So, how healthy is processed meat?
Making your own processed meats needs to be perfectly clean, the quantities need to be spot on and you need to be sure about the final product. If in doubt : throw it out!
Consider, for frequent use, making green bacon. I make green bacon with non iodised salt and sugar and other flavours such as mustard. It isn’t pink, but it is very bacon. I also vacuum seal it and freeze the packets until I need them.
Consider using premixed curing salts that have exactly the right amount of nitrate in them, completely mixed by machine, so you can’t overdose your cured products.
Simply eat less! I consider myself as a processed meat fanatic, but I don’t eat it every day, I don’t sprinkle bacon on my salad every time I have one, and like everything else a good all round balanced diet with exercise is important.
Strange times
Until recently, well 1962, the amount of nitrate in meat was not controlled. An American study fed rats a 10% diet of nitrates and found there to be little observable effect, and then went on to divide this according to differences in mass between people and rats and came up with a figure of the daily intake of nitrates, which then became a limit on the % of nitrate in a salt cure. It is a very blunt instrument!
In the early 19th century bacon and other processed meats had much larger amounts of nitrates / nitrites, but the growth in cancers have increased hugely mostly in modern times. The combination of alcohol, pollutants, the huge number of enormous and potentially dangerous molecules such as pesticides possibly combine in a deadly cocktail that increase the cancers and other illnesses we seem plagued with.
The bottom line
People will try to tell you meat is not safe, I don’t believe them. Like everything else, a balanced diet and exercise is the way to health.
Everyone has an opinion and I wouldn’t tell you what to do, but I will still be making, cooking and enjoying my processed meats, bacon, pork pies, hams ... the list goes on!
City Cottage magazine/September, 2017