ISN'T THIS LAST CENTURY'S NEWS?

Scientists Demand Ban on Bacon, Claiming Link to 54,000 Cases of Cancer.  Smoked meats, or preservatives in meats, or maybe meats themselves, have long given Wise Experts something to fret about.

First they came for sugar, then they came for bacon. Will life be worth living once all the simple ‘unhealthy’ pleasures are banned? I haven’t read the study, but a first thought is whether people who eat lots of bacon aren’t unhealthy in other ways that might explain a higher incidence of bowel, breast and prostate cancers. That’s often the problem with these studies – there are so many potential factors that could explain an 18% increase in various maladies. They’ll have statistical techniques to try to deal with that, for sure. But trying to work out why diseases like cancer develop as a result of eating certain foods is never an exact science.

Academicians, though, like to have more attention than another Minimal Publishable Unit in Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini will get them.

A coalition of leading scientists says the refusal to ban nitrites - preservatives used to keep processed meats pink and long-lasting - has come at a devastating human and financial cost, with the NHS footing an estimated £3 billion bill to treat preventable cancers over the past decade.

Their analysis, based on figures from Cancer Research UK and the British Journal of Cancer, estimates that around 5,400 bowel cancer cases each year in the UK are caused by eating processed meats. Treatment costs for each patient average £59,000.

That the National Health Service have no clue how much any one treatment costs, or how much the quality of a life year without bacon is lessened, is immaterial to "leading scientists."  Read on, and consider the source.

The warning comes exactly ten years after the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen - placing it in the same risk category as tobacco and asbestos.

Despite this, ministers have done 'virtually nothing' to reduce Britons' exposure, according to Professor Chris Elliott OBE, founder of the Institute for Global Food Security and a former government adviser.

He said: 'A decade on from the WHO report, the UK Government has done virtually nothing to reduce exposure to nitrites - the curing agents that make these products pink and long-lasting but also create nitrosamines, compounds known to trigger cancer.

'Every year of delay means more preventable cancers, more families affected, and greater strain on the NHS.'

The scientists who worked on the original WHO report have now written to Health Secretary Wes Streeting urging him to ban nitrites in processed meats.

Ah, yes, the World Health Organisation, the international agency that did so well managing the Wuhan coronavirus a few years ago.  As far as "strain on the National Health Service," well, if you can't ration the medical care directly with those quality adjusted life years, you can ration it indirectly by rationing the purchase of cured meats.  How long until bangers and mash or those sausages at a Full English Breakfast come with warning labels?