This will no doubt come as great news to Muslims who find the intoxicating aroma of bacon so repulsive that they forced a restaurant owner in England to remove an exhaust fan, the fumes from which were said to be sullying the air.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has decreed that America’s favorite breakfast meat is as dangerous as cigarettes.
WHO will target other processed meats such as ham and sausage as causes of cancer and will say red meat is also hazardous to health in a ruling to be released Monday. The findings resulted from a meeting of scientists from 10 countries.
The Daily Mail reports WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer will conclude that a host of processed meats should be placed in the highest of five possible rankings as “carcinogenic to humans.”
The ranking will put burgers and bacon alongside asbestos, arsenic, cigarettes, and alcohol. The justification behind the decision, according to the Daily Mail, is that when meat is being preserved through processes like smoking, carcinogens can be added. Red meat on the other hand has been linked to bowel cancer, according to the U.K’s Department of Health.
The decision is already drawing fire from scientists and meat experts, with the North American Meat Institute claiming the the report goes against “both common sense and dozens of studies showing no correlation between meat and cancer.”
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Dr. Ian Johnson, Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Food Research, said:
Although there is epidemiological evidence for a statistically significant association between processed meat consumption and bowel cancer, it is important to emphasise that the size of the effect is relatively small, and the mechanism is poorly defined.
It is certainly very inappropriate to suggest that any adverse effect of bacon and sausages on the risk of bowel cancer is comparable to the dangers of tobacco smoke, which is loaded with known chemical carcinogens and increases the risk of lung cancer in cigarette smokers by around 20 fold.
This report, by Guy Bentley, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
