Go Easy on the Hot Dogs
With the baseball and grilling seasons more or less upon us, two different groups of researchers recently published studies with a common message: Hot dogs may be worse for us than we thought.
Actually, neither of these studies singled out hot dogs, but rather all processed meats, from bacon to baloney. But summer isn’t far off, and Americans eat about 7 billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day, according to industry estimates. What’s a guy supposed to munch on with his beer at the ballpark? Sushi? No one took this news harder than I did. I’ve been a devotee of the tube steak since my childhood. On more than one Thanksgiving Day, after serving roast turkey to the rest of my family, my mother would present her picky-eater son with the only dish he would deign to eat, a frankfurter on a bun. I’m not so fussy at the dinner table any more, but I still love hot dogs.
And while I’ve never kidded myself that franks and salami are healthy treats, I’ve always been able to brush aside past studies linking processed meats to cancer, since they usually involved small groups of people.
Now comes a report by researchers in France, published in the International Journal of Cancer, that’s hard to ignore. The French team, a unit of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the World Health Organization), looked at the diets of about a half-million Europeans. They found that people who eat a lot of sausage, bacon and luncheon meats increase their risk for colon cancer by about 50%.
Scientists have long suspected that eating too much meat of any kind encourages tumor growth in the gut. The French study had a twist, however: People whose meat menu is mostly limited to fresh cuts--steaks, lamb chops and veal cutlets, for instance--didn’t seem to put themselves in much danger. Eating a lot of processed meat, however, was associated with “a moderate, but significant increase in colorectal cancer risk,” according to the study.
When these findings were initially presented at a conference last summer, some scientists cautioned that a single study doesn’t exonerate fresh meat as a potential influence on colon cancer. But the study does heighten suspicions about the processed variety, in particular. (Food companies protect meat from bacteria and preserve its color by adding a form of salt, sodium nitrite, and to a lesser extent, sodium nitrate.) When nitrites hit your belly, they combine with naturally occurring compounds called amines to form nitrosamines. Studies have shown that nitrosamines cause cancer in lab animals. Despite the findings by the French scientists, however, there is still no conclusive proof that humans run the same risk by occasionally chomping on a hot dog or ham sandwich.
In the other study published last month, Harvard researchers offered the first credible evidence that eating too much processed meat may increase the risk for type 2 diabetes. The team followed more than 42,000 men, aged 40 to 75, for 12 years, periodically asking them to describe the foods they ate. They concluded that men who consumed processed meat at least five times a week were 46% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than men who rarely or never ate the stuff.
One of the study’s authors, Dr. Frank Hu, an assistant professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said that eating a lot of salty meats may simply be a sign that your overall diet stinks. After all, people who frequently feast on frankfurters, sausages and cold cuts tend not to be devotees of nutritious foods, such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
Hu suspects, however, that processed meats contain ingredients that raise the risk for type 2 diabetes. Again, the culprit may be nitrites. More study is necessary to confirm his theory, but he notes that scientists have already detected an association between nitrites and type 1 diabetes, which is the kind that most often afflicts kids.
Hu swears he isn’t out to spoil anyone’s fun at ballgames or cookouts this summer. In his study, after all, only men who ate cured meats practically every day had an increased risk for diabetes. “We’re talking about high-frequency eaters,” said Hu. “For people who eat processed meats one or two times per week this shouldn’t be a major problem.”
I asked Hu if it was OK to eat hot dogs made from chicken or turkey, but he seemed to think I was missing the point. Some chicken and turkey dogs, after all, contain nitrites. You can, however, find nitrite-free franks and cold cuts in some supermarkets and natural food stores, so you might want to check the labels. More important, Hu feels it’s wise to eat less processed meat, period, and balance your diet with fish, lean cuts of poultry and plenty of produce, of course.
In other words, it’s OK to savor a hot dog at the ballpark or enjoy a deli sandwich now and then, as long as you don’t bring home the bacon too often.
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Massachusetts freelance writer Timothy Gower can be reached by e-mail at tgower@attbi.com. The Healthy Man runs the second Monday of the month.
