Bacon story – must we take it seriously?

LAST week we were shocked by the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) declaration that processed meats such as bacon and sausages increase your risk for stomach cancers.

Newspapers went crazy with headlines such as “Processed Meats Rank Alongside Smoking as Cancer Causes — WHO”. According to the WHO, bacon runs alongside cigarettes, alcohol, asbestos, plutonium and salted fish in terms of risk of cancer. But is this correct or were they out to create headlines? You can make up your own mind.

They used archaic methods in evaluating the risks and went on to explain their take on this in a very poor manner. The WHO said that eating two strips of bacon a day is rated as bad as smoking. This is utter nonsense. Smoking raises a person’s lifetime risk of developing lung cancer by a staggering 2 500 %, while two daily strips of bacon, based on the associations identified by the WHO, would translate to about a 6% lifetime risk for colon cancer. To put this further in perspective, people who don’t eat bacon or processed meats have a 5% risk of getting colon cancer. The risk is minute then.

We do know that eating a lot of processed meat or red meat is associated with higher cancer risk; the WHO report cited 800 studies documenting the association. But that’s a long way from cause and effect. It may simply be the so-called healthy user bias, the idea that people who eat lots of bacon are more likely to engage in risky behaviours (like smoking or a sedentary lifestyle) that lead to cancer; and that non meat eaters exhibit other healthy virtues (like exercise or eating vegetables) that protect them.

Personally, I don’t eat a lot of processed meats, simply because I know that they contain a lot of preservatives, but I would not say no to a strip of bacon every now and again.