Remember when eggs caused high cholesterol?
Or eating late at night was going to make you fat?
The latest health scare craze is bacon.
Recently the World Health Organization (WHO) released a study that put bacon in the same cancer causing category as cigarrettes.
Yes, that is right, eating bacon is as bad for you as smoking cigarettes. Because that makes sense right?
Let’s take a look at the numbers behind the frenzy.
If you smoke cigarettes, your chance of getting lung cancer goes up 2500%. That’s a lot.
If you eat two slices of bacon everyday, your chance of getting colorectal cancer goes up 18%. That sounds like a lot.
Given the incidence of colorectal cancer runs around 5%, eating that bacon raises your chance to about 6%.
Look, I am not advocating that you eat bacon everyday. Let’s be sensible here.
While it is not OK to have a BLT everyday, having bacon every now and then is certainly nothing to stress about. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the anxiety over eating a few slices of bacon every now and then, is more damaging then eating the bacon.
I’ll see you at brunch!