I could sure go for some Ivermectin squeezed on top of a hotdog and washed down with some motor oil about now.
Can I have a little sausage, as a treat?
I felt shitty, I made changes to my diet and exercise, I feel much better now.
It doesn’t take research to convince me that processed foods, especially industrial, large scale, profit-above-all-else, processed food is bad for me.
These results shouldn’t surprise anyone, and I don’t think they do. But, people will find excuses to keep doing unhealthy things they enjoy, and that is their prerogative.
Some of this food isn’t great for you, but if you only have it now and then it shouldn’t be a problem.
Moderation and a diverse diet is key.
publishing this article three days before independance day is terrorism
i usually use a little mnemonic device to remember exact dates for holidays. for fourth of July i try to match the last word with the month of the year and the first word with the day of the month.
i can’t argue with toddlers
Jokes on them. I do tons of unsafe shit, and probably only one of those things is going to kill me. There will be no accountability for 99.9% of the bad behavior, including unregulated hotdog intake. Suckers.
For me, it’s about the quality of life before I die, not which shitty thing I’m willingly doing to my body that ends up “winning”.
Are the Germans dying in droves due to this?
Ya well in the 70s and 80s this was what we as kids were given to eat.
I’m paying for that now
sorry but one hotdog a day is not a small nor moderate amount.
What I liked was their phrasing: “people who ate as little as one hot dog a day”
I’m assuming it’s just the average though, I generally ingest my 7 hotdogs for Monday morning breakfast, and then eat healthy the rest of the week.
There are plenty of toddlers who’d disagree with you
Right lol that’s an insane amount of hot dogs
Every few trips to Costco already seems too often, but it is delicious.
I’m not a nutritional epidemiologist.
But I’ve started to get into learning about it in the last few months.
It’s really starting to feel like this is a giant bullshit field, and as much as they are trying to find useful results, there’s something severely wrong with how they seem to arbitrarily assign causality and correlation.
In a contrived example: “People who live near power lines have more cancer” - “No, poor people live near power lines because they’re poor, and poor people have more cancer”
What are the kind of people that eat processed hot dogs? I can promise you they are not millionaires. I can promise you it’s not people who can afford filet mignon but decide to have a steamed hot dog. It’s not people who work out and take care of their bodies. It’s not people who cook.
So when a study is done like this, what answer are you actually getting? probably finding out that the type of people who eat processed meat are more prone to these conditions for a variety of considerations that are just totally left out of the analysis.
We have collectively forgotten that correlation != causation
Basically: wanna live healthy and forever? Just become a billionaire! If you don’t want to live healthy then I guess that’s your choice to make.
Yes, poor people eat poor quality food more often but the food is bad either way.
Here’s a good tip, look at allllll of the specific foods that a doctor would tell a pregnant person to avoid. Non-pregnant people should also avoid them, and processed meats have been on that list for a long time.
that’s not true. pregnant people are told to stay away from sushi because of immunity with raw fish. you should also not eat papaya while pregnant because it can cause premature contractions. you’re making a very broad generalization that the recommendation to pregnant people is completely nutrition based, but there’s many factors when growing a life inside you.
like in early pregnancy, you eat foods high in choline. that’s not because foods low in choline are bad for you, but because during early fetal development, choline builds neural tubes
Sure there are exceptions. You haven’t made any point about whether processed meats cause poor health outcomes though. They do, and its been shown over and over again, but people don’t like someone telling them they have bad habits.
Try to follow the thrust of the conversation.
Well, you’re right and I’m surprised I’ve never thought of this before.
The EMF from power lines was a real mind virus that went around when I was a teenager!
I’ve been alive too long and have seen this pattern play out again, and again, and again. Feeling a little sad right now, actually.
For another example: all my life the common sense accepted wisdom, supported by real dermatologists was that to keep the likelihood of skin cancer to a minimum there is zero known healthy level of sun exposure. Well that’s all out the f’king window in 2025 because we now know the deleterious effects of insufficient sun exposure are vastly more severe compared to an increased morbidity for types of skin cancer.
I don’t want to be mr critical, but… there’s something wrong in our whole approach to these “studies” and I don’t know what fixes it. Any experts wanna help describe what I’m getting at with the right technical language?
