Smoking sausages is bad for you.

by Rick Johansen

I am very concerned about the latest health warnings around the consumption of certain types of food. From what I can tell, it is not advisable to smoke 20 sausages a day. Or was it rashers of bacon? Anyway, the point is that it all gives you cancer. At least until next week when a report will appear in the Daily Express – where else? