Hacker News Reader

Comment by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that bacon is already a known carcinogen for those worrying about artificial sweeteners but happily eating processed meats.

View on HN

Why stop with nitrates and nitrites? Acrylamide is a known human carcinogen, and occurs in a huge variety of cooking processes (including baking, frying, and grilling). If you eat potatoes, you're almost certainly putting yourself at more risk than aspartame is: we've got epidemiology and mechanism of action to back up the potato risk.

I believe California even helpfully warns you about any location that has acrylamide.

So… restaurants?

Literally yes. Every Starbucks in California has a little placard with that stupid warning to the point where people tune it out.

> Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse.

> The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.

> In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it.

> People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sesame-allergy-sufferers-wanted...

WARNING: This location contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Prop 65. It's everywhere in California and it's completely useless.

What's the danger with potatoes? Can you point me towards a study or something?

I think the poster meant "fried/roasted potatoes" (boiled are not included). Most Maillard reaction cooking involves a risk of creating potential carcinogens like acrylamide.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2118565-are-potatoes-no...

Which is what I figured and is a wholly disingenuous argument. Would love to see any research showing unseasoned boiled or baked potatoes being bad for you.

Acrylamide has nothing at all to do with seasoning, and baking potatoes forms acrylamide (as will anything that browns a potato --- or that browns bread!).

Serious question: do you have kids and if so, what do you feed them if you avoid acrylamide? I’m constantly looking for alternatives for my kids and it feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole such that they do, sometimes anyways, eat the processed things because I can’t eradicate the junk from everything.

I don't avoid acrylamide! How would I? :)

(I have 2 kids, but both are in their early 20s.)

My understanding is that bacon itself is not the culprit of the possible (note — possible) carcinogen. The sodium nitrate that is often used as a preservative is. Nitrate-free bacon is easy to find though.

Nitrate-free (or, "no nitrates added") bacon still contains nitrates. About the same amount as standard bacon, and in some cases, more.

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

In the UK, we have nitrate-free bacon available that is actually nitra(i)te free: https://www.betternaked.com/products/better-naked-unsmoked-b...

I'm intrigued. That seems a fair bit different than the uncured bacon I'm familiar with in the US [0], but I would certainly give it a try.

[0]: https://applegate.com/products/natural-thick-cut-bacon

(Note that this product is actually cured with nitrates via the celery powder in the ingredients list.)

Ah, the magic of marketing.

It's exactly the same, except one uses celery. No, in fact, if I remember correctly, the nitrates used in the "uncured" process were even higher than the normal process.

I don't see anything on that site that says anything other than nitrates weren't added. Where are you seeing that it's actually nitrate free?

Under "Dietary information" at the bottom of the page, it says "Nitrite-free, Gluten-free, Dairy-free,[sic]"

I wouldn't be surprised if that's misleading considering the other article was suggesting nitrite precursors are usually what's in the food later to be turned into nitrite, but I'd love to be wrong.

You could simply measure the levels of nitrite before any exists and the end product might still have just as much.

The one article is talking about celery juice being stealth nitrates. It's not something that is in the pork itself.

The only candidate would be natural flavors, and I sort of doubt that they would get away with that.

In the US, they are required by law to write nitrate free if they add celery salt, which is 100% nitrates.

That site lists “natural flavors” as an ingredient. I wonder if celery salt counts as a natural flavor in the UK.

This UK producer:

https://www.primalcut.co.uk/post/nitrate-free-bacon-bringing...

Contains the weasel words I pasted in below, which are verbatim what the US producers that use celery salt claim. Also, they don’t list the natural flavors. I’d bet they’re using celery salt, but that UK labeling laws don’t make them break it out as a separate ingredient:

> Primal Cut free-from naked bacon contains only fresh organic fruit sugars and nitrates present in the natural raw organic seasonings.

To what everybody else is saying, I'll add that by the US definition, that's not bacon; it's back bacon, which is a loin cut, radically different than American bacon, which I believe you lot call "streaky bacon".

Interesting, I didn't realise that but I always preferred the non-streaky kind.

Being a global community, would we assume bacon means all types of bacon cut? I have been but maybe I've been wrong. Surely we're not just referring to streaky bacon or American bacon

Yes, we would assume here that bacon means pork belly bacon. The reason nitrates are such a big deal with American bacon is that they're an important part of the flavor of the bacon (nitrates create "hammy" flavor). If there's genuinely un-cured pork loin "bacon" in Germany or New Zealand or whatever, that's great, but it's a less interesting claim than that there's real nitrate/nitrite-free American bacon (I don't believe there is).

Sorry my question wasn't about nitrates. It was about the use of the term bacon being used to define all bacon's as we're a global community or whether people in general on this community would think of bacon being used for only streaky bacon.

I totally understand. I know "bacon" is a thing everywhere, and it doesn't mean cured strips of pork belly everywhere. I guess I'd say "bacon" in popular culture refers to the American product, whose flavor is heavily derived from the interaction of sodium nitrite with pork belly. To tell an American "you can get bacon without the nitrites" is a little like saying "you could just go eat an apple". True, but irrelevant! :)

Better stop eating celery or anything containing it if you're really concerned about nitrates.

Green leafy vegetables contain a hell of a lot more nitrate than cured meat does.

Sure, there's less protein in vegetables, so less chance of nitrosamines forming, unless you're eating a complete meal, in which case... figure it out.

Also, vegetables contain anti-oxidants and things which offset some of the nitrates, but this just seems like a reason to eat some vegetables with your cured meats.

I cute and smoke my own bacon. I do not use nitrite. Also in my country organic bacon has zero nitrate in it.

