Comment by array_key_first | Hacker News Reader

Comment by array_key_first | Hacker News Reader

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array_key_first

Hamburger patties are processed, I don't know who y'all are kidding.

At the end of the day, red meat is bad for you. Processed red meat is in the same category as carcinogen as Alcohol and Tobacco. To put into perspective, diet coke is two categories lower. And it doesn't get much more artificial than that. Bacon is basically cigarettes in meat form, and hamburgers are just heart disease in a bun.

Believe it or not, starches and oils are genuinely healthier than meat. Meat is basically just bad for you, or at least most of it.

And before I hear more "dawn of man" stuff - uh, no. For most of human history, humans ate very little meat. It was mostly plants.

And, of the meat they did eat, it was nothing like the meat we have today. We eat extremely fatty farmed meat, they ate lean game meat. Farmed meat is a very new invention.

There is still lean meat today! Hamburgers are not it, though.

Same IARC group does not equal same risk. Group 1 just means the evidence is strong, not that the danger is equivalent. Smoking increases lung cancer risk by 2,000-3,000%. Daily processed meat increases colorectal cancer risk from around 4.5% to 5%. calling bacon "cigarettes in meat form" is wildly misleading.

Yes, I know that, my point is we know, almost definitely, that processed red meat causes cancer.

For many processes ingredients, like aspartame, we don't know. We're pretty sure it doesn't cause cancer. But from the way people talk about aspartame versus pastrami, you wouldn't know that.

And I stand by what I said about bacon. It's health detriments are much much worse than just colorectal risk - it heightens your risk of almost all cancers, similar to tobacco, due to inflammation and free radicals. And that's not even touching on heart disease, which is the more realistic concern.

It is good provocation even if it is poor analogy.

This is because bacon is more like cigarettes than most people assume, even if far less dangerous in practice.

Like another example is "sugar is poison." which is also structured as a factual equivalence and also gesturing at something real and also designed to land as a stronger claim than the evidence warrants.

Hamburgers are pretty lean. The meat is “processed” by mixing fatty cuts with lean cuts. So it ends up leaner than what the fat cut would have been.

And preservatives, and antimicrobial washes.

Hamburger patties are not very lean at all. 15% saturated fat is not lean. Lean is chicken breast or game deer.

Those are weird steps for homemade burgers. Lean meat is rabbit, not even chicken.

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