Can I have a little sausage, as a treat?
Let’s begin by reading the article, and noting this key sentence: "“Habitual consumption of even small amounts of processed meat, sugary drinks, and trans fatty acids is linked to increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease and colorectal cancer,” said lead author of the study, Dr. Demewoz Haile, a research scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle. "
Health effects associated with consumption of processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages and trans fatty acids: a Burden of Proof study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03775-8#author-information
Abstract
Previous research suggests detrimental health effects associated with consuming processed foods, including processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and trans fatty acids (TFAs). However, systematic characterization of the dose–response relationships between these foods and health outcomes is limited. Here, using Burden of Proof meta-regression methods, we evaluated the associations between processed meat, SSBs and TFAs and three chronic diseases: type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease (IHD) and colorectal cancer. We conservatively estimated that—relative to zero consumption—consuming processed meat (at 0.6–57 g d−1) was associated with at least an 11% average increase in type 2 diabetes risk and a 7% (at 0.78–55 g d−1) increase in colorectal cancer risk. SSB intake (at 1.5–390 g d−1) was associated with at least an 8% average increase in type 2 diabetes risk and a 2% (at 0–365 g d−1) increase in IHD risk. TFA consumption (at 0.25–2.56% of daily energy intake) was associated with at least a 3% average increase in IHD risk. These associations each received two-star ratings reflecting weak relationships or inconsistent input evidence, highlighting both the need for further research and—given the high burden of these chronic diseases—the merit of continuing to recommend limiting consumption of these foods.
Then I hit a paywall. Anyone got a ladder?
One of us is gonna have to email one of the authors to ask for a copy. I’ve read that they want the public to read their work and that the paywall is just like a default setting.
Dang, you mean to tell me that animal refuse blended into mush and saturated with salt is bad for us?!
Eh, “refuse” makes sausage sound worse than it is. In the modern world anyplace with a food inspection system will typically see sausage made from cuts of meat that are perfectly edible but don’t meet the grading standards likely to sell on the shelf , or the excess pieces of muscle left over after breaking primal cuts down into smaller pieces. No one wants to buy USDA certified Meh grade steak, or a palm sized wedge of uneven thickness. So they get sent off to make hamburger, sausage, and various canned or commercial meat products that don’t need to be pretty.
Processed meat also includes much more benign seeming foods, like sandwich meat, ground meats, and bacon. We’ve known for a while that eating meat, and more so red meat, is a risk for colon problems. Red meats are more likely to be processed and therefore cheap and salty.
The new thing the study adds is that there isn’t a lower bound. For a lot of things there’s a quantity that isn’t associated with any issues, and it’s only when you go above that limit that the risk goes up.
Truth.
Yesterday I opened a huge bung of ground beef that I got from Costco.
Fried up 1/3 of it up and when I tasted it… Damn that’s f’kking bottom round roast beef 😋
One of the other interesting things in the US is that different states can have different laws for meat standards, as long as they meet or exceed USDA minimums. They can’t, however, advertising that fact because it’s a violation of interstate trade.
So in the US, a legal hotdog ranges from a blend of the trimmings above and what can be removed from the bone with a power washer, up to “hot dogs must be made only of the product of primal cuts with no trimmings or waste meat”.I’m going to design and print a shirt that simply says
“Legal hotdog”
Refuse? Why do you think processed meat is animal refuse?
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.
“As little as one hot dog a day”, doesn’t really strike me as a great example of a “small” amount of processed meat. I’d generally say I ate a lot of something if I had it literally on a daily basis.
Totally agree on hotdogs, but if someone ate a slice of standard toast for breakfast every day I wouldn’t say they ate a lot of toast.
Point being, I don’t think the frequency can be considered independent of the thing.They maybe could have phrased it better as “consumption of as little as 2 ounces of processed meat, about one hotdog, a day…”.
A hotdog is a relatable unit of measure for an amount of food, but a hotdog a day isn’t normal. A hotdog one day, a deli sandwich the next, and so one though isn’t preposterous.…constantly fails the engineering exam… …constantly eats roast beef…
I love Red Dwarf so much.
Im so screwed.
Be like a Harley rider - embrace your dangerous lifestyle.
So I have to eat raw meat?
Mett gang assemble!
I love living dangerously
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.
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.
that’s not the point i was addressing in my comment though, i agree processed foods a very bad. and poorer people are more likely to eat them. there’s no debate there from me.
i was only addressing your broad generalization of looking at all food doctors recommend for pregnant people to avoid. while it does include lots of bad and unhealthy foods, these recommendations also include foods that are directly related to fetal development, hormone changes, etc
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.
