How Good Is Your Bacon? Is It To Die For?

courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Ryanx7

by Glen Hendrix

I love bacon. That is why, if you love it too, I know for a fact you are not going to like what I have to tell you. But it has to be said for there to be changes.

According to the World Health Organization you are 18% more likely to die from colon cancer if you eat processed meat. That includes bacon, most lunch meats, hams, canned meats like corned beef and Spam, hard cured sausage, hot dogs, and beef jerky. If you want to know for sure, read the label. It will say “Contains sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite”; sometimes just the nitrates.

Processing meat involves one or more of salting, curing, fermentation, and smoking. Most of industry processed meat involves the chemicals sodium nitrate and/or sodium nitrite. While sodium nitrate exists in many foods and sea salt, sodium nitrite is a manufactured chemical. Because the nitrates morph into nitrites, they both form cancer-causing nitrosamines during the curing of meat. This is a chemical reaction with the naturally occurring amines in red meat.

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Sodium nitrite is a dangerous chemical. Less than 1/2 teaspoon is a lethal dose for the average sized human. Signs of sodium nitrite poisoning are cyanosis (blue skin), tachycardia, unconsciousness, and seizures. There have been occasions when there was too much sodium nitrite in cured meat and it caused these symptoms. Because the symptoms are so similar to those of a heart attack or stroke, no one knows how many poison fatalities have been mistaken for natural causes but there are recorded cases. Since it is already a nitrite, it begins changing into cancer-causing nitrosamines right away.

Why does the meat industry use nitrates and nitrites? Injecting the meat with a curing solution using multiple needles simultaneously, the cure time can be cut down to only about 2 hours. The quicker one can process a product, the faster one makes money. Using just salt, the curing time can take months unless smoking is used, which shortens the time period. Smoking introduces other cancer-causing chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.  Also, curing with nitrates and nitrites keep the meat that nice pink color on the shelf for however long it takes you to buy it. The meat industry does not dwell on this aspect.

According to the meat industry, they have to use nitrates and nitrites to prevent botulism. There are an average of about 145 cases of botulism per year, and most of them don’t involve meat. Only 15% (22) involve food, and less than half of those involve meat. Lets be generous and say 10 botulism cases per year involving meat. Due to modern medicine, only 8% are fatalities. That’s one fatality a year for botulism tainted meat. You might suggest that the meat industry is doing a good job of protecting us since the occurrence is so low. The fact is, occurrence of botulism fatalities has always been pretty rare. The most fatalities per year were 20 in 1974 and 1935, and those were extreme outliers. Currently, it’s about one chance in 326 million per year in the U.S. of dying from botulism.

There are 50,000 deaths from colon cancer in the U.S. every year. Eighteen percent of those deaths is 9000 people, 9000 times the number of deaths from food-borne botulism. This does not include the deaths from accidental ingestion of mis-applied amounts of sodium nitrite. So, the chances of dying from colon cancer are about one in 6,500 per year, but the meat industry is not spending millions of dollars per year to prevent it like they do botulism. Huh!

If the meat industry is out to safeguard the American public, their argument for the use of nitrates and nitrites in the curing of meat is illogical, even farcical. 

So how can you have your bacon and safely eat it too? It’s hard to do off the shelf. The big chains have started claiming to sell “uncured” meat. If you read the ingredients, it has nitrates in it from celery and sea salt; sometimes more than what was originally put in there in a pure chemical form. It still changes to cancer-causing nitrosamines. The problem is celery salts can be concentrated to contain almost any amount of nitrates the user wants.

Even at Whole Foods you have to read the labels. What you can find there is bacon cured with sea salt. The 365 Brand at Whole lists: pork, sea salt, raw sugar, and spices. The only nitrates are what naturally occur in sea salt. It claims “No nitrites or nitrates*.” The asterisk refers to “*except naturally occurring nitrates in sea salt.” If nitrates were somehow distilled from sea salt and added back in to mix with the meat, they would be lying about the ingredient “sea salt”. Sea salt has a naturally occurring amount of nitrates at about 1 part per million. Not much. Whole Foods is pretty good at vetting their products and being honest with their customers. Their recent sale to Amazon may eventually erode that trust but Amazon would be foolish to tarnish such a sterling corporate character.

The only other alternative is to make your own bacon. Until a number of people decide to make their own, the meat industry will keep doing what it is doing; putting cancer-causing chemicals in our meat. Pork belly is cheap. Turning it into bacon is safe, and some of these recipes and procedures are very easy, on the order of “coat with salt and leave in fridge 4 days, turning it once in a while”. Three links are here, here, and here (easiest). You can find many more on the Web. Happy, worry-free bacon eating to you.