My “maybe?” controversial opinion, shot off half-cocked and a little uninformed… is that the entire field of nutritional epidemiology is bad pseudo-science arising from a fundamentally flawed viewpoint and bias: That health outcomes are tied to nutritional intake vs nutritional intake arising from the conditions of individuals’ lives.
I’d hate to be a nutritional epidemiologist tbh. I can’t think of a less fruitful career searching for answers and finding what looks like answers, but are just the biases of your questions reflected back to you.
Im so screwed.
Be like a Harley rider - embrace your dangerous lifestyle.
So I have to eat raw meat?
Mett gang assemble!
Considering humans have been eating processed meats like these for centuries, I think I’ll take my chances.
Nitrites only date back to the middle of the 19th century.
Isolated as a pure salt, maybe. All those “uncured” varieties listing celery as an ingredient are making use of the same compound though.
We’ve been smoking, salting, and otherwise preserving meat for way longer than that, though. People usually died off from other things before cancer got them, that’s all. The relatively high number of cancer deaths is a product of medical intervention getting so good and so widespread that we don’t regularly die of sepsis from stepping on a splinter or catching communicable disease anymore.
Absolutely, fuck cancer. But cancer went from being a minor concern to a relatively common one because we conquered so many other avenues of death, systematically and carefully, until we’re down to time, neglect and negligence as the three main ways humanity gets itself to the Reaper.
And our rates of intestinal cancer have been rising steadily to the point where now it’s a common killer, so we’ve become afraid of it in our quest to live long, pain-free lives.
Things change as we learn. Why we don’t use lead in our pipes anymore. Safe, biocompatible plastic only.
If the rates have been rising, wouldn’t that prove it’s not processed meats like these? It would be something that’s being introduced at a steady rate lately, not something that’s been around for centuries.
Nitrites have being slowly “introduced” at a steady rate lately
If the problem is nitrites, then the problem is not processed meats, it’s nitrites. Therefore, the headline is wrong. Kinda like the problem with making hats was not making hats, but mercury exposure.
It is likely many factors at once but it’s also important not to assume causation where there is a correlation. Keep in mind also our mechanism of detection is better now than it’s ever been.
Yeah, but I think I’ll take 60 years of eating really tasty meats and foods at the risk of slightly increasing my chance of getting cancer and dying at like 65 instead of 85.
But it’s also about quality of life; do you want the last decade to be in increasing pain with challenged mobility or not as bad?
Yeah, I try not to make it my entire diet, but… no pepperoni? Why live?
7% increase of an already small chance in exchange for 1 hotdog/day doesn’t sound that bad to me.
It never seems that bad unless you’re in that small percent. Cancer’s a damned awful way to die.
Sure but there are a ton of things, genetic, environmental, dietary, neurochemical, etc. that can contribute to the development of cancer. You can do literally everything right and end up in the exact same place as someone who did all the wrong things because the causes are innumerable and many are literally unavoidable.
Would I regret my choices if I got cancer after I did all the things the studies say would increase my odds? Of course I would. Would I regret my choices if did everything “right” and still got cancer? Of course I would. But that’s because being in that position inherently biased you against your past. If I did all the wrong things I would regret that I indulged too much, and if I did all the right things I would regret that I never really indulged at all and enjoyed life fully. Either way you got shafted. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
But to me it’s better to just live intentionally but without having this constant concern about every single thing I eat, drink, or breath maybe, possibly, eventually contributing to developing cancer. Like I’m not about to start smoking, I rarely drink, I try to eat enough veggies, etc. because those things have much more tangible direct consequences that I’m mindful of, and I’m not about to eat a hotdog every day mostly because I’m a really good cook and that sounds sad as fuck. But the next time I do eat a hotdog, a salami, or a Reuben sandwich, I promise you that no part of my mind is going to be worrying that it will give me cancer. Constant dread is its own form of cancer and life’s too short and uncertain to live with that shit 24/7.
I know these things logically. I wish I could embed them more emphatically so that articles like this don’t kick up my anxiety the way they do. Thanks for putting this comment to remind me to come down from the ledge of needless dread and worry.
Worrying too much causes cancer
Words to live by. Well put.
Well said.
…and what do they say about just plain meat, I wonder? 🤔