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.
We have collectively forgotten that correlation != causation
sorry but one hotdog a day is not a small nor moderate amount.
There are plenty of toddlers who’d disagree with you
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.
One hotdog a day is little compared to the 30+ hot dogs day they are force feeding those poor albino rats.
Right lol that’s an insane amount of hot dogs
Every few trips to Costco already seems too often, but it is delicious.
Everyone who has ever eaten a hot dog will die
When?
Yup
studies show that 100% of people who drink water will also die.
That’s why I only drink Mtn Dew
I don’t have a problem. I can stop drinking water whenever I want to.
I need to stop oxygen…everyone who has it dies.
See, that’s the addiction talking. Seek help.
It’s easy to quit drinking water. I do it several times a day.
I will continue eating that crap
It’s also important to note that the studies included in the analysis were observational, meaning that the data can only show an association between eating habits and disease –– not prove that what people ate caused the disease
Doing the Lord’s work here. Thank you.
right. that’s just about any food study! it’s the trouble with the nutrition field in general
I think that if you know a person who eats a hot dog every day, you will have many other reasons to suspect that they’re unhealthy.
The hot dog was an example, lunch meat is also processed and plenty of people eat a sandwich every day.
Isn’t pasta also ultra processed? Bread?.. Butter? CHEESE? Isn’t everything ultra processed? Even beans if they have been dried and canned?
Bread and pasta can be for sure. There are variations in how flour is made for example. Butter and cheese are unhealthy types of fats, they are unhealthy for other reasons. Moderation is important, and a varied diet.
as little as one hot dog a day
That still seems like a lot to me.
While I’m sure they meant a hotdog sized amount per day… yeah, thats terrible wording. When I eat hot dogs I might eat 2 or 3 at a cook out or something… then not eat hotdogs for like 3 months. They could have evoked the “amount” better. And even then… who eats that much ultra processed meat?
Think that’s about the average.
Deli meats, pizza toppings, bacon, etc.
how is bacon ultra processed meat? bacon is just part of a pig in the same way that loin or rump are. Unless US bacon is just reconstituted corn syrup like most of their stuff seems to be.
All bacon worldwide is processed meat because it’s treated to preserve shelf life.
Butcher bacon is different
I sure hope not. Sodium nitrite is one of the ‘problematic’ compounds and is used when curing meat, especially to prevent the bacteria that produces botulinum toxin from growing. While nitrites may kill you slowly, botulism can kill you much faster.
The problem with food that contains the botulism bacteria is that you don’t notice it. It doesn’t look or smell any different. Any meat that wasn’t cured using a specific minimum percentage of sodium nitrite is not to be trusted.
They use fewer chemicals but it’s still processed and still carcinogenic.
Tell us how it’s processed. You seem to know a lot about it.
The real difference in butcher bacon is that they get the better cut of meat. The cheaper cut goes into the sliced packages for grocery stores.
It’s cured and smoked.
the curing process introduces carcinogenic nitrates, which is a similar risk factor, if I understand correctly
A hot dog a day keeps the doctors employed.
I suggest you don’t visit West Virginia…
Each year, West Virginians consume 481 hot dogs per capita, according to 24/7 Wall St. That means the average West Virginian eats more than one hot dog a day. Illinois locals love their Chicago dog, and they didn’t even come close to West Virginia’s annual hot dog consumption, hitting 317 per capita.
https://www.tastingtable.com/1887834/west-virginia-most-hot-dogs/
Coincidentally West Virginia has an obesity rate of 41%.
I feel like the west virginia statistic may be heavily biased by what a poor family might feed a child. I remember my parents using hot dogs for ‘cheap’ meat that could be doctored into meals that my picky toddler ass would eat.
West Virginia is what,the third poorest state in GDP per capita? The average there is poor, so yeah.
For as little as one hot dog a day, you could save this person from diabetes
The hot dog was supposed to be an example. A more common one is lunch meat, which some people do eat every day.
Fair point. My kid eats a lot of turkey sandwiches.
Anyone know the conversion rate of turkey slices to hotdogs?
Well if you roll up a Turkey slice its about the same size? Hard to say though, it varies by brand and region. Most of this stuff doesnt apply outside the US as much either as food standards tend to be very low in the states.
hello my name is Guy Who Eats 365 Hot Dogs Per Year, I’m here for chest pain
