Why stop with nitrates and nitrites? Acrylamide is a known human carcinogen, and occurs in a huge variety of cooking processes (including baking, frying, and grilling). If you eat potatoes, you're almost certainly putting yourself at more risk than aspartame is: we've got epidemiology and mechanism of action to back up the potato risk.
> Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse.
> The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.
> In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it.
> People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.
I think the poster meant "fried/roasted potatoes" (boiled are not included). Most Maillard reaction cooking involves a risk of creating potential carcinogens like acrylamide.
Which is what I figured and is a wholly disingenuous argument. Would love to see any research showing unseasoned boiled or baked potatoes being bad for you.
Acrylamide has nothing at all to do with seasoning, and baking potatoes forms acrylamide (as will anything that browns a potato --- or that browns bread!).
Serious question: do you have kids and if so, what do you feed them if you avoid acrylamide? I’m constantly looking for alternatives for my kids and it feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole such that they do, sometimes anyways, eat the processed things because I can’t eradicate the junk from everything.
My understanding is that bacon itself is not the culprit of the possible (note — possible) carcinogen. The sodium nitrate that is often used as a preservative is. Nitrate-free bacon is easy to find though.
To what everybody else is saying, I'll add that by the US definition, that's not bacon; it's back bacon, which is a loin cut, radically different than American bacon, which I believe you lot call "streaky bacon".
Being a global community, would we assume bacon means all types of bacon cut? I have been but maybe I've been wrong. Surely we're not just referring to streaky bacon or American bacon
Yes, we would assume here that bacon means pork belly bacon. The reason nitrates are such a big deal with American bacon is that they're an important part of the flavor of the bacon (nitrates create "hammy" flavor). If there's genuinely un-cured pork loin "bacon" in Germany or New Zealand or whatever, that's great, but it's a less interesting claim than that there's real nitrate/nitrite-free American bacon (I don't believe there is).
I wouldn't be surprised if that's misleading considering the other article was suggesting nitrite precursors are usually what's in the food later to be turned into nitrite, but I'd love to be wrong.
You could simply measure the levels of nitrite before any exists and the end product might still have just as much.
Contains the weasel words I pasted in below, which are verbatim what the US producers that use celery salt claim. Also, they don’t list the natural flavors. I’d bet they’re using celery salt, but that UK labeling laws don’t make them break it out as a separate ingredient:
> Primal Cut free-from naked bacon contains only fresh organic fruit sugars and nitrates present in the natural raw organic seasonings.
It's exactly the same, except one uses celery. No, in fact, if I remember correctly, the nitrates used in the "uncured" process were even higher than the normal process.
A big problem with the these "nitrate free" forms is that Vitamin C was required in the "nitrate" versions, to prevents the formation of some of the carcinogens [1]. In the "nitrate free" versions, it is not! I make sure to drink orange juice, or take a vitamin C, with any form of bacon.
Green leafy vegetables contain a hell of a lot more nitrate than cured meat does.
Sure, there's less protein in vegetables, so less chance of nitrosamines forming, unless you're eating a complete meal, in which case... figure it out.
Also, vegetables contain anti-oxidants and things which offset some of the nitrates, but this just seems like a reason to eat some vegetables with your cured meats.
Nitrate-free bacon isn't bacon. The stuff that is marketed as nitrate-free isn't -- it's a dubiously moral marketing gimmick that is essentially untrue.
With bacon you know what you get, so you can dose it and take your risks. Aspartame has been sold to us as the healthy alternative to sugar. People literally use aspartame as an excuse to chug liters of soda every day.
Isn't it a healthy alternative to sugar? If you have a one in five chance to live ten years longer because you don't develop cardiovascular issues from obesity, but one in a million develops cancer, I mean...
It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.
The WHO recently conditionally recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control. Their stance is that we should be reducing sweetened food/beverage intake in general, rather than trying to find healthier ways to sweeten what we eat.
Aspartame causes weight gain, so abstinence-only isn’t a great analogy.
If you are trying to lose weight, then just use less sugar. That’s actually pretty easy, since artificial sweeteners and sugary drinks desensitize you to sweet stuff.
If you taper off for a week or so, you’ll find that the stuff you were previously drinking is cloyingly sweet.
For instance, reading a starbucks menu makes me shudder. I can’t even drink their non-dairy lattes anymore because they are too sweet.
While that is their stance, it is conditioned on what they seem to consider to be good evidence that using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control does not work (at the level of public health, that is; for individuals, YMMV.)
Liquid chocolate, the kind we drink as a hot beverage in Central and South America, was difficult for me to get used to without any sweet taste.
Nowadays I prefer it that way.
Coffee is a bit more difficult for me.
Two teaspoons is already one sixth of the WHO recommended daily sugar intake, and that was just the coffee. And WHO claims there are additional health benefits expected if you can do half of what they recommend.
It’s actually sodium nitrite that’s carcinogenic (after being exposed to high heat), and I can find bacon without sodium nitrite here pretty much at every grocery store.
If it is completely uncured sure, but usually niteite/nitrate free bacon has an asterisk saying something like "beyond what is naturally found in the added celery juice". If you heat those nitrites in the bacon it doesn't the same thing as the synthetic stuff would. Luckily trichinosis is largely a thing of the past, so why heat it? Uncooked bacon tastes awesome. Also, in stews I believe it does reach the dangerous temps?
Adding to what remote_phone said, and repeating another comment of mine, that nitrite free bacon still has the same amount of nitrites (in some cases, more).
There’s one place near me that sells actual nitrate/nitrite free bacon but its super expensive - $10-12 Canadian for 250grams or so. It like double bacon in the store and its an hour drive away.
Sad to learn about the celery nitrite thing. I’ve been overpaying for it for a while now, apparently. It literally says “contains no preservatives” but has “cultured celery extract” in the ingredients, so its a lie.
If you read carefully, it still contains sodium nitrite except as powdered celery. So the source of the sodium nitrate is “natural” but the dose is still the same.
Fml so I’ve been paying more for nitrite free bacon that still has nitrite in it?
It feels like saying something contains no nitrites or preservatives and then including them in the form of cultured celery extract should be fraud/false advertising and a crime.
You extremely have been conned by the "nitrite-free bacon" labeling, yes. This is something that food writers have been complaining about for over a decade.
This is why Vitamin C was a required additive, with "nitrate" cured meats. Unfortunately, it is not with the "nitrate from celery" forms, which should lead to more cancer.
But without sodium nitrite you instead run the risk of increased bacterial growth, and in the worse case: botulinum toxin which is like instant death compared to dying of cancer at 70+.
I had to remove the ionizer from my blueair, ionizers plus terpenes (what essential oils are made of, and in virtually all cleaning products) creates formaldehyde, which I'm allergic to, and is linked to cancer and kids developing asthma.