If one man’s meat is another man’s poison, as the old saying goes, research is making it pretty clear that the real poison is processed meat. Studies, seemingly one after another, are piling up evidence indicating that processed meats – such as hot dogs, sausage, salami, ham, bacon, and lunch meat – are definitely harmful to the body and should be consumed at a minimum. Processed meat is defined as any meat preserved by curing, salting, smoking, or with the addition of chemical preservatives.
Regularly eating processed meat may shorten your life. That’s the conclusion of a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Nutrition that analyzed dietary questionnaires filled out by seventy-five thousand Swedish men and women and which covered a 15 year period. Compared with no consumption, high consumption of processed red meat (100 grams, or 3.5 ounces) daily was associated with a progressively shorter survival. Consumption of non-processed red meat alone, in this study, was not linked to shorter survival. In the same issue of the journal, an analysis of more than forty-four thousand French women’s eating habits revealed an association between the consumption of processed red meat – but not with unprocessed meat − and hypertension.
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