I’m not a nutritional epidemiologist.
But I’ve started to get into learning about it in the last few months.
It’s really starting to feel like this is a giant bullshit field, and as much as they are trying to find useful results, there’s something severely wrong with how they seem to arbitrarily assign causality and correlation.
In a contrived example: “People who live near power lines have more cancer” - “No, poor people live near power lines because they’re poor, and poor people have more cancer”
What are the kind of people that eat processed hot dogs? I can promise you they are not millionaires. I can promise you it’s not people who can afford filet mignon but decide to have a steamed hot dog. It’s not people who work out and take care of their bodies. It’s not people who cook.
So when a study is done like this, what answer are you actually getting? probably finding out that the type of people who eat processed meat are more prone to these conditions for a variety of considerations that are just totally left out of the analysis.
Basically: wanna live healthy and forever? Just become a billionaire! If you don’t want to live healthy then I guess that’s your choice to make.
Well, you’re right and I’m surprised I’ve never thought of this before.
The EMF from power lines was a real mind virus that went around when I was a teenager!
I’ve been alive too long and have seen this pattern play out again, and again, and again. Feeling a little sad right now, actually.
For another example: all my life the common sense accepted wisdom, supported by real dermatologists was that to keep the likelihood of skin cancer to a minimum there is zero known healthy level of sun exposure. Well that’s all out the f’king window in 2025 because we now know the deleterious effects of insufficient sun exposure are vastly more severe compared to an increased morbidity for types of skin cancer.
I don’t want to be mr critical, but… there’s something wrong in our whole approach to these “studies” and I don’t know what fixes it. Any experts wanna help describe what I’m getting at with the right technical language?
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We have collectively forgotten that correlation != causation
I actually don’t think it’s possible to forget. In the sense that pattern recognition and chain-of-event are thought structures baked into our very beings. We don’t intuit that most things are random in a greater sense, and probabilistic on a finer resolution. We’re always looking for self-satisfying, singular paths of causality and they don’t exist.
Touch red hot metal burn skin; Stab self in face make self not alive. A necessary abbreviated thought structure essential to human survival.
Extend that perspective to eat ween get beetus. Wait.
What is the field of nutritional epidemiology hoping to accomplish by obsessively searching for links (their magic word) between disease and dietary intake? It assumes, by the very nature of the question, that there is a direct causal relationship between diet & illness. There can’t be. Any sufficiently complicated system of interrelationships is going to have massive amounts of turbulence and chaos!
Yes, poor people eat poor quality food more often but the food is bad either way.
Here’s a good tip, look at allllll of the specific foods that a doctor would tell a pregnant person to avoid. Non-pregnant people should also avoid them, and processed meats have been on that list for a long time.
that’s not true. pregnant people are told to stay away from sushi because of immunity with raw fish. you should also not eat papaya while pregnant because it can cause premature contractions. you’re making a very broad generalization that the recommendation to pregnant people is completely nutrition based, but there’s many factors when growing a life inside you.
like in early pregnancy, you eat foods high in choline. that’s not because foods low in choline are bad for you, but because during early fetal development, choline builds neural tubes
Sure there are exceptions. You haven’t made any point about whether processed meats cause poor health outcomes though. They do, and its been shown over and over again, but people don’t like someone telling them they have bad habits.
that’s not the point i was addressing in my comment though, i agree processed foods a very bad. and poorer people are more likely to eat them. there’s no debate there from me.
i was only addressing your broad generalization of looking at all food doctors recommend for pregnant people to avoid. while it does include lots of bad and unhealthy foods, these recommendations also include foods that are directly related to fetal development, hormone changes, etc
Yeah I was being overly broad but its a good starting point still when looking to cut out unhealthy foods. People seem to understand why pregnant people shouldnt smoke or drink, I just think they should consider the foods they shouldnt eat either and why.
