The ‘uncured’ bacon illusion: It’s cured, and it’s not better for you (2019)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
That just seems to indicate buying pork from humane producers?
https://support.butcherbox.com/hc/en-us/articles/11501571308...
Any suggestions? Particularly something that doesn't require me to live within 20 miles of you.
Or grow your own.
Aside from how they die, pigs are pretty intelligent animals, and I think an adult pig is similar in mental capacity to a 6 yr old or higher.
If they lived better fulfilling lives and died peacefully I might feel like I could eat pork. But not at the moment.
Actually it becomes a rabbit-hole. I then discovered how baby male chicks are killed...
At the moment I feel like eating meat requires a mental disconnect from the suffering if the animal and what we think is ok, and the act of eating food.
Either way, I'm basically vegetarian these days. I'll pay for something someone promises me is really organic acorn fed pork or some kind of super happy cow, but I'm not even really sure how much I believe that anymore.
Venison, however, I think is basically guilt free. It's never farmed (at least, where I am from) and it tastes better than beef..
[1] https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/bad-news-venison-eater...
Yes, but only for sociopaths who can not feel guilt.
I live in a rural area, farmland and timber. Hunters come for deer in season, whenever that was. Coming home at a certain time in the evening, I always seemed to interrupt some does and fawns crossing the road in the same place, so I know to be cautious and drive slow. But lately it had seemed to me that I never see any deer, which is unusual. Two weeks ago, I'm out early at sunup, I turn a corner, and I see about 40 fawns in a field, they all look up at me at the same time, then dart across the field. There isn't one there that's more than a year old. No deer, just a large amount of fawns. So this last season the hunters apparently killed every deer in the area. All that are left are the fawns, dozens and dozens of them, motherless. Seeing all those fawns was the saddest thing I have witnessed in recent memory.
Hunting is not good, and those that hunt, suck, for the needless killing for sport, but also for their extreme, unbounded entitlement. If someone can't enjoy themselves without killing something, there is something terribly wrong with them. But with any luck, they'll all die of rectal cancer.
I believe we can't detect C0 and things like N0 so they just straight up kill you once you pass out from oxygen deprivation
I come from a shellfish village, and we would do our lobsters this way all my life -- we would put them in headfirst which I guess maybe slightly reduces the time they suffer (although -- personally -- when I am doing it, I kill them with a knife to the brain before they go into the water these days)..
But octopus? How horrifying.
Pigs have always received better treatment, even though they often receive terrible treatment. Octopi are served live in some places still.
IME there are a lot of bad bacons with this label so I avoid buying anything with the label.
Which is exactly the reaction they try to get by laundering their preferences through trade associations. That's the point. An illusion of some kind of authority keeping companies in check, while actually it's those very companies setting the rules, to deflect criticism and stave off actual regulation.
Or one bag of crisps, definitely 4 servings there...
The packaging should explain the contents, not some weird fraction of the contents that no one sticks to.
The main issue is really the term “serving size”, as it implies that what’s in the package is a single “serving”. (And this confusion only applies to smaller, convenience size packages. Nobody would think a party size bag of chips is a single “serving”).
If they called it something else, like “sample size”, it might not be so bad. However it’s also difficult to come up with a succinct word to describe it.
The people deciding on the budget and bloviating about the budget are not the ones paid by that budget. And the people paid are not generally highly regarded or zealously consulted by the bloviators (well, different bloviators have different favorite budgets), so their agreement is immaterial to the decision.
Use it or lose it budgeting creates a massive incentive to burn money on all sorts of things, including scope creep.
The people actually making the decisions on whether or not to accept the scope creep don't need to be told by the political appointees at the top whether they should because if they weren't capable of reading the political winds they wouldn't have ascended to decision making positions in a government bureaucracy.
When it comes to counting macros, bacon’s a great source for fat (that you can also save and re-use in other dishes).
Best advice is to do an elimination diet. It improved for me then it was years of trial and error. I basically just eat meat, rice, milk, butter, and broccoli now but not wanting to take a drill to my forehead is great.
Bacon may be unhealthy since it's generally burnt to a crisp and has more oxidants.
A lot of nutrition science has changed recently, but eating a bunch of saturated fat is still generally believed cause cardiovascular disease.
I think there's evidence that keto and even carnivore can work for some people. Ted Naiman seems more sustainable/evidence-based to me if you want to eat animal protein.
