“The bastards” are the ones who want to kill the messengers.

E.g., artificial preservatives, artificial colorings, emulsifiers, flow agents, anti-caking agents, “mouth feel” enhancing agents.

However, one can certainly turn this inside-out, and condemn a number of industrial foods for what has been taken out instead: A good example here would be flours & associated products made from industrially-produced flour.

Most people don’t realize that “bread” as would be familiar in the Middle Ages was nothing like what passes for “our daily bread” today. “Wonder Bread” is a only a wonder in the breadth of its nutritional abomination. Industry so over-processes wheat today –mainly in attempts to increase storage life of raw materials and shelf life of finished products — that it’s reduced to something that even the bugs won’t eat.

Just as industrial processing of foodstuffs adds things that we shouldn’t be consuming, it’s stripping food of “inconvenient” nutrients. Junk food truly is junk!

Brainstorm the reason traditional cured meats are pink is because the curing mix includes saltpetre aka potassium nitrate. If you are being iffy about ‘chemicals’ I suspect that would count, though I hate the use of chemical in that context so I’m not a good judge of such things. On the other hand I do make a mean cured beef …

The red meat is mostly eaten in countries with high life-expectations, and the colorectal cancer is with geriatric prevalence. So if one do not eat meat he is probably not reaching the age when this cancer type is important. And if we eat the same amount of proteins with another food, then we must add the risk of this new protein source.

And another question: Although the full report is to be published, it is clear that this meta-study is performed mainly on epidemiological basis. Is the the meat or the artificial stuff we add to it in order to produce more meat and to make it edible? We almost always eat the meat not crude so the process is always there and it seems it matters (processed group 1, not processed group 2 ==> the processing is cancerogenous).

Well should be good if the authors of the study are lurking around.

As Socrates apparently said (although obviously in ancient Hellenic) “All things in moderation including moderation.”

My second fave quote of his behind only his near last words to his follower Apollodorus :

Apollodorus : “O Socrates how it grieves me to see you die so undeservedly.”

Socrates : “My dear Apollodorus, would you rather see me die deservedly?”

Death by bacon and other tasty meats? There are far worse ways to go! (& we all gotta go someday, somehow, anyhow.)

Good calm informative article here, Greg Laden – thanks.