To eat, or not to eat Bacon. That is the question.

I thought I would start this week with a study that is fascinating but you probably would have never heard about it. It’s not a new study but an old one. One the mainstream media never really talked about. I wonder why. 

Essentially researchers split a bunch of rats into a number of different groups with different diets. One of the groups of rats ate a diet primarily made up of bacon. Another group ate a diet of beef, another of chicken and two others with more of a processed diet including casein, olive oil, corn oil and other foods.

The rats were injected with a compound known to trigger colon carcinogenesis (the process in which normal cells turn into cancer cells). The researchers then stood back and watched how the diets played out relative to the cancer 

There were some surprising observations… 

• The chicken based diet did NOT inhibit colon cancer progression

• The beef based diet had NO EFFECT on colon cancer progression
• The bacon based diet DID inhibit the progression of cancer compared to the other diets

The bacon based diet performed better than all of the diets despite being high in sodium nitrate and other supposed carcinogens 

The researchers were baffled by this and thought that maybe it was because the bacon eating rats drank more water (mmm salty bacon) and thus the water was pronounced the hero – a pretty far stretch if you ask me 

Years later the same researchers ran a questionnaire based study plotting food frequency against colon cancer in us humans. In other words they asked those with colon cancer what they had eaten over the last 12 months. And guess what, the relationship was flipped and so called “bad’’ foods like bacon and beef got a bad wrap. While so-called “clean’’ foods like chicken were considered a healthy food. 

So we have a controlled trial that clearly shows bacon as the hero and an epidemiological study that says bacon is the villain. Personally I find a tight controlled study has far more weight to it than a study simply looking for patterns and distributions. 

In summary – EAT THE BACON.