sorry but one hotdog a day is not a small nor moderate amount.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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I'm not a nutritional epidemiologist.
But I've started to get into learning about it in the last few months.
It's really starting to feel like this is a giant bullshit field, and as much as they are trying to find useful results, there's something severely wrong with how they seem to arbitrarily assign causality and correlation.
In a contrived example: "People who live near power lines have more cancer" - "No, poor people live near power lines because they're poor, and poor people have more cancer"
What are the kind of people that eat processed hot dogs? I can promise you they are not millionaires. I can promise you it's not people who can afford filet mignon but decide to have a steamed hot dog. It's not people who work out and take care of their bodies. It's not people who cook.
So when a study is done like this, what answer are you actually getting? probably finding out that the type of people who eat processed meat are more prone to these conditions for a variety of considerations that are just totally left out of the analysis.
Yes, poor people eat poor quality food more often but the food is bad either way.
Here's a good tip, look at allllll of the specific foods that a doctor would tell a pregnant person to avoid. Non-pregnant people should also avoid them, and processed meats have been on that list for a long time.
Well, you're right and I'm surprised I've never thought of this before.
Im so screwed.
So I have to eat raw meat?
Mett gang assemble!
7% increase of an already small chance in exchange for 1 hotdog/day doesn't sound that bad to me.
It never seems that bad unless you're in that small percent. Cancer's a damned awful way to die.
Sure but there are a ton of things, genetic, environmental, dietary, neurochemical, etc. that can contribute to the development of cancer. You can do literally everything right and end up in the exact same place as someone who did all the wrong things because the causes are innumerable and many are literally unavoidable.
Would I regret my choices if I got cancer after I did all the things the studies say would increase my odds? Of course I would. Would I regret my choices if did everything "right" and still got cancer? Of course I would. But that's because being in that position inherently biased you against your past. If I did all the wrong things I would regret that I indulged too much, and if I did all the right things I would regret that I never really indulged at all and enjoyed life fully. Either way you got shafted. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But to me it's better to just live intentionally but without having this constant concern about every single thing I eat, drink, or breath maybe, possibly, eventually contributing to developing cancer. Like I'm not about to start smoking, I rarely drink, I try to eat enough veggies, etc. because those things have much more tangible direct consequences that I'm mindful of, and I'm not about to eat a hotdog every day mostly because I'm a really good cook and that sounds sad as fuck. But the next time I do eat a hotdog, a salami, or a Reuben sandwich, I promise you that no part of my mind is going to be worrying that it will give me cancer. Constant dread is its own form of cancer and life's too short and uncertain to live with that shit 24/7.
I know these things logically. I wish I could embed them more emphatically so that articles like this don't kick up my anxiety the way they do. Thanks for putting this comment to remind me to come down from the ledge of needless dread and worry.
Worrying too much causes cancer
Well said.
Words to live by. Well put.
It’s also important to note that the studies included in the analysis were observational, meaning that the data can only show an association between eating habits and disease –– not prove that what people ate caused the disease
right. that's just about any food study! it's the trouble with the nutrition field in general
I think that if you know a person who eats a hot dog every day, you will have many other reasons to suspect that they're unhealthy.
The hot dog was an example, lunch meat is also processed and plenty of people eat a sandwich every day.
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as little as one hot dog a day
That still seems like a lot to me.
The hot dog was supposed to be an example. A more common one is lunch meat, which some people do eat every day.
hello my name is Guy Who Eats 365 Hot Dogs Per Year, I'm here for chest pain
A hot dog a day keeps the doctors employed.
I suggest you don't visit West Virginia....
Each year, West Virginians consume 481 hot dogs per capita, according to 24/7 Wall St. That means the average West Virginian eats more than one hot dog a day. Illinois locals love their Chicago dog, and they didn't even come close to West Virginia's annual hot dog consumption, hitting 317 per capita.
https://www.tastingtable.com/1887834/west-virginia-most-hot-dogs/
Coincidentally West Virginia has an obesity rate of 41%.
I feel like the west virginia statistic may be heavily biased by what a poor family might feed a child. I remember my parents using hot dogs for 'cheap' meat that could be doctored into meals that my picky toddler ass would eat.
West Virginia is what,the third poorest state in GDP per capita? The average there is poor, so yeah.
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Considering humans have been eating processed meats like these for centuries, I think I’ll take my chances.
Nitrites only date back to the middle of the 19th century.
Isolated as a pure salt, maybe. All those "uncured" varieties listing celery as an ingredient are making use of the same compound though.
We've been smoking, salting, and otherwise preserving meat for way longer than that, though. People usually died off from other things before cancer got them, that's all. The relatively high number of cancer deaths is a product of medical intervention getting so good and so widespread that we don't regularly die of sepsis from stepping on a splinter or catching communicable disease anymore.
Absolutely, fuck cancer. But cancer went from being a minor concern to a relatively common one because we conquered so many other avenues of death, systematically and carefully, until we're down to time, neglect and negligence as the three main ways humanity gets itself to the Reaper.
And our rates of intestinal cancer have been rising steadily to the point where now it's a common killer, so we've become afraid of it in our quest to live long, pain-free lives.
Things change as we learn. Why we don't use lead in our pipes anymore. Safe, biocompatible plastic only.
If the rates have been rising, wouldn’t that prove it’s not processed meats like these? It would be something that’s being introduced at a steady rate lately, not something that’s been around for centuries.
Nitrites have being slowly "introduced" at a steady rate lately
It is likely many factors at once but it's also important not to assume causation where there is a correlation. Keep in mind also our mechanism of detection is better now than it's ever been.
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Yeah, I try not to make it my entire diet, but… no pepperoni? Why live?
"As little as one hot dog a day", doesn't really strike me as a great example of a "small" amount of processed meat. I'd generally say I ate a lot of something if I had it literally on a daily basis.
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Dang, you mean to tell me that animal refuse blended into mush and saturated with salt is bad for us?!
Eh, "refuse" makes sausage sound worse than it is. In the modern world anyplace with a food inspection system will typically see sausage made from cuts of meat that are perfectly edible but don't meet the grading standards likely to sell on the shelf , or the excess pieces of muscle left over after breaking primal cuts down into smaller pieces. No one wants to buy USDA certified Meh grade steak, or a palm sized wedge of uneven thickness. So they get sent off to make hamburger, sausage, and various canned or commercial meat products that don't need to be pretty.
Processed meat also includes much more benign seeming foods, like sandwich meat, ground meats, and bacon. We've known for a while that eating meat, and more so red meat, is a risk for colon problems. Red meats are more likely to be processed and therefore cheap and salty.
The new thing the study adds is that there isn't a lower bound. For a lot of things there's a quantity that isn't associated with any issues, and it's only when you go above that limit that the risk goes up.
Truth.
Yesterday I opened a huge bung of ground beef that I got from Costco.
Fried up 1/3 of it up and when I tasted it... Damn that's f'kking bottom round roast beef 😋
Refuse? Why do you think processed meat is animal refuse?
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