Page 145 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

34

PROCESSED MEAT

AND CANCER

ot dogs and baseball. Bacon and weekends. Lunch boxes
and ham sandwiches. American culture has a great many
Hjoyous associations with processed meats.
So it was tempting for many of us to look the other way when
the World Health Organization released a whammy of a headline
in 2015, stating that processed meat causes cancer. Colorectal
cancer, specifically. This is a big deal. Rarely do scientists use
the word cause. Normally you hear them cautiously, almost
timidly, state a conclusion as, “Well, perhaps there’s, at most,
a 95 percent probability that Thing 1 might, given the weight of
the evidence, have been associated with Thing 2—though more
research is needed.” When they say “cause,” it means this is one
scientific conclusion worth some serious attention.
The “processed meat” category includes hot dogs, ham,
bacon, sausage, salami, corned beef, beef jerky, canned meat,
and sauces made with those products, like a pork sausage ragù
or bacon salad dressing. “Processing” in this context means
meat that has been treated in order to preserve it over a long
period of time or give it flavor—usually through smoking,
salting, curing, or fermenting in some way. Most commonly,
processed meats come from pork or beef, but the issue applies
to those with a base of other red meats, poultry, meat by-
products, or animal organs. There isn’t the same level of con-
sensus about whether smoked and cured fish products—think
lox on your bagel—count as processed meats in terms of car-
rying the same cancer risk, but it makes sense to treat them

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