Nitrates are in everything. That's part of the point of this article: you can cure bacon with celery extract. Anyways, this subthread begs the question. What we're debating is the health risk of nitrates. The parent comment asks, essentially, "do nitrates matter? bacon is already unhealthy".
Pork isn't especially unhealthy, it's just that everything you learned about nutrition in the 90s was a lie. You don't actually have to follow the food pyramid and eat an entire loaf of bread a day.
Bacon may be unhealthy since it's generally burnt to a crisp and has more oxidants.
Bacon is ~40% fat. The sodium is probably carcinogenic in addition to any compounds developed in cooking.
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.
> A lot of nutrition science has changed recently, but eating a bunch of saturated fat is still generally believed cause cardiovascular disease.
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.
Raw dough/batter is a one-off risk. If that one batch wasn't contaminated, you're safe. Insofar as nitrates are a risk, they're more of a cumulative chronic exposure sort of risk.
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?
I have no idea whether it even is a risk. My point was that it’s very hard to compare the two examples because they’re very different risk profiles, irrespective of the magnitude of their effects
The article speaks specifically about colorectal cancer:
>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.
