Safer ways to eat bacon....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 10-29-2015

Just recently the information that a high intake of processed meats including bacon can cause health problems showed up again in the news.

The initial one said that eating lots of processed meats as in every day boosted heart disease risk.

The current one said eating lots of processed meats as in every day boosted the risk of colon cancer.

But eating meat with its high protein is helpful with fat loss or keeping off excess fat because your body will let you get away with fewer calories when you get plenty of protein AND you get less hungry besides.

AND, it’s also easier to lose all fat when you are doing that and no muscle or less muscle if in addition to strength training to eat plenty of protein.

Meats like bacon and sausage and pepperoni taste good enough that eating plenty of protein is easier to sustain long term.

So, how can you eat bacon and get those benefits without the health harms?

A.  First of all the effect was small.  So just eating bacon or other processed meats once or twice in two months instead of daily works. 

(Getting protein from whey from grass fed cows – Jarrow sells it -- and cheese from cows fed only grass and from wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils and from whole eggs from hens fed only their natural diet on pasture and from beans and lentils and organic vegetables, you can eat a high protein diet the rest of the time with far less risk.)

But there are even more ways to make eating bacon safer.

B.  Here’s a list:

1. Apparently, the cancer causing effect is partly from nitrosamines being formed from nitrates and high heat. 

So you can remove this risk in large part by using bacon from Whole Foods that is free of all or most nitrates AND you can cook bacon on low moderate heat on the stove until it turns golden brown instead of on high heat and it turns almost black.

2.  Most bacon in stores today is from pigs fed corn and soy instead of their natural diet so the fat is high in omega 6 oils which are relatively fragile and produce cancer causing and extra oxidized breakdown products when heated on a high setting.

If you can manage to get bacon from pigs fed their natural diet, this goes away. 

But since that is currently quite hard to manage, you can still minimize this effect by cooking bacon on low moderate heat on the stove until it turns golden brown instead of on high heat and it turns almost black.

3.  Onions have anti-cancer effects.  So if you eat some sautéed onion slices with diced bacon or in a separate dish when you eat bacon that helps.

In fact, lightly toasted slivered almonds taste very like bacon.  So instead of eating four slices of bacon, you can get great bacon taste by cooking and dicing up two slices of bacon and an equal volume of slivered almonds and dice up some onion slices and heat the mixture until it smells good!

4.  If you also take steps to prevent heart disease such as never drinking soft drinks, staying away 100 % of the time from tobacco smoke, never eating high fructose corn sryup, never eating wheat, and never eating ANY hydrogenated oils, you can eat more bacon without causing heart disease.

It also helps to take curcumin and DHA and omega 3 for their heart protective effects and exercise regularly.

5.  If you do those things – particularly staying away 100 % of the time from tobacco smoke --and taking curcumin AND add drinking green tea and or taking green tea extract and other anticancer supplements, you can eat more bacon without causing cancer.

So between the strategies it IS possible to continue to eat bacon and avoid heart disease and avoid cancer anyway!