Try to follow the thrust of the conversation.
publishing this article three days before independance day is terrorism
edit: two days. Somehow I thought the fourth of july was on the fifth.
i usually use a little mnemonic device to remember exact dates for holidays. for fourth of July i try to match the last word with the month of the year and the first word with the day of the month.
sorry but one hotdog a day is not a small nor moderate amount.
What I liked was their phrasing: “people who ate as little as one hot dog a day”
I’m assuming it’s just the average though, I generally ingest my 7 hotdogs for Monday morning breakfast, and then eat healthy the rest of the week.
One hotdog a day is little compared to the 30+ hot dogs day they are force feeding those poor albino rats.
Right lol that’s an insane amount of hot dogs
Every few trips to Costco already seems too often, but it is delicious.
There are plenty of toddlers who’d disagree with you
Jokes on them. I do tons of unsafe shit, and probably only one of those things is going to kill me. There will be no accountability for 99.9% of the bad behavior, including unregulated hotdog intake. Suckers.
For me, it’s about the quality of life before I die, not which shitty thing I’m willingly doing to my body that ends up “winning”.
Didn’t think it needed the /s, but maybe it always needs the /s
Considering humans have been eating processed meats like these for centuries, I think I’ll take my chances.
And our rates of intestinal cancer have been rising steadily to the point where now it’s a common killer, so we’ve become afraid of it in our quest to live long, pain-free lives.
Things change as we learn. Why we don’t use lead in our pipes anymore. Safe, biocompatible plastic only.
If the rates have been rising, wouldn’t that prove it’s not processed meats like these? It would be something that’s being introduced at a steady rate lately, not something that’s been around for centuries.
Nitrites have being slowly “introduced” at a steady rate lately
If the problem is nitrites, then the problem is not processed meats, it’s nitrites. Therefore, the headline is wrong. Kinda like the problem with making hats was not making hats, but mercury exposure.
But
Nitrites are an important component in seasoned and processed meat as a stabiliser and relatively important ingredient.
And I know you love carchuterie or salami or whatever other kind of seasoned or processed meat there is because there’s always a lot of it in every supermaket, as much as vegetable and relatively more than lean chicken breast and meat.
When we take these as an example we mean that this kind of meat is on average worse than others. Not that red meat on its own is also that much better.
Our ancestors used to have one or two portions of meat weekly because they farmed it themselves, that’all they had, and we have portion of meat daily in what we call western diet. We can’t keep up with the mediterranean diet and the okinawa diet without understanding the basics of these.
Also, the environmental impact of this product is high.
It is likely many factors at once but it’s also important not to assume causation where there is a correlation. Keep in mind also our mechanism of detection is better now than it’s ever been.
Yeah, but I think I’ll take 60 years of eating really tasty meats and foods at the risk of slightly increasing my chance of getting cancer and dying at like 65 instead of 85.
But it’s also about quality of life; do you want the last decade to be in increasing pain with challenged mobility or not as bad?
Nitrites only date back to the middle of the 19th century.
We’ve been smoking, salting, and otherwise preserving meat for way longer than that, though. People usually died off from other things before cancer got them, that’s all. The relatively high number of cancer deaths is a product of medical intervention getting so good and so widespread that we don’t regularly die of sepsis from stepping on a splinter or catching communicable disease anymore.
Absolutely, fuck cancer. But cancer went from being a minor concern to a relatively common one because we conquered so many other avenues of death, systematically and carefully, until we’re down to time, neglect and negligence as the three main ways humanity gets itself to the Reaper.
Isolated as a pure salt, maybe. All those “uncured” varieties listing celery as an ingredient are making use of the same compound though.
Yeah, I try not to make it my entire diet, but… no pepperoni? Why live?
7% increase of an already small chance in exchange for 1 hotdog/day doesn’t sound that bad to me.
It never seems that bad unless you’re in that small percent. Cancer’s a damned awful way to die.
Sure but there are a ton of things, genetic, environmental, dietary, neurochemical, etc. that can contribute to the development of cancer. You can do literally everything right and end up in the exact same place as someone who did all the wrong things because the causes are innumerable and many are literally unavoidable.
Would I regret my choices if I got cancer after I did all the things the studies say would increase my odds? Of course I would. Would I regret my choices if did everything “right” and still got cancer? Of course I would. But that’s because being in that position inherently biased you against your past. If I did all the wrong things I would regret that I indulged too much, and if I did all the right things I would regret that I never really indulged at all and enjoyed life fully. Either way you got shafted. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
But to me it’s better to just live intentionally but without having this constant concern about every single thing I eat, drink, or breath maybe, possibly, eventually contributing to developing cancer. Like I’m not about to start smoking, I rarely drink, I try to eat enough veggies, etc. because those things have much more tangible direct consequences that I’m mindful of, and I’m not about to eat a hotdog every day mostly because I’m a really good cook and that sounds sad as fuck. But the next time I do eat a hotdog, a salami, or a Reuben sandwich, I promise you that no part of my mind is going to be worrying that it will give me cancer. Constant dread is its own form of cancer and life’s too short and uncertain to live with that shit 24/7.
Well said.
I know these things logically. I wish I could embed them more emphatically so that articles like this don’t kick up my anxiety the way they do. Thanks for putting this comment to remind me to come down from the ledge of needless dread and worry.
Words to live by. Well put.
Worrying too much causes cancer
Dang, you mean to tell me that animal refuse blended into mush and saturated with salt is bad for us?!
Eh, “refuse” makes sausage sound worse than it is. In the modern world anyplace with a food inspection system will typically see sausage made from cuts of meat that are perfectly edible but don’t meet the grading standards likely to sell on the shelf , or the excess pieces of muscle left over after breaking primal cuts down into smaller pieces. No one wants to buy USDA certified Meh grade steak, or a palm sized wedge of uneven thickness. So they get sent off to make hamburger, sausage, and various canned or commercial meat products that don’t need to be pretty.
Processed meat also includes much more benign seeming foods, like sandwich meat, ground meats, and bacon. We’ve known for a while that eating meat, and more so red meat, is a risk for colon problems. Red meats are more likely to be processed and therefore cheap and salty.
The new thing the study adds is that there isn’t a lower bound. For a lot of things there’s a quantity that isn’t associated with any issues, and it’s only when you go above that limit that the risk goes up.
Truth.
Yesterday I opened a huge bung of ground beef that I got from Costco.
Fried up 1/3 of it up and when I tasted it… Damn that’s f’kking bottom round roast beef 😋
One of the other interesting things in the US is that different states can have different laws for meat standards, as long as they meet or exceed USDA minimums. They can’t, however, advertising that fact because it’s a violation of interstate trade.
So in the US, a legal hotdog ranges from a blend of the trimmings above and what can be removed from the bone with a power washer, up to “hot dogs must be made only of the product of primal cuts with no trimmings or waste meat”.I’m going to design and print a shirt that simply says
“Legal hotdog”
Refuse? Why do you think processed meat is animal refuse?
Ya well in the 70s and 80s this was what we as kids were given to eat.
I’m paying for that now
I felt shitty, I made changes to my diet and exercise, I feel much better now.
It doesn’t take research to convince me that processed foods, especially industrial, large scale, profit-above-all-else, processed food is bad for me.
These results shouldn’t surprise anyone, and I don’t think they do. But, people will find excuses to keep doing unhealthy things they enjoy, and that is their prerogative.
Some of this food isn’t great for you, but if you only have it now and then it shouldn’t be a problem.
Moderation and a diverse diet is key.
Are the Germans dying in droves due to this?
Can I have a little sausage, as a treat?
So I have to eat raw meat?
Mett gang assemble!
I could sure go for some Ivermectin squeezed on top of a hotdog and washed down with some motor oil about now.
Im so screwed.
Be like a Harley rider - embrace your dangerous lifestyle.
…and what do they say about just plain meat, I wonder? 🤔
