Eating processed meats will ... kill you?
I love statistics.
I also love Italian hoagies. And bacon. And prosciutto. And bacon. And turkey subs. (Yes. “hoagies” for the Italian, “sub” for turkey. Leave me alone.) And beef jerky. And bacon. And pork roll. Have I mentioned bacon? And all other manner of processed meats.
Now I know the items listed above aren’t exactly health food, but when I came across the following statistic, I blanched. I told my wife to stop buying this stuff, and certainly to stop feeding it to our children.
And here’s that stat: You have an 18 percent higher risk of getting colon cancer by eating one serving of processed meat a day. Couple of strips of bacon? You’re dead. A single hot dog? It’s over. Pork roll, egg, and cheese? More like drop dead, you’ll never be a geez.
And it’s not like this is one of those “well, only in moderation things” either.
“We see a 4 percent increase in the risk of cancer even at 15 grams a day, which is a single slice of ham on a sandwich,” Dr. Nigel Brockton, director of research for the American Institute for Cancer Research, told the New York Times back in December, which is where I found this troubling statistic.
The research behind this horror came courtesy of the The International Agency for Research on Cancer, in which 22 experts from 10 countries reviewed over 800 studies to arrive at this 18 percent higher risk number. It’s good science. In fact, it ain’t get much gooder than this. I mean, 800 studies? This was not one lone scientist working for Big Arugula - this was over 800 individual studies, and the whole shebang was published back in 2015 in “The Lancet Oncology.”
So that’s that. I told my wife we were done with this garbage, and for the next three minutes, we were. But then I Googled. (Remember I said up there how I love statistics, how I love processed meats? Yeah, well, I left out one other thing I love: I love a sudden swerve in a story. I love when I’m reading something and out of nowhere, I get blindsided, taking the story in another direction. You ever read “Gone Girl?” It’s kinda like that. And here’s your swerve …)
The average person has a 5 percent chance of developing colon cancer in their lifetime, this according to Cancer.org.
Eat a serving of processed meats every day? Yep. Your risk goes up 18 percent. All the way up to … 5.9 percent. {Please cue the animatronic Mark Twain to recite the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” thing.}
That’s bananas, huh? (Bananas, btw, cut stroke risk by 12 percent in postmenopausal women, according to the American Heart Association’s journal “Stroke,” which is easily the most porny-sounding medical journal ever. Anyway …)
Anyway, I’ve always known, intellectually, that numbers could be bent and twisted to make things appear to be more dangerous (or beneficial) than they actually are. And so yes, of course, when you see things like “processed meats put you at an 18 percent higher risk for colon cancer,” you take that bacon and toss it in the trash.
But when you dig a bit deeper and realize the risk goes from
5 to 5.9 percent over the course of a lifetime, well, it seems high time we add bacon to every single meal. That’s risk I can live with. (OK fine, maybe every other meal. No reason to be a glutton.).
Big takeaway? Beware of numbers. Don’t take them at face value. Go deeper. Eat pork roll.