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Who the fuck is eating "as little as one Hotdog per day"?
WHO IS EATING TUBE STEAK EVERY DAY?!?
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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So if I eat 1 gram of processed meat, am I gonna die or something?
Eventually, yes
So… if we eat an unrealistic amount of processed meat we will get sick?
Who knew?
Next they’ll tell us that swallowing even 1 mouthful of hydrogen peroxide mouthwash is unsafe.
Doesn't hydrogen peroxide just degrade into water and oxygen? How is it harmful?
Swallowing it can make you very sick, yet it’s a safe and effective mouthwash if you have gum disease, or any other infection.
Best to just play it safe and rinse with warm salt water.
when it spontaneously degrades, yes, it turns into tame water and healthy oxygen, but when it touches organic matter (your skin, tongue, mouth, etc) the oxygen directly reacts with the carbon atoms to make CO2, effectively "burning" away your tissues very slowly.
Usually, you don't notice that because you use store-bought 3% peroxide, but chemists regularly use the much more powerful 35% peroxide, which gives you nasty burns
peroxide burn
also, fun fact, some cells produce hydrogen peroxide as a waste product, so nature has evolved the catalase enzyme to break it down, and that's why you see bubbling when using it on a scar but not on skin, because that enzyme is only inside you and your blood
I see, so oxygen is leached much faster and causes damage via hyperoxidation. Thank you for the writeup!
Looks unpleasant but generally not dangerous.
I think that's the point he was trying to make.
Yup. That’s basically it. The article creates an unrealistic gradation to compare against its definition of what’s healthy.
Processed meat is completely healthy, eating it every day for prolonged periods of time, not so much.
Hydrogen peroxide mouthwash? Totally safe! As a beverage? Not so much.
as little as one hot dog a day
That is a lot processed meat to be eating if its every single day. Who is buying more than a pack of sausages per person each week? Also hot dog sausages are surely some of the worst sausages for being highly processed. Don't forget about the strange bread used in hot dogs too. That must have a shitload of stuff added to it or it would be stale and mouldy. Bread shouldn't still be fresh days later.
Who is buying more than a pack of sausages per person each week?
Poor people
You are clearly a richer poor person than I am then.
Been there, and hotdogs are far and away not the cheapest protein.
Chicken breast and thighs traded blows back and forth as the cheapest meat per lb in my grocery store when I was scraping by a few years ago. I'm vegan now, but I can just as easily say dry beans as being a viable alternative.
You can also just not eat meat very often to help keep costs down. For the 2 of us this week we have a single pack of 600g which is above average for us.
Sometimes get tinned mackerel which is much less total meat, but it's got a stronger flavour than chicken or pork so it can go further in a meal. I would look at catching crabs from the harbour but my partner refuses to eat them.
as convenience foods go, 2/$1 gas station hot dogs exceed 500kcal. nothing comes close.
also celery salt, or juice in those bougie organic hot dogs, in places like whole foods is all nitrates too. nitrate/nitrite salts have distinctive taste and smell. many orgnaic brands might have celery salt. your safe if the ingredients isnt mentioning any salts or celery.
when your heating up nitrates, it forms things like nitrosamine which have been implicated in lab studies of causing cancer in model organisms.
smoked and UNCURED meat might still have the same nitrates in them.
So what I'm hearing is we just need to return to tradition and start curing our own meats in our backyard smokehouses?
Curing (removing moisture from food by means of salt) is a distinct process from smoking (adding smoke to food as well as removing moisture via heat). Curing with nitrite and nitrate based salts (sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite) is what’s been implicated in cancer.
Smoking meat is much more complicated from a chemistry perspective. Different types of wood, different temperatures, moisture content, salt content, and cooking durations can all affect the concentrations of carcinogenic compounds in the food. For example, softwoods (such as pine) tend to produce a lot of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known class of carcinogens, but thankfully softwood is undesirable as a smoke wood anyway so is rarely used.
Smoking technique can also dramatically affect the result. Poor smoking technique allows the wood to smoulder at a lower temperature, producing a harsher smoke with more carcinogenic, toxic, and bitter compounds. Expert smoking technique uses a smaller, hotter fire which produces a much cleaner smoke that also results in better flavour.
TL;DR: Cancer is coming for us all.
But I only buy boars head so it obviously safe.
/s, although I did reluctantly buy some teriyaki chicken boars head that sounded amazing.
What is the definition of “processed” here? blended meat? high salt %? specific preservatives? artificial casing?
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