Let’s talk Hot Dogs. Mechanically separated meat. Theoretically, best part of meat for you – easy was to get closer to the “whole animal”
If you google this – as you should never do! for health questions, because google is bought out. Actually. Pause: if you want to do some health research, go to search.brave.com; click on “Goggles,” search for Apis’ search goggles, and utilize that. It’ll give you much more accurate and helpful results. Pro tip. Anyways. Back to the post.
If you google “hot dogs” or see posts on social media vilifying processed meat, they’ll almost always allude to the same bogeyman: A HUGE STUDY IN 2012 FOUND THAT PROCESSED MEAT CAUSES CANCER!
I’m highlighting this, because it epitomizes the idiocy of using studies to replace Tradition as the foundation of medicinal discernment – much like statistics are just empty numbers waiting to be spun into yarns, studies are just data collected to justify a pre-approved message.
Let me preface by saying I’m not a fan of nitrates, ammonia, etc, in processed meats. I’m REALLY REALLY not a fan of a particular ingredient found in many processed meats (actually two, found together) – BHA/BHT. BHA/BHT is a highly refined petroleum product (that’s right, like gasoline/butane/jet fuel, except more refined) that basically kill everything and run roughshod over you (they’re basically artificial dyes without color). That’s a red line for me – if a meat has BHA/BHT, I won’t be eating it, because I’ll feel the effects if I do (and I’m guessing you do too, even if you’ve never noticed it; same as dyes).
Which leads to another qualifier here: “processed meats” don’t necessarily equal “processed meats.” If the problem is BHA/BHT, for example, eating Aldi’s processed hot dogs won’t be as bad (no BHA/BHT) as eating their Pepperoni (ugh, seriously Aldi?). And personally, I tend to think that this is the key difference – yes, preservatives are often really bad, etc., but the REALLY bad ones are the petroleum products – BHA/BHT, TBHQ, artificial dyes, etc. I have a zero-tolerance policy for those, and I’m very happy with that policy.
Also quick notes: you’ll hear about why plant nitrates (plants also have a ton of nitrates, by the way!) are ok, while meat nitrates aren’t, because plants have a bunch of antioxidants that prevent destabilization of said nitrates. Maybe. Meat has WAAAAY more antioxidants than plants – not even comparable. And if you’re that worried about it, just pop 250mg of vitamin C when you’re eating processed meats. That’s way more than you’ll get from most hybrid-agrotoxin-bound-depleted-soil-grown plants nowadays anyways.
(Also – personally, I would guess that seed oils and GMO-augmented lectin concentration (i.e. plant toxins) are also big players here. Anyways).
Ok. So, there’s that. But, onwards and upwards.
This is the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3493769/#:~:text=Results:,cancer%2C%20breast%20cancer%2C%20prostate%20cancer
Read it, if you’d like. Essentially, about 6,000 participants in Montevideo, Uruguay, hospital patients, were administered a food questionnaire – how often do you eat [a list of foods, including several types of processed meat].
Now, I don’t know about you, but that alone should be enough to raise red flags. You can’t effectively diagnose stomach pain based on something like that, let alone pin an accurate % increased probability of cancer.
Think about it. If you’re someone who has health problems (they’re patients in a hospital, for crying out loud) who “eats processed meats alot,” where did those processed meats come from? Either from a supermarket, or a restaurant, especially fast food places. If you’re even slightly discriminating in your food choices, pretty much anything – including vegetable-oriented diets – will be healthier than an “anything goes” approach. People who aren’t eating alot of processed meats by definition are going to be more health-conscious – not necessarily healthier, but at least have the intention to be healthier – because “default” food choices (supermarket, restaurant) involve cheap processed meat.
This study doesn’t show that processed meat “causes cancer.” It does seem to suggest that being even slightly discriminating in your diet choices, and veering from default options, is helpful in the long run – even if only a little.
If you need a study to demonstrate common sense, if that’s what gets your busnon burner going, a better design might be to survey health-conscious people who have a meat-heavy diet that includes regular processed meat, and compare rates of various cancers to the general population. Still not perfect – no such thing, all studies carry a built-in goal – but, assuming the rates of various cancers were higher than normal in that group, it would suggest that, even if you’re health conscious, processed meats are bringing you down and causing cancer.
But that will never happen, primarily because studies are extremely expensive, and that’s clearly not the implicit starting goal of the study: the point of the study from the beginning to clearly to conclude “meat bad.”
Also rat-smelling is the French International Agency for Research on Cancer, which believes that even unprocessed red meat is cancer-causing. Oh brother. Additionally, lines from the study such as “Lung cancer has been considered as directly associated with meat intake” should raise one’s eyebrows the roof. Really? REALLY? Meat intake causes cancer? This really isn’t a feasible stance anymore, in the day and age where people can actually – wait for it – share their experiences with each other (when done over time, called “tradition.”) Unfortunately this experience-sharing is hampered by the power-sponsored artificial bot manipulation of the internet, but sunshine still peeks through the clouds nonetheless.
This study is such baloney I think I’m going to make a sandwich out of it, and have a relatively-healthy-not-the-greatest-but-better-than-most-plants snack.
