Bacon as deadly as cigarettes

[Josephus]

Oh well....might as well take up smoking again, i ain't giving up my bacon

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/bacon-sausages-big-cancer-threat-083910518.html

[Liep]

Fuck you, science.

[Ed Anger]

Bacon is overrated.

[Syt]

I'd say bacon is less deadly than cigarettes because there's no such thing as second hand bacon.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'd generally say ignore this. The state of nutrition science is terrible, reporting on nutrition science is the only thing vastly worse in the field. Nutrition and how it effects the body is complicated, most studies are nibbling at the periphery, then the media runs wild with it, then even worse, regulatory and advisory bodies make proclamations based off of a very minimal amount of research. The 1950s study that lead to the popular wisdom that saturated fats are terrible and we should cut things like milk, eggs, etc from our diets and replace them with alternatives directly lead to the huge increase in consumption of trans fats, which at least a good amount of research has shown is far worse for you. Meanwhile the methodology of the origin study for these decisions and its results have largely since been debunked, as far back as the 1980s,  but organizations like the USDA and AMA have been slow to acknowledge that.

The hilarious state of the science was laid particularly bare a couple years ago when, in the same week, two peer reviewed articles were published in the same week: one which said consuming eggs regularly is worse than tobacco consumption in terms of long term health effects, and another that said regular consumption of eggs is associated with better health outcomes. The reality is no one really knows, the type of research that is necessary to bring nutrition science up to where it be, for reasons I've never fully understood, simply is not being done.

[OttoVonBismarck]

In the place of better science that can lead to meaningful nutritional guidelines, we've instead given rise to people that "come to their own conclusions" with a mixture of their personal experience, experience with customers of theirs (in the cases of persons who are dietitians and such), "common sense", outright pseudoscience and etc. Most of these people are only right in the same manner that a stopped clock is. The Michael Pollan's of the world, the Paleo advocates and etc are a direct result of not having anything close to usable, reliable nutrition science.

That being said, I think some of these guys do a good job of explaining why nutrition science is so poor, even if their prescribed eating habits are based on even less empirical evidence. Pollan's explanation of why nutrition science tends to constantly refute itself is a persuasive one.  Foods are complex, how the body breaks foods down and uses them is also complex. The gut bacteria that are key to this have been called one of the last great "unexplored frontiers of human anatomy." The relationship between how you combine different foods in different meals is complex. Scientists cannot meaningfully control for this many variables at once, so they tend to craft studies that try to isolate specific foods and then break them down into their nutritional components in order to come to conclusions about those components. It's this that leads to things like "fiber helps prevent colon cancer" then later studies that say "eh, maybe not" or that Omega-3 fatty acids can cut the risk of heart disease to "eh, maybe not as much as we said...and if the fish you eat to get these EFAs are high in mercury then it may still be a net-negative." People don't in the real world just eat fiber by itself, fiber comes in food that has lots of other stuff in it. Same for EFAs, same for saturated fats etc. Sure, you can actually buy direct fiber and fish oil supplements, but the reality is only a small minority of people are ever going to get their nutrition in pills/powders/liquids that are a concentrated source of one single thing. And even those people will continue to eat real food due to the necessity of you know, eating real food, and the interplay between those and the direct supplements of specific nutrients is poorly understand (essentially it's never been researched.)

[Valmy]

Some stupid study has been going around Facebook saying cheese is more addictive than crack. 

[Eddie Teach]

Have you ever tried to quit?

[DGuller]

In the place of better science that can lead to meaningful nutritional guidelines, we've instead given rise to people that "come to their own conclusions" with a mixture of their personal experience, experience with customers of theirs (in the cases of persons who are dietitians and such), "common sense", outright pseudoscience and etc. Most of these people are only right in the same manner that a stopped clock is. The Michael Pollan's of the world, the Paleo advocates and etc are a direct result of not having anything close to usable, reliable nutrition science.

That being said, I think some of these guys do a good job of explaining why nutrition science is so poor, even if their prescribed eating habits are based on even less empirical evidence. Pollan's explanation of why nutrition science tends to constantly refute itself is a persuasive one.  Foods are complex, how the body breaks foods down and uses them is also complex. The gut bacteria that are key to this have been called one of the last great "unexplored frontiers of human anatomy." The relationship between how you combine different foods in different meals is complex. Scientists cannot meaningfully control for this many variables at once, so they tend to craft studies that try to isolate specific foods and then break them down into their nutritional components in order to come to conclusions about those components. It's this that leads to things like "fiber helps prevent colon cancer" then later studies that say "eh, maybe not" or that Omega-3 fatty acids can cut the risk of heart disease to "eh, maybe not as much as we said...and if the fish you eat to get these EFAs are high in mercury then it may still be a net-negative." People don't in the real world just eat fiber by itself, fiber comes in food that has lots of other stuff in it. Same for EFAs, same for saturated fats etc. Sure, you can actually buy direct fiber and fish oil supplements, but the reality is only a small minority of people are ever going to get their nutrition in pills/powders/liquids that are a concentrated source of one single thing. And even those people will continue to eat real food due to the necessity of you know, eating real food, and the interplay between those and the direct supplements of specific nutrients is poorly understand (essentially it's never been researched.)

My guess is that with nutritional science, just like with many other sciences, poor understanding of statistical tools is a big factor in such ragged advancement of knowledge.  Statistics is probably the most susceptible science to the "know enough to be dangerous" phenomenon.  Then there is also the publication bias, when only significant results get published, and what may get published is that 1 study out of 20 that shows a significant result at a 95% confidence level.

[jimmy olsen]

I used to eat a lot of sausages, but I'm much more of a chicken guy these days.

[mongers]

I used to eat a lot of sausages, but I'm much more of a chicken guy these days.

Enough about your sexuality. 

[Ed Anger]

Dammit, not fast enough.

[mongers]

Dammit, not fast enough.

Well you could have spent some extra time making a better joke, fish involved perhaps.

[DGuller]

That was my thought process as well.  I was trying to find a way to replace chicken with fish, because chicken just doesn't work.  Can't even make a Brain reference with that.  I decided to pass after some serious deliberation. 

[Eddie Teach]

I think you just leave it open-ended. We don't really want to know what he does with the chicken anyway.