Some schools don’t allow peanut butter - isn’t that right? My wife and I are volunteering at an elementary school and they have a “no nuts” rule… unless they mean the other kind of nuts.
I have long felt that coldcuts/processed meats are unhealthy. We were making our own for a while, cooking and slicing boneless chicken breasts but have recently backslid with some Boars Head sliced chicken and turkey sneaking into the grocery bag. I love avocado and cheese samiches.
I try to avoid any highly processed food and try to make most things from scratch. For sandwiches I eat roasted chicken and roasted turkey from birds I cook. I also eat a lot of tuna.
But I also eat steak, roast beef, roast pork, etc., and I will continue to do so. I believe eating most things in moderation is the key. We probably only eat bacon a few times a year but that is because I don’t like it very much, so I don’t buy it.
Bacon is the foundation of America! Everyone knows that! LOL. However, I do draw the line at bacon ice cream. And the Bacon peanut brittle that I had at a wannabe ritzy Lower East Side Manhattan restaurant was God awful…and overpriced to boot!
Maybe it’s better to look at this in perspective. Let’s say the lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5%. In the US, that’s about 40 new cases per 100,000. If everyone could manage to get down an additional 3 pieces of bacon per day, every day, the rate would start moving up towards 6%, or 47 cases per 100,000.
Where do you think this ranks in terms of smoking, drinking and obesity?
JOD is correct. The risk goes up 18%, but the small number times 1.18 is still a small number. This is a pretty good article with answers to many questions posted here:
You know what. Everything causes cancer, the air we breathe (especially in SoCal), the phone I have with me 24/7, the diet soda I drink on occasion, the pesticides used to grow our food, so I’m not going completely give up bacon or red meat. And don’t get me started on my smug vegan friends gleefully posting this study all over. Obnoxious.
Chicken and egg salad are yummy. If you don’t want to roast a bird yourself (super easy) just buy a rotisserie bird from a supermarket. I think cutting back on processed meat is probably a good idea. Other thoughts quark/farmer’s cheese mixed with herbs especially on a flavorful bread is tasty and healthy. We also just eat a lot of leftovers in our house. I deliberately cook extra servings of dinner so it can be eaten for lunch.
Vegans should keep their mouths shut and think about the commercial agriculture’s effect on our planet (deforestation, soil erosion, etc. ). There is no way “sustainable” and “organic” small-farm farming can feed the current population.
Anyway, back to our regular programming.
It’s just very frustrating that people are getting in a tizzy over this.
You know what the WHO recommendation is? Eat less red meat and more fruits and vegetables. You know what health professionals have been recommending for decades? Eat least meat and more fruits and vegetables.
Again, if people want to cut down on meat- I think that’s great! But it’s the same stuff people have been saying for decades. You are much less likely to experience cancer than any of the many other negative health outcomes associated with poor diets.
^BTW, cheese is not a mold…
Excellent point, romani. This new “blockbuster” study doesn’t tell us anything I haven’t been hearing from my doctor for the last 30 years. Want to avoid colorectal cancer? Limit your intake of fatty red meat and processed meats, sure, but at least as important, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, especially green leafy vegetables, like spinach, kale, and collard greens. That will give you plenty of fiber, antioxidants, folic acid, and calcium (dairy products and some fish are also good sources of calcium). Sound familiar?
In other news, the sun rose in the East today, and experts are predicting it will fall in the West tonight.
How can prosciutto possibly be anything but good?
I am about 80% vegetarian already but do like chicken or turkey occasionally. I must have a hot dog or 2 every summer and do like that imported salami sliced thin with cheese. But my experience with all processed meats is that I am desperately thirsty for days after I consume it.
My personal recommendation…take these sensationalistic reports of scientific studies with a shipping container’s worth of salt, take it with the requisite humor, and help oneself to a few 20 oz steaks, sausage links, burger patties, etc etc etc.
I’m with the epicurians on this one…eat, drink, and be merry for we’ll all eventually die anyways. May as well take some pleasures in one’s life without being fearful it’s “BAD FOR YOU”.
The few vegans/vegetarians I know who tend to act that way tend to IME, be unhealthy from poor diets(too much pastries/cakes/sweets or malnutrition from not having a reasonably balanced diet with enough protein), cite studies from junk science/conspiracy type websites, and be puritannically against eating foods which are “too tasty”.
The last may explain their strong preference for eating plain unflavored uncooked tofu…which causes me as someone who grew up in a tofu-eating familial culture to roll my eyes and not take their words too seriously.
As far as the kids lunches, think of food in it’s purest form. Natural cheese, nuts, fruit, whole grains,even lean meats - but not deli meat!
I personally find “cold cuts” or whatever you want to call them disgusting. That’s just me. No one however, is going to disrupt my weekend pleasure of two slices of bacon on Saturday morning.
I’m so glad I don’t have to pack lunches anymore! My hubby used to make roast beef every Sunday to make my son roast beef sandwiches. He gets migraines so we avoided processed food.
How about the horrifying article that a small percentage of hot dogs had traces of human dna. I think last year I had a hot dog from 5 guys. Blech… I don’t think anyone would really suffer much eliminating hot dogs.
Right now I’m obsessed with a roasted chicken recipe from Ina garten.
My picky daughter would eat cheese sticks, peanut butter sandwiches with no jelly, clementines or apples. Every day for 13 years…
Just listened to an interesting report on this. The news stories are lumping everything together. It’s more like processed meats definitely cause some kinds of cancer if you average 50 grams a day. Red meats probably cause cancer if you average 50 grams a day. However, the risk from the latter is much, much lower than the risk from the former.
What surprised me was that pork (unprocessed) and lamb are lumped in with beef. I eat beef about 6 times a year, if that. I eat ham about 2 or 3 times a year, if that. I eat pork.about 30-40 times a year. There’s only so much fish and chicken I can stomach, so I vary them with pork. I thought it was healthier than beef.
Egads Eyemamom, I thought the days of Upton Sinclair had passed. Reading in high school about folks finding thumbs in their sausages back in the day was a bit…nauseating. Ugh!!!
Just a sidebar here: Has anyone else found it difficult to get a turkey to roast when it’s not November or December? It’s very frustrating – both DH and I love turkey, and I’d make it every three or four weeks if I could. But it’s hard to find and, when I do find it, it’s very expensive. For some mysterious reason the price goes way down during Thanksgiving/Christmas time. Counterintuitive.
“My picky daughter would eat cheese sticks, peanut butter sandwiches with no jelly, clementines or apples. Every day for 13 years…”
I only ate tuna growing up. My sister only ate saltines. My mom only cooked dinner for her and my dad. If I took two bites of anything it was cause for celebration. She used to put 3 peas on my plate. I would gag down one on a good day. She also made us have a glass of milk but it would just sit and get warm and then when she wasn’t looking we would carefully pour it down the sink out of one side so it would look like we drank it.