Processed Meat
You might expect me to say processed meat is completely healthy. You’d be wrong ... to a degree. There is a correlation between nitrate / nitrite consumption and ill health, so much to say the World Health Organisation have called processed meat a probable carcinogen. A recent study by The International Agency for Research on Cancer which reviewed 800 studies on the subject found that people who ate 50 g of processed meat (4 rashers of bacon or 1 hot dog a day) had an 18% greater risk of bowel cancer. Sounds scary doesn’t it? The chances of getting bowel cancer during your lifetime is 5% and eating this amount of processed meat each day increases this risk to 6%.
But who eats that much processed meat?
It’s not scientific, and I would like to say I love bacon, ham, biltong and goodness knows I make enough of it, along with the odd pork pie. But I did a quick total of my average week of, and I found myself eating 200 g of processed meat.
Now that would increase my cancer risk by only 9%, and my lifetime % chance of bowel cancer would be 5.4%, in other words, of 200 deaths, 0.8 of one of those deaths would have statistically been to using nitrates / nitrites in processed meat, at my level of consumption.
But there is more, nitrates / nitrates are also considered important for health
No, I don’t mean that it cuts down on the bacterial load, I’m coming to that later. A paper in Cardiovascular Research (11th Oct 2010) pointed to the cardiovascular benefits of NO (nitric oxide formed from nitrite) and postulated the formation of a renewed theory of the benefits of eating nitrate rich vegetables, such as spinach.
Regardless of how much organic or inorganic fertiliser you add to the soil, spinach accumulates nitrates which in turn is converted to nitrites and thence to nitric oxide. A good helping of spinach has comparable concentrations of nitrate to processed meat.
Salt
By far the greatest problem in our food is the amount of salt, which causes no end of problems both arterial, renal and cardiovascular. It is found in almost all foods, particularly canned food and supermarket foods. The maximum allowed intake daily for an adult is 6 g, but this figure can be exceeded in a single meal.
What can I do?
The problem of making your own food is spoilage and the lack of testing. So you have to be sure. Botulism, or sausage disease, is a bacterial infection that is deadly, and is controlled by the amount of nitrate / nitrite in the product.
Are the days of the meatfeast numbered?