cigarettes? The cited mortality reports weren’t prepared with this kind of comparison in mind so I doubt they accounted for those important considerations. All in all, I don’t fault **Cecil **for the attempt. I was merely joining in to say it didn’t make a lot of sense to me either.
I’d say you’re comparing apples and oranges, but since we’re specifically comparing bacon and cigarrettes, perhaps I need a different homily.
The thing is, bacon comes with an inherent dosing limit not encountered with the cigarrettes. There’s only so much bacon a person can eat in one day. The dosing limit on cigarrettes is nowhere near as tight. I mean, one could conceivably chain smoke all day long without stopping, whereas the stomach can only hold so much.
Seems to me an equivalent comparison would be looking at drinking water. Everyone needs drinking water, but try to drink 6 gallons in a day and you will die. Not from drowning, but from overtaxing the kidneys and diluting blood components, etc. But surely smoking 1 cigarrette is far less healthy than drinking, say 5 - 8oz glasses of water in one day.
Okay, it may be true that things like sodium intake does not scale linearly. That certainly affects how you think about the topic.
But look at it from a certain standpoint - what is a typical intake of bacon in one day? What is a typical cigarrette intake? Now, using those numbers, how does the relative effect compare? Oh look, C is much more harmful than B, given those relative intakes.