• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Bacon and eggs anyone?

I thought I needed more excitement in my life, maybe I should take up sky-diving or ski-jumping but now I realize that I am dicing with death daily just by having breakfast.
 
As my bacon usually emerges from the freezer as I grumble at myself for forgetting to defrost it, I put it into the pan and boil it to defrost and that also takes out salt and soluble preservatives. Once I can separate the rashers I sieve them out and cook normally, but I expect that a lot of unwanted stuff goes down the drain.
 
Read through and saw her numbers... what a load of twaddle.. 34,000 extra cases a year worldwide? Out of a global population of over 7 billion that must be so statistically insignificant as to not even register. Scaremongering of the highest order. No idea how she gets from 34,000 worldwide to 8,800 UK cases but even that as a percentage of what 70 mio in the UK is also so small as to be unremarkable (unless you happen to be one of that number of course).
 
Boo1979 said:
Hmmm well, maybe just eggs
Click to expand...
Its not statistically imposable to live to be 100 these days and I'm not even half way there yet and assuming in advance I do. I still don't think I have enough time left, on this planet, to read the whole of that article.
 
Pah. I will dice with death at breakfast, like @Mr_Pot, and fight the dastardly bacon with an equally dastardly sausage, washed down by lethal coffee (it's bound to be, at some point). I try and buy locally-produced bacon and high meat content sausages from local farms and producers so perhaps the death dice will just be delayed. Honestly, if you took on board every single 'don't eat this' you'd be eating air....
 
67 paragraph article, and it turns out that the actual figure she quotes is mentioned twice, once near the beginning, and once near the end. No mention of relative or absolute risk, presumably because that would either confuse the poor reader, or demonstrate that the melodrama is unnecessary. Accompanied by dramatic words like ‘chilling’ and that 8,800 people killed by processed meats (not just bacon) is MORE than are killed on British roads each year!!! The rest of the wordage is a general history of food scares and some info on processed meats.

What a load of journalistic padded nonsense.

From my own perspective, the fact that 8000 odd people are killed on British roads in a year does not stop me being a passenger or driver on those roads.

Does it stop any of you?

I shall continue to enjoy bacon, while not eating it so often that I cease to enjoy it, alongside a variety of other foods.
 

Yes, I said as much on another thread yesterday. If we stop eating all that is declared to be bad for us, we would be left with nothing. Even water.
 
It looks my attention deficit again is a blessing,as I just glanced over this lengthy post .and wasted little time.
 
Journalists are notoriously bad at 'scientific analysis'. To be fair to this journalist, she does make an attempt to give figures for both the relative risk and the absolute risk:-
"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. (Eating larger amounts raises your risk more.) Learning that your own risk of cancer has increased from something like 5% to something like 6% may not be frightening enough to put you off bacon sandwiches for ever."
​
She is quoting an increase of 18% for the relative risk and an increase from 5 to 6% for the absolute risk. Cancer Research UK say 17% for relative risk and an increase from 6.1 (or 5.6 for low meat-eaters) to 6.6% for the absolute risk, so not too dissimilar http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/10/26/processed-meat-and-cancer-what-you-need-to-know/

She also says that that 8,800 is 4 times the annual death toll on British roads i.e. around 2,200 rather than the 8,000 odd you mentioned.
 
So The Guardian is jumping on the Daily Fail's Everything Gives You Cancer bandwagon?

Pass me the rashers, please.
 
The figure of 34,000 comes from WHO. A large proportion of the world do not eat processed meats (or very little) so do not contribute to that figure. Processed meat is consumed frequently in the UK so the proportion of bowel cancer cases due to processed meats would be expected to be higher.
 
Except that the definition of processed meats is the key (and so far as I know is not a distinction the WHO made). So you get 97% meat sausages lumped in with spam and mechanically recovered meats from beaks to bums... and I doubt very much that the UK accounts for the extra 25% of the global bowel cancer cases however much processed meat we eat so a bad article is "backed up" by even worse statistics.
 
OK, you've all cheered me up with your analysis - especially the idea that I'm much more likely to die in my car. Now to hide those car keys!
 
WHO say:-
"Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation. Most processed meats contain pork or beef, but processed meats may also contain other red meats, poultry, offal, or meat by-products such as blood."
http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
​
Do you have a source for 'good' statistics that you can share with us?
 

As I have said many times before until people are locked up and fed precise things there are no "good" or "reliable" nutritional studies or statistics. It is all open to interpretation and misinterpretation. The IARC study was a combination of data from about 800 other studies which I have no specific knowledge of but I can assure you that hardly any (and probably none) were carried out under precise enough conditions to give anything like enough evidence for their claims because those studies haven't been done in the last 40 years. The study was done by the IARC which is an independent branch of the WHO and so far as I know all the statements claimed to be from the WHO are in fact from the IARC. I recall reading an excellent rebuttal of the IARC study which I have been searching for but cannot unfortunately find.
This one from Reuters is the closest I can get but not the one I was looking for
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-who-iarc/

I'm glad you have however proved my point that the definition of "processed" meat is all encompassing and could be seen to contain a multitude of nasties as well as slightly tampered with fresh meat. In fact looking at that definition a steak with salt and pepper on has become "processed meat" in a similar way to a McDonalds chicken nugget or a tin of spam.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn More.…