Bacon is a vegetable
Beer is a vitamin.
Booze and bacon sarnies: A recipe for immortality?
Earlier this week, a chilling and extremely newsworthy report established a link between fried meat and Alzheimer's disease. "Bacon is particularly problematic," doomwatched the Daily Mail, a noted proponent of the "if it's tasty it'll kill you" school of scientific killjoyery. Neil Cardy's massive bacon sarnie from a cafe on …
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Friday 28th February 2014 07:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Danger of scientific papers
I heard that if you consume more than one scientific paper on health a week, you can reduce your life expectancy by 5 years due to resulting stress and worry.
So, less science, more dubious meat products and alcohol. If you get the balance right the end result will be the same, just one way is more fun.
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Friday 28th February 2014 12:00 GMT Scroticus Canis
Re: Danger of scientific papers
"if you consume more than one scientific paper on health a week, you can reduce your life expectancy by 5 years due to resulting stress and worry"
Not only that but it really bungs up your bowels thus leading to a heightened risk of stroke straining to get it out the nether end.
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Friday 28th February 2014 07:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
20g of "processed meat"
What exactly is processed meat? Do they mean cooked? I can't imagine eating raw meat is going to do any favors for one's lifespan, unless you're super careful about preparing it to avoid catching nasty diseases. Damn those cavemen for discovering how to make fire!
Or do they take "processed" to mean something that is bought precooked, so somehow buying it raw and cooking it myself isn't bad for me? If so, there should be some list of preservatives that are bad for you, and could be avoided, similar to how we learned the evils of trans fats and as a result they've been mostly removed from processed foods.
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Friday 28th February 2014 10:07 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: 20g of "processed meat"
Fresh meat - straight from the carcass is usually fine. And, if you can overcome your inhibitions damn tasty (the palate is hard-wired to respond positively to raw protein). There are exceptions, of course, but in general you can eat anything freshly killed.
Our propensity for cooking stuff has as much to do with using fossil fuels to do some of the work of digestion as any safety considerations. Boiling water is another matter.
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Friday 28th February 2014 11:06 GMT William Hughes
Re: 20g of "processed meat"
Not really a good idea. Pork and chicken may have parasites that are killed by cooking, it's risky to eat them raw. Beef and lamb are safe but beef in particular does need to be hung for a few weeks to decay a bit to be at it's best, as does venison which is my personal choice here as it's a very healthy meat and deer can't be farmed in the same way as cows, pigs or sheep - no putting into lorries and trips to abattoirs for Bambi's mum.
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Saturday 1st March 2014 02:28 GMT Grey Bird
Re: 20g of "processed meat"
I don't know about where you are, but here "processed meat" would be things like bologna, hot dogs, and other things where bits and parts are ground up and mashed into something people will eat. So to me, bacon is _not_ processed meat. Smoking, salting, etc. doesn't constitute processing since it just improves the bacon and doesn't dilute it with lesser cuts of the pig.. Neither does just grinding, like hamburger, since it's usually particular cuts like chuck roast that are ground.
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Saturday 1st March 2014 19:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 20g of "processed meat"
"So to me, bacon is _not_ processed meat."
That's because, quite regretfully, you do not know enough to say otherwise.
Bacon is FAR more processed than simply "smoking, salting, etc.". Store-bought bacon has nitrates, which currently has a likely link to pancreatic cancer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16526695
The more you know, the more you'll find out what will kill you.
Dying by pancreatic cancer is NOT pleasant so please save yourself the nightmare: a 5% survival rate for 5 years, that's the statistic, the worst of all the cancers.
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Saturday 1st March 2014 22:13 GMT gotes
Re: 20g of "processed meat"
Result of a quick web search: http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/seasoningflavoring/a/nitrates.htm
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Friday 28th February 2014 09:04 GMT ISYS
Test subject
My father, although now not a heavy drinker, was a keen homebrew wine producer and consumer for about twenty years. He enjoys bacon sarnies, beef dripping on toast, vast quantities of cheese, butter not marg, coffee by the bucket-load and red meat every day - he does not like garlic.
We celebrated his 80th birthday in December by going for a slap up meal in a pub!
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Friday 28th February 2014 11:42 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Test subject
Mmmm beef dripping. That was so yummy when I was a lad. Maybe because I didn't get it at home, only at a couple of friends' houses (whose Mums were more old-fashioned than mine). I've not tried it in years though, as I suspect it would be horrible now.
Almost all nostalgic food trials I've done in the last few years have been horrible. Crisp sandwhiches (prawn cocktail Walkers) didn't work, Dandelion & Burdock is horrific and makes your teeth furry, Spangles and Chewits are icky and cream soda tastes over-sweet and bitter simultaneously.
Admittedly eggy-bread (french toast) is still the food of the Gods on a Sunday evening. You can feel it doing your arteries good.
I also don't think I've ever had bacon sandwiches with anything other than tea, water or fruit juice. Perhaps that needs to be tested. What's the appropriate drink? Beer, a chilled white wine, a robust red?
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Friday 28th February 2014 15:43 GMT Dr Who
Re: Test subject
Firstly a rather crass remark that you've made. Secondly, it's just under 80 for males, and only for males that are born today. For males born 80 years ago the life expectancy was considerably lower, so I think in this case, he is well ahead of average.
My old man smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, ate like a king and died at the age of 69 - a very happy man!
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Friday 28th February 2014 15:54 GMT Corinne
Re: Test subject
"We celebrated his 80th birthday in December"
Average UK lifespan is 81 --- so he's currently, err, less than average.
Maybe - but is that the overall average lifespan in the UK. Women live on average about 4 years longer than men, so he's already above the MALE average lifespan.
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Friday 28th February 2014 09:09 GMT Blofeld's Cat
10 Years from now...
"That depends", said the furtive figure at the street corner, "what exactly you are after..."
"What have you got?" said the man wearing the baseball cap.
The figure opened his tracksuit top slightly, revealing two plastic packages. "Smoked or streaky? I've got both"
At this a van screeched to a halt and the figure was wrestled to the ground. One of the armed officers searched him and held up a small packet of white powder. 'Salt', he said triumphantly.
The man in the baseball cap shook his head.
"Kids today - why can't they just stick to blue meth like everyone else?"
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Friday 28th February 2014 15:02 GMT IT Drone
Re: George Foreman - hero!
We have the Tefal version of the grill in the house. Makes the best crispy bacon I have ever tasted. (Mind you a proper bacon sarnie is not made with crispy bacon but thick, juicy, fatty bacon smothered in HP sauce between two slabs of white bloomer...)
There is a lot of speculative or even contradicting twaddle from health professionals fuelling the journarselists space-filling articles - BMC says salt and chemicals in bacon, BHF says it is the fat. Boffins at Harvard say avoid creating nitrosamines or heterocyclic amines during cooking.
All I know is if the choice is no more bacon or an early death, well...
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Friday 28th February 2014 15:29 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: George Foreman - hero!
I didn't realise until now that George Foreman is one of the saviours of the human race.
Whenever I use the George Foreman grill at home I remember how it's supposed to be good at fat-free/fat-reduced cooking. Then I slather* the outside of two bits of bread with butter and put a good melty cheese (like brie*) inside with some processed meats (chorizo* + something else, usually; chorizo goes great with anything) and toast up a delicious, fatty grilled sandwich. The contents of the drip tray** can be drizzled over subsequent sarnies* eaten in the same sitting.
Purported health benefits of the grill: easily and tastily subverted. Stick that in your metaphorical pipe, George :)
* for some reason Firefox is putting wiggly red lines under these words. I'd call it a conspiracy (to unword only delicious and unhealthy things), but since it also redlines "Firefox", "unword" and "redlines" but not "epicurean", the reason for the omissions is probably plain boring(ness).
** any of the brie that oozes goes a bit like crispy Czech Smažený sýr, another delicious invention. I dare say that the GF grill would be good at making that too.
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Friday 28th February 2014 13:24 GMT 45RPM
Top journalism
Now that's what I call quality journalism - and backed up by a well thought out hypothesis too! Well done, Lester - that's good enough for me.
I plan to perform a practical experiment to prove this hypothesis this evening - a pub crawl followed by kebabs and a fry up, heavy on the bacon, tomorrow for breakfast. I'll do a full write up (if I remember) and, if your hypothesis turns out to be wrong and I end up a drooling imbecile or dead, at least I'll have had a bloody good time.
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Friday 28th February 2014 15:26 GMT Splodger
I salute El Reg's bleeding-edge boffinry!
However, your vital nutri/life-enhancing research needs to move out of the shed. I suggest a kickstarter to fund a Large
Hadron ColliderHeadache Provider - an epic pub crawl to discover the true nature of the elementary beer particle - the Glugs Boozon.Begin immediately, I say!
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Friday 28th February 2014 21:30 GMT Chris G
Porcopop
For the busy young executive who has little time to correctly prepare his essential daily ration of delicious porcine goodness and has even less time to frequent an intellectually heightening alehouse for his/her encephalic elucidation, we have combined the two into a cerebrally nourishng elixir of life! Porcopop!
Here in Ibiza the locals have a tradition of killing the family pig each year at a get together called a matanza (killing or slaughter). Every part of the pig is used including the cleaned intestine as sausage skin for the chorizo and morcilla a Spanish version of black pudding.
There are old Ibicencos here who daily quaff alchoholic beverages and pork products for breakfast, eat plenty of meat at other meals and many of them look positively ancient but still spry.
My landlord is approaching ninety and he is out working on his veggy patch nearly every day year round and in the evenings strolls off for a game of cards and a few bevvies with his mates.
Not a bad advert for this type of diet.
Most of the bacon here id streaky but usually a bit leaner than in the UK, wonderful stuff!
Worth a read: http://bacontoday.com/2014-bacon-festivals/ a Texan mate put me on to this.
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Friday 28th February 2014 22:37 GMT C. P. Cosgrove
Re : The Jon - The only known cure
That curly headed correspondent is correct ! Much to the aggravation of one of my sisters, her junior son on his 11th birthday declared he was vegetarian. This lasted about 8 months, until one Sunday she was making herself a couple of bacon sarnies.
"Mum, can I have one of them, please?"
Instant return to omnivore status !
Chris Cosgrove
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