When Evidence Starts
One common meme lately has been the list of Foods Never to Eat (typical example here). In many of these lists, most of the foods in question do not have actual evidence showing shorter life expectancies or increased illness. They only have far-fetched associations (food X is associated with pesticide Y which is correlated with a syndrome in lab rats that in turn is correlated with cancer). To make matters worse, the lists ignore the fact that toxins have thresholds, below which they're harmless.
The exception is preserved meat. There appears to be actual evidence showing it's unhealthy. The good news is that there is a threshold (just like real toxins) below which it's harmless. Just keep your consumption of pastrami, sausages, etc. below 20 grams per day. (That's five ounces per week for those of us who prefer hexadecimal units.)
2 Comments:
The "actual evidence" link is broken (too bad; I'd like to read it!).
I was about to say "screw the evidence; I make sausage and I like it", but then I realized "even with making 50lbs of sausage per year, after I split that w the woman, give a lot away to friends, etc. I'm prob under the threshold".
It's fixed both ways. (Not only was the link broken originally, it was a link to a secondary source.) The graph on p. 7 of the pdf is particularly interesting: It shows a mortality minimum at 20 g/day. Will nitrites turn out to be Vitamin N?
OTOH, maybe the people refusing any processed meat also refused vaccination. They looked at nearly every confounding factor but that.
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