First they came for sugar, now they want to ban your bacon
Will life be worth living once all the simple ‘unhealthy’ pleasures are banned?
An un-named group of ‘scientists’ are calling for a ban on supermarket bacon and ham after the chemicals used in their production were linked to more than 50,000 bowel cancer cases.
The Mail has more.
A coalition of leading scientists says the refusal to ban nitrites – preservatives used to keep processed meats pink and long-lasting – has come at a devastating human and financial cost, with the NHS footing an estimated £3 billion bill to treat preventable cancers over the past decade.
Their analysis, based on figures from Cancer Research UK and the British Journal of Cancer, estimates that around 5,400 bowel cancer cases each year in the UK are caused by eating processed meats. Treatment costs for each patient average £59,000.
The warning comes exactly 10 years after the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen – placing it in the same risk category as tobacco and asbestos.
Despite this, ministers have done “virtually nothing” to reduce Britons’ exposure, according to Professor Chris Elliott OBE, founder of the Institute for Global Food Security and a former government adviser.
He said: “A decade on from the WHO report, the UK Government has done virtually nothing to reduce exposure to nitrites – the curing agents that make these products pink and long-lasting but also create nitrosamines, compounds known to trigger cancer.
“Every year of delay means more preventable cancers, more families affected and greater strain on the NHS.”
The scientists who worked on the original WHO report have now written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting urging him to ban nitrites in processed meats.
Their landmark report, published in 2015, analysed data from more than 800 studies and found that for every 50g of processed meat eaten a day, the risk of colorectal cancer increased by 18 percent.
Experts say it is specifically the combination of nitrates and processing methods used in meats such as bacon, ham and sausages that generates carcinogenic compounds when consumed.
Currently, up to 90 percent of bacon sold in the UK is thought to contain nitrites, which have been linked not only to bowel cancer but also breast and prostate cancers.
I haven’t read the study, but a first thought is whether people who eat lots of bacon aren’t unhealthy in other ways that might explain a higher incidence of bowel, breast and prostate cancers.
That’s often the problem with these studies – there are so many potential factors that could explain an 18 percent increase in various maladies. They’ll have statistical techniques to try to deal with that, for sure.
But trying to work out why diseases like cancer develop as a result of eating certain foods is never an exact science.
And remember, just because something is ‘linked’ to something else does not make it a fact.
Correlation is NOT causation.
See more here dailysceptic.org
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.