The specifically interesting part of nutrition science changes is that we've discovered how individualized this is. Same with salt intake.
Some people can pack away 10g of sodium per day with no deleterious effects on their blood pressure. Others respond very poorly to it.
Some people can raw slonk a dozen egg yolks or 1/4lb of lard and see no appreciable rise in serum total cholesterol or LDL levels. Others cannot.
The main thing we've learned is that dietary advice based on broad population studies will tell you precisely nothing about how good or bad a given food is for your specific metabolism, epigenetic expression, and physiology. We should all go for differential blood panels in our teens or early twenties to determine this up front. A thousand dollars to save a hundred times that later down the road.
Saturated fat in comparison literally doesn't matter and since it is much harder to oxidize it can extend your lifespan.
The CDC says "Don’t taste or eat raw (unbaked) dough or batter", but many do anyway because the risk is low enough to not be overly concerned about.
Is the cumulative risk on the order of 0.01% to 0.1%? Or is it like 1% to 10%? If it's the former, then it's not worth thinking about. If it's the latter, I may change my behavior. Or it could be expressed via expected life years lost. If 1 year, eh. If it's 10 years, that's another story. Also how much would need to be consumed. Are we talking about bacon every day? Or once a week? Or month?
>found that every 50 grams of processed meat per day upped the risk by 18 percent
18% sounds like a big increase, and it is a big increase from a relative standpoint. But the absolute risk goes from 5% lifetime risk to 6% lifetime risk in the linked study.
I don’t think anything was going to make optional masking commonplace over a long period of time, so I wouldn’t blame excessive warning labels on it.
I believe the acrylamide that forms in roasted or fried potatoes is only a probable carcinogen and only causes cancer in studies with doses much higher than people eat.
I guess I don't eat enough bacon to have formed an opinion on that.
Bacon without headaches is healthier bacon (for me). End of story.
If sodium nitrate is the content of pink salt that causes your headaches, one would expect a similar or greater amount of sodium nitrate in celery powder to cause similar symptoms.
"No nitrates or nitrites added, except for those occurring naturally in cultured celery powder and sea salt."
The author mentions one study.
They do not compare the health consequences of a naturally derived ingredient (nitrates from celery) vs an industrial-scale produced one (sodium nitrate-- basically, salt-peter -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrate).
I'll take celery over salt peter any day.
This article is not the least bit persuasive, and I wonder if the author has any industry-tilted biases, because the article seems bias, as summarized with: "hey don't worry about salt-peter! celery-nitrates are just as bad!"
The food still has nitrates and nitrites. Your focus is on the "no safer" part of the headline, which does seem overstated.
From basic chemistry, nitrates and nitrites are all salts that dissolve in water. So the only differences between different nitrates are what which cation is present, since the body is designed to deal with sodium ions. I suppose celery based curing agents could potentially have different cations. It is also possible that the amounts introduces are meaningfully different. (And of course, the nitrite side of things differs in a similar manner.)
But other than cations, and amount of nitrate and nitrite salts remaining in the food, the only other plausible difference is any trace impurities in the curing agent which may be related to how the curing agent is sourced.
The fetishistic obsession with naturally derived flavors and additives is mostly blindly dogmatic and ignores the science.
As any chemist will tell you, no process has 100% yield with zero dangerous side products, let alone 100% of the time.
Real processes have mistakes that make it past QA, let alone scams and other issues.
Is the concern generally overblown? Yes. But it isn’t completely unrealistic either.
That doesn't mean you can tell which one is better without extensive testing.
Being made from dirt in a random field is not great for purity.
I'm not saying it's an informed decision, I'm saying it's a conservative one, with relatively well known problems and risks (minus the relatively modern industrial contamination and pesticide problems, which make it mostly moot IMO).
There’s no protective magic that sourcing the same arrangement of atoms from a plant adds.
Indeed, it smells of homeopathic reasoning.
The industrial process for producing nitrites commonly derive them from sodium nitrate, yes. But deriving food-grade compounds from substances that would be toxic on their own is a common chemical practice, and is not, on its own, remarkable.
Ignoring that you linked the wrong chemical, that's not the decision you're making at all. You're taking salt peter either way.
I could put "salt peter" in scare quotes but I think that makes it harder to understand my point.
The emphasis on only two sentences is because it feels like you're skipping that part.