Thursday, March 01, 2018

Processed meat for processed people

Health scares are now ten-a-penny and, usually, ignored by the public but can we risk letting the meat-industry off the hook with the latest revelation. In 2016, the World Health Organization that “processed meats” were now classified as a group 1 carcinogen, meaning scientists were certain that there was “sufficient” evidence that they caused cancer, particularly colon cancer. The warning applies to bacon and ham, to salami,  chorizo,  bratwurst and many other foods. The pinkness of bacon – or cooked ham, or salami – is a sign that it has been treated with chemicals, more specifically with nitrates and nitrites. It is the use of these chemicals that are widely believed to be the reason why “processed meat” is much more carcinogenic than unprocessed meat. Technically, processed meat means pork or beef that has been salted and cured, with or without smoking. A fresh pound of beef mince isn’t processed. Cured salami is. French journalist Guillaume Coudray argues that we should speak not of “processed meat” but “nitro-meat”. 

The WHO announcement came on advice from 22 cancer experts from 10 countries, who reviewed more than 400 studies on processed meat covering epidemiological data from hundreds of thousands of people. It was now possible to say that “eat less processed meat”, much like “eat more vegetables”, had become one of the very few absolutely incontrovertible pieces of evidence-based diet advice. processed meat was now in a group of 120 proven carcinogens, alongside alcohol, asbestos and tobacco. Smoked sausage is as deadly as smoking.  WHO advised that consuming 50g of processed meat a day – equivalent to just a couple of rashers of bacon or one hotdog – would raise the risk of getting bowel cancer by 18% over a lifetime. The consumption of processed meat causes an additional 34,000 worldwide cancer deaths a year is much more chilling. According to Cancer Research UK, if no one ate processed or red meat in Britain, there would be 8,800 fewer cases of cancer. (That’s four times the number of annual road deaths.) 21% of bowel cancers can be attributed to eating processed or red meat. (86% of lung cancers are linked to smoking.)

 The North American Meat Institute, an industry lobby group, called the report “dramatic and alarmist overreach”.  Sales of bacon in the UK have risen 5% in the two years up to mid-2016. Yet the evidence linking bacon to cancer is stronger than ever. n January, a new large-scale study using data from 262,195 British women suggested that consuming just 9g of bacon a day – less than a rasher – could significantly raise the risk of developing breast cancer later in life. The study’s lead author, Jill Pell from the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at Glasgow University, explained while it can be counterproductive to push for total abstinence, the scientific evidence suggests “it would be misleading” for health authorities to set any safe dose for processed meat “other than zero”.

 Experts at the National Cancer Institute said that meats containing nitrites and nitrates have “consistently been associated with increased risk of colon cancer” in human studies. But they added that “it is difficult to separate nitrosamines from other possible carcinogens that may be present in processed meats like bacon”. These other suspects include haem iron – a substance that is abundant in all red meat, processed or not – and heterocyclic amines: chemicals that form in meat during cooking. A piece of crispy, overcooked bacon will contain multiple carcinogens, and not all are due to the nitrates.

The health risk of bacon is largely to do with two food additives: potassium nitrate (also known as saltpetre) and sodium nitrite. It is these that give salamis, bacons and cooked hams their alluring pink colour.  It is this nitrite that allows the bacteria responsible for cured flavour to emerge quicker, by inhibiting the growth of other bacteria. Nitrate is naturally present in many green vegetables, including celery and spinach. But something different happens when nitrates are used in meat processing. When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat (haem iron, amines and amides), they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer. The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. This is known to be “carcinogenic even at a very low dose”. Any time someone eats bacon, ham or other processed meat, their gut receives a dose of nitrosamines, which damage the cells in the lining of the bowel, and can lead to cancer. 

Scientists have known nitrosamines are carcinogenic for a very long time. More than 60 years ago, in 1956, British researchers  found that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver tumours. By the 1970s, animal studies showed that small, repeated doses of nitrosamines and nitrosamides – exactly the kind of regular dose a person might have when eating a daily breakfast of bacon – were found to cause tumours in many organs including the liver, stomach, oesophagus, intestines, bladder, brain, lungs and kidneys. In 1976, cancer scientist William Lijinsky argued that “we must assume” that these N-nitroso compounds found in meats such as bacon were also “carcinogens for man”. In the years since researchers have gathered a massive body of evidence to lend weight to that assumption. In 1994, American epidemiologists found that eating hotdogs one or more times a week was associated with higher rates of childhood brain cancer, particularly for children who also had few vitamins in their diets.

 It is possible to make bacon and ham in ways that would be less carcinogenic. The most basic way to cure any meat is to salt it – either with a dry salt rub or a wet brine – and to wait for time to do the rest. The reason they reject it is cost: it takes much longer for processed meats to develop their flavour this way, which cuts into profits.  In trade journals of the 1960s, the firms who sold nitrite powders to ham-makers spoke quite openly about how the main advantage was to increase profit margins by speeding up production. n 1993, Parma ham producers in Italy made a collective decision to remove nitrates from their products and revert to using only salt, as in the old days. For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto di Parma. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-pink colour. We now know that the colour in Parma ham is totally harmless, a result of the enzyme reactions during the ham’s 18-month ageing process.

 But what about mass-market meats? Eighteen months would be a long time to wait.  There have always been recipes for nitrate-free bacon using nothing but salt and herbs. Nitrate is not a necessary ingredient in bacon. It’s generally accepted that solid muscle products, as opposed to chopped meat products like salami, don’t require the addition of nitrate for safety reasons.

Corinna Hawkes, a professor of Food Policy at City University in London, has been predicting for years that processed meats will be “the next sugar” – a food so harmful that there will be demands for government agencies to step in and protect us. Someday soon, Hawkes believes, consumers will finally wake up to the clear links between cancer and processed meat and say “Why didn’t someone tell me about this?” Why was it that it took so long for official public health advice to turn against processed meat?

 It could have happened 40 years earlier. 

During the 1970s, wesaw the so-called “war on nitrates” in the US in which one prominent public health scientist called “the most dangerous food in the supermarket”.  Leo Freedman, the chief toxicologist of the US Food and Drug Administration, confirmed to the New York Times that “nitrosamines are a carcinogen for humans”. The US meat industry realised it had to act fast to protect bacon against the cancer charge. The first attempts to fight back were simply to ridicule the scientists for over-reacting. In a 1975 article titled “Factual look at bacon scare”, Farmers Weekly insisted that a medium-weight man would have to consume more than 11 tonnes of bacon every single day to run the faintest risk of cancer. This was an outrageous fabrication.

Then the meat lobby, the AMI – the American Meat Institute started to make the argument that the nitrate was only there for the consumer’s own safety, to ward off botulism – a potentially fatal toxin sometimes produced by poorly preserved foods. The scientific director of the AMI argued that a single cup of botulism would be enough to wipe out every human on the planet. So, far from harming lives, bacon was actually saving them. In 1977, the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture gave the meat industry three months to prove that nitrate and nitrite in bacon caused no harm.  The meat industry could not prove that nitrosamines were not carcinogenic – because it was already known that they were. Instead, the argument was made that nitrates and nitrites were utterly essential for the making of bacon, because without them bacon would cause thousands of deaths from botulism. Does making ham without nitrite lead to botulism? If so, it is a little strange that in the 25 years that Parma ham has been made without nitrites, there has not been a single case of botulism associated with it. Almost all the cases of botulism from preserved food – which are extremely rare – have been the result of imperfectly preserved vegetables, such as bottled green beans, peas and mushrooms. The botulism argument was a smokescreen. 

The meat industry’s tactics in defending bacon have been “right out of the tobacco industry’s playbook”, according to Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. We have been so willing to accept the cover-up. The first move is: attack the science. By the 1980s, the AMI was financing a group of scientists based at the University of Wisconsin. These meat researchers published a stream of articles casting doubt on the harmfulness of nitrates and exaggerating the risk from botulism of non-nitrated hams. The more that consumers could be made to feel that the harmfulness of nitrate and nitrite in bacon and ham was still a matter of debate, the more they could be encouraged to calm down and keep buying bacon.

The AMI managed to get the FDA to keep delaying its three-month ultimatum on nitrites until a new more sympathetic FDA commissioner was appointed in 1980.  The nitrite ban was shelved. The only concession the industry had made was to limit the percentage of nitrites added to processed meat and to agree to add vitamin C, which would supposedly mitigate the formation of nitrosamines, although it does nothing to prevent the formation of another known carcinogen, nitrosyl-haem.

 The messages challenging the dangers of bacon have become ever more outlandish. The Meat Science and Muscle Biology lab at the University of Wisconsin argues that sodium nitrite is in fact “critical for maintaining human health by controlling blood pressure, preventing memory loss, and accelerating wound healing”. A French meat industry website, info-nitrites.fr, argues that the use of the “right dose” of nitrites in ham guarantees “healthy and safe” products, and insists that ham is an excellent food for children. Advocates of the “Paleo” diet, argue that bacon is actually a much-maligned health food. Human saliva is high in nitrite so one widely shared article claims that giving up bacon would be as absurd as attempting to stop swallowing. 

US consumers have been more savvy about nitrates than those in Europe, and there is a lot of “nitrate-free bacon” on the market. The trouble is that most of the bacon labelled as nitrate-free in the US “isn’t nitrate-free”. It’s made with nitrates taken from celery extract, which may be natural, but produces exactly the same N-nitroso compounds in the meat. Under EU regulation, this bacon would not be allowed to be labelled “nitrate-free”.

In 2010, the EU considered banning the use of nitrates in organic meats. Perhaps surprisingly, the British organic bacon industry vigorously opposed the proposed nitrates ban. Richard Jacobs, the late chief executive of Organic Farmers & Growers, an industry body, said that prohibiting nitrate and nitrite would have meant the “collapse” of a growing market for organic bacon. 
Organic bacon produced with nitrates sounds like a contradiction in terms, given that most consumers of organic food buy it out of concerns for food safety. Having gone to the trouble of rearing pigs using free-range methods and giving them only organic feed, why would you then cure the meat in ways that make it carcinogenic? In Denmark, all organic bacon is nitrate-free. But the UK organic industry insisted that British shoppers would be unlikely to accept bacon that was ‘“greyish”.

The average British sausage is not cured, being made of nothing but fresh meat, breadcrumbs, herbs, salt and E223, a preservative that is non-carcinogenic. The US National Cancer Institute confirmed that “one might consider” fresh sausages to be “red meat” and not processed meat, and thus only a “probable” carcinogen.

In theory, our habit of eating salted and cured meats should have died out as soon as home refrigerators became widespread in the mid-20th century. But tastes in food are seldom rational, and millions of us are still hooked on sizzling bacon.  Our brains can’t cope with the thought it isn't good for us. So we turn our ire towards these simply clueless “nutrition experts” warning us of its hazards who don’t know any better.

The technology now exists to make the pink meats we love in a less damaging form, which raises the question of why the old kind is still so freely sold. In 2009, Juan de Dios Hernandez Canovas, a food scientist and the head of the food tech company Prosur, found that if he added certain fruit extracts to fresh pork, it stayed pink for a surprisingly long time. Finnebrogue Artisan, a Northern Irish company that makes sausages for many UK supermarkets used this technology to launch genuinely nitrate-free bacon and ham in the UK. It’s not really cured. It’s more like a fresh salted pork injected with a fruit and vegetable extract, and is more perishable than an old-fashioned flitch of bacon – but that doesn’t matter, given that it is kept in a fridge. Because it is quick to produce, this is much more “economically viable” to make than some of the other nitrate-free options, such as slow-cured Parma ham. Nitrate-free bacon still sounds a bit fancy, but there shouldn’t be anything faddish about the desire to eat food that doesn’t raise your risk of cancer. But why isn't it sold more widely? None of the big producers want to take it. They said: ‘It will make our other processed meats look dodgy’”.

n an ideal world, we would all we eating diets lower in meat, processed or otherwise, for the sake of sustainability and animal welfare as much as health. But in the world we actually live in, processed meats are still a normal, staple protein for millions of people who can’t afford to swap a value pack of frying bacon for a few slivers of Prosciutto di Parma. Around half of all meat eaten in developed countries is now processed.  The people who will be worst affected are those – many on low incomes – for whom the cancer risk from bacon is compounded by other risk factors such as eating low-fibre diets with few vegetables or wholegrains.  In coming years, millions more poor consumers will be affected by preventable colon cancer, as westernised processed meats conquer the developing world.

Taken from here
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/01/bacon-cancer-processed-meats-nitrates-nitrites-sausages

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