BREAKING: Scientists say eating will give you cancer.

Mustard might have some anti-cancer benefits, but it's also a topical irritant. We generally try not to eat those. My point is that we usually eat processed meats with some really sketchy condiments that are chock full of some compounds that we turn into chemical weapons. They're not even sure mustard is safe for pregnant women. In contrast, ground meat is still meat. It's just been "pre-chewed". So is the study yet another pile of poorly executed dietary garbage?

Now I want a pretzel.

And wouldn't it be convenient to have a big soft pretzel hanging off your belt right when that craving hit?

They had to be thinking something rational in 1559. What's the purpose of the pretzel shape as compared to a bread stick? The pretzel shape seems ideal for hanging on the side of an ALICE pack, a belt, or a shoulder strap, whereas a bread stick pretty much has to go in a pocket or pouch where it will probably get crushed. If you made the break as a simple circle, as soon as you take a bite of it you've got a ring with a gap that will fall right off your fighting harness as it rotates around. But the pretzel has several convenient loops so you could eat a half or two thirds of it and still have a continuous loop so you can hook it on and stay all up and mobile.

It seems like the soft pretzel might have come about as a medieval Armageddon, zombie-apocalypse assault food. But that implies that the hard pretzel is food for when the shit really hits the fan, perhaps for an asteroid impact, perhaps an invasion of face-hugging aliens. We just don't know, but I'd stock up.

What is the point of living longer if I can't enjoy lots of red meat?

They didn't have pockets in the middle ages but everyone had a belt because it was the only way to keep your pants up. You would tie a small pouch to you belt to hold your money so it kind of makes sense people would loop a pretzel on to their belt. They were carrying a snack for later which wouldn't go bad over the course of a day.

After all a pretzel is just bread dipped in lye water to get the smooth skin like crust then baked.

I like your idea! I'm going to hang a pretzel on a loop around my neck the next time I go hunting. I will have a pretty much "hands free" snack I don't have to go digging for, which makes unnecessary movements deer might see. No mustard though, that would get messy bouncing against my jacket. Wait! When I get to my blind I could hang the pretzel from a tree for convenience. The next time I hunt I will post a pic of the hands free pretzel in action!

They're talking about two different things. They're saying red meat might cause cancer, but processed meat, any kind of processed meat, does cause cancer.

And yet how does "processing" make the meat a carcinogen?

Most dietary studies are garbage because they're based on self-reported diaries where people lie. Over half of the people in such studies should be dead from a lack of sufficient calories to keep them alive.

On a more positive note concerning health research, scientists now claim that getting in a fatal head-on collision with an 18 wheeler will cure hiccups 100 percent of the time. I'm thinking the test group was too small, but what do I know?

Make them eat beets. Plain boiled beets.

I see nothing wrong with your proposal. Now beet it, I'm kind of busy.

Plain beets suck but borscht is good. My friend's Ukrainian wife has made it at several dinner parties.

I have found there is a pretzel food truck in this area so I will have to hunt them down and buy a couple of their $1 soft pretzels.


http://m.yelp.com/biz/philly-soft-pretzel-company-san-diego

So not only does it yield only a small increase in your odds of getting one particular type of cancer ...

but also, if you ate enough meat to dramatically increase your cancer odds, isn't it more likely that heart disease would get you first?

It's a little like saying that getting shot increases your chances of getting brain damage from lead poisoning. Yes, it's technically true. But also, probably not your biggest concern.

More on that.


Bacon Causes Cancer? Sort of. Not Really. Ish.
Sarah Zhang Science 10.27.15

Perhaps no two words together are more likely to set the internet aflame than BACON and CANCER. So when the World Health Organization classified processed meat as a group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco—

Hold on. Let me stop right here. Eating bacon is not as bad as smoking when it comes to cancer. Just no.

The way WHO classifies cancer-causing substances, on the other hand? Maybe a little dangerous to your mental health. Because it is really confusing.

Here’s the deal: The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer weighs the strength of the scientific evidence that some food, drink, pesticide, smokable plant, whatever is a carcinogen. What it does not do is consider how much that substance actually increases your risk for actually getting cancer—even if it differs by magnitudes of 100.

The scientific evidence linking both processed meat and tobacco to certain types of cancer is strong. In that sense, both are carcinogens. But smoking increases your relative risk of lung cancer by 2,500 percent; eating two slices of bacon a day increases your relative risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Given the frequency of colorectal cancer, that means your risk of getting colorectal cancer over your life goes from about 5 percent to 6 percent and, well, YBMMV. (Your bacon mileage may vary.) “If this is the level of risk you’re running your life on, then you don’t really have much to worry about,” says Alfred Neugut, an oncologist and cancer epidemiologist at Columbia.

The link, though tiny, may start with an iron-based chemical called heme, found in red meat. Heme breaks down into carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds in the digestive tract. Partially on this basis, the IARC also classified unprocessed red a “probable carcinogen.” But processed meat takes it a step further: The nitrates and nitrates used to cure meat—which is to say, preserve it—also turn into N-nitroso compounds. Grilling, frying, or otherwise cooking the meat at high-temperatures may create yet other cancer-causing compounds.

So it makes sense that cutting down on bacon, hot dogs, salami, and ham reduce cancer risk a little. But it’s hardly the big deal that quitting tobacco would be. Connecting the two, as The Guardian does in its headline, “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes—WHO,” misrepresents the IARC’s conclusions.

The IARC is an organization of scientists, not policy makers. It publishes monographs to identify hazards and sift them into five piles: group 1 (carcinogenic), group 2A (probably carcinogenic), group 2B (possibly carcinogenic), group 3 (not classifiable), and group 4 (probably not carcinogenic.) Group 1 includes processed meat, and also asbestos. Also alcohol (boo!) and sunlight (yup!). Identifying hazards involves looking at existing data—lots and lots of it—to do essentially a meta-analysis of studies already out there. And it’s relatively objective. “Hazard identification is the process that is the closest to the generation of scientific data,” say Paolo Boffetta, a cancer epidemiologist at Mount Sinai who has served on similar WHO panels. In other words, IARC studies the studies and generates numbers.

What the IARC doesn’t do—and where things get a lot fuzzier—is risk assessment, or figuring out the danger to humans in the real world. Risk assessment involves looking at different scenarios, finding out real-world exposure levels, and weighing possible benefits. (Useful drugs like Tamoxifen—used to treat breast cancer—are also carcinogens, for example.) Those factors can vary from person to person, country to country. “The issue of whether the monograph program should be amended to also include risk assessment has been raised several times, and each time,” says Boffetta, “the conclusion was it should not. It should let national regulatory agencies do the research.” And after 50 years of doing things one way, it’s not like the IARC can just change its mind.

In a way, the IARC’s commitment to, as Boffetta calls it, “an independent list that was not subject to additional pressures,” makes a kind of sense. But science doesn’t happen in a vacuum—just look at the wave of traffic that crashed the IARC’s website after the meat announcement. The agency can maintain that it’s a dispassionate resource for policymakers, but the public is knocking at its door.

In recent years, says Boffetta, the agency has gotten a lot of attention each time it classified something, and those actions often get “overinterpreted.” “X causes cancer” does not mean that X will definitely give you cancer; it just means that X increases your risk of cancer by some amount, and it can vary wildly from a tiny tiny percentage to 25 fold. Does bacon cause cancer? Sure. A little. Will bacon cause cancer in you? Probably not.

So having bacon every day for 60 years increases you chances of getting colon cancer from 5% to 6%? That does not sound so bad especially since no one is going to eat bacon every day for 60 years straight. What they also didn't look at is simply increasing your fiber intake and shitting once per day likely cancels most of that out.

I think I will still have bacon once or twice a week.

If the nitrates are causing cancer then wine drinkers would show increased mortality. They don't.

I love bacon, but I may have it once a month at most.

It's just something I don't eat very often.

What if they had bacon flavored ice cream? Who am I kidding they probably already do.

They do. I actually enjoyed the bacon flavor of Jack in the Box's bacon milkshake but the fuckers put way too much maple syrup in the thing. If I could have gotten it with 1/5th the syrup it would have been great.

FROM MY COLD, GREASY HANDS!