Processed meats

Processed meat and your health: what is all the fuss about?

Daniel Commane 18/05/23

Meat processing, the salting, drying, curing, smoking, chemical preservation of meat is an ancient practice, and arguably in its day it was a great boon for public health. In times gone by, these practices improved food security by stabilising a valuable product that would otherwise rot quickly post slaughter. If hunger was a constant companion through most of human history, food borne disease was certainly a co-traveller; the cooking of food was one solution to the problem of microbial contamination, but of itself it does not remove microbial toxins such as botulinum that may accumulated in infected foods. The beauty of meat processing was thought to be that it not only increased the shelf life of the food but in lowering the pH and displacing water with salt the growth of toxin producing organisms might be stopped. Indeed Clostridium botulinum, though common in our environment, is a rare cause of death these days, and processed meats tend to be consumed instead for culinary reasons.

In place of hunger and food borne illness, we are now much more likely to succumb to age related disease, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and so on. The bad news for connoisseurs of charcuterie, anti-pasti and the good old bacon butty, is that when we study the effects of diet on trends in disease in large scale population studies processed meat consumption emerges consistently in each of these conditions, in fact IARC now lists processed meat as a grade 1 human carcinogen. These studies are always criticised for presenting evidence of association rather than causation. And proponents of processed meat might argue that when we observe the intake of cheaper meat in a population we might just be capturing otherwise poorer dietary patterns.

However, mechanistic studies reinforce the observational data. Our own recent mycomeat study compared the effects of consuming red and processed meat daily for two weeks to consuming mycoprotein. When the volunteers consumed the meat, we saw a significant increase in the production of DNA damage inducing chemicals in the gut. Others have noted reductions in cholesterol and the high level of sodium in some of these products may increase blood pressure.

What to eat

Most of us could do with eating a little bit less meat in total, white meat and fish is safer.

When choosing red meats, choose cleaner cuts and higher quality produce where it is affordable. When cooking, avoid charring and blackening of meat produce as this creates its own set of nasty chemicals.

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