A big problem with the these "nitrate free" forms is that Vitamin C was required in the "nitrate" versions, to prevents the formation of some of the carcinogens [1]. In the "nitrate free" versions, it is not! I make sure to drink orange juice, or take a vitamin C, with any form of bacon.

[1] https://locavoredelivery.com/blog/some-facts-about-bacon-wit...

Orange juice is a huge spike to the insulin levels. As the saying goes, eat your juice, don't drink it.

Nitrate-free bacon isn't bacon. The stuff that is marketed as nitrate-free isn't -- it's a dubiously moral marketing gimmick that is essentially untrue.

With bacon you know what you get, so you can dose it and take your risks. Aspartame has been sold to us as the healthy alternative to sugar. People literally use aspartame as an excuse to chug liters of soda every day.

Isn't it a healthy alternative to sugar? If you have a one in five chance to live ten years longer because you don't develop cardiovascular issues from obesity, but one in a million develops cancer, I mean...

It's going to depend on how this turns out exactly.

The WHO recently conditionally recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control. Their stance is that we should be reducing sweetened food/beverage intake in general, rather than trying to find healthier ways to sweeten what we eat.

https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...

While that is their stance, it is conditioned on what they seem to consider to be good evidence that using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control does not work (at the level of public health, that is; for individuals, YMMV.)

If we shift the context just a little bit, everyone would ridicule this kind of abstinence-only approach.

"Everyone" might be a stretch.

Depending on the topic, I'm in camp abstinence.

Aspartame causes weight gain, so abstinence-only isn’t a great analogy.

If you are trying to lose weight, then just use less sugar. That’s actually pretty easy, since artificial sweeteners and sugary drinks desensitize you to sweet stuff.

If you taper off for a week or so, you’ll find that the stuff you were previously drinking is cloyingly sweet.

For instance, reading a starbucks menu makes me shudder. I can’t even drink their non-dairy lattes anymore because they are too sweet.

I am personally trying to achieve that.

Liquid chocolate, the kind we drink as a hot beverage in Central and South America, was difficult for me to get used to without any sweet taste. Nowadays I prefer it that way. Coffee is a bit more difficult for me.

Nothing is safer than sugar if you're just talking about a few grams for your coffee.

Can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar. Diet cokes has 0.2 grams of aspartame.

You listed two isolated facts. You forgot to make a point.

This was downvoted but Is correct, relative amounts mean nothing.

Using artificial sweeteners for coffee is completely unnecessary, unless you're drinking a lot.

The amount of calories in two teaspoons of sugar is minuscule.

Two teaspoons is already one sixth of the WHO recommended daily sugar intake, and that was just the coffee. And WHO claims there are additional health benefits expected if you can do half of what they recommend.

The caffeine will get you before the aspartame if you actually chug liters a day so you can't really do that in practice.

Source: My dad has a heart attack from drinking liters of diet soda every day.

It’s actually sodium nitrite that’s carcinogenic (after being exposed to high heat), and I can find bacon without sodium nitrite here pretty much at every grocery store.

If you read carefully, it still contains sodium nitrite except as powdered celery. So the source of the sodium nitrate is “natural” but the dose is still the same.

Fml so I’ve been paying more for nitrite free bacon that still has nitrite in it?

It feels like saying something contains no nitrites or preservatives and then including them in the form of cultured celery extract should be fraud/false advertising and a crime.

You extremely have been conned by the "nitrite-free bacon" labeling, yes. This is something that food writers have been complaining about for over a decade.

I buy raw pork belly. Doesn't taste the same after being cooked, but surely it has no nitrites. ;)

Adding to what remote_phone said, and repeating another comment of mine, that nitrite free bacon still has the same amount of nitrites (in some cases, more).

https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos...

There’s one place near me that sells actual nitrate/nitrite free bacon but its super expensive - $10-12 Canadian for 250grams or so. It like double bacon in the store and its an hour drive away.

Sad to learn about the celery nitrite thing. I’ve been overpaying for it for a while now, apparently. It literally says “contains no preservatives” but has “cultured celery extract” in the ingredients, so its a lie.

Yup. You were overpaying for a worse product. Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm in processed products branded as healthy.

It's better to stick the the regular version; the kinks have been probably worked out. Still unsafe, but unsafe in a known quantity.

If it is completely uncured sure, but usually niteite/nitrate free bacon has an asterisk saying something like "beyond what is naturally found in the added celery juice". If you heat those nitrites in the bacon it doesn't the same thing as the synthetic stuff would. Luckily trichinosis is largely a thing of the past, so why heat it? Uncooked bacon tastes awesome. Also, in stews I believe it does reach the dangerous temps?

Sodium nitrate converts to sodium nitrite over the course of a cure; that's why Prague Powder #2 is used for long-term cures.

This is not correct, in spirit of "is it carcinogenic": https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing-and-health-prof...

This is why Vitamin C was a required additive, with "nitrate" cured meats. Unfortunately, it is not with the "nitrate from celery" forms, which should lead to more cancer.

But without sodium nitrite you instead run the risk of increased bacterial growth, and in the worse case: botulinum toxin which is like instant death compared to dying of cancer at 70+.

Or drinking hot tea. Working graveyard shift. Drinking alcohol.

Breathing air in any city.

That's why I have a BlueAir air filter running continuously that spits out 0 ppm air and swapped my A/C's filters for the highest MERV ones available.

I had to remove the ionizer from my blueair, ionizers plus terpenes (what essential oils are made of, and in virtually all cleaning products) creates formaldehyde, which I'm allergic to, and is linked to cancer and kids developing asthma.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/classic/research/...

I hope you're saying to stop eating bacon as well and not just that nothing matters.

Neither nor. They're saying to see things in perspective.

Source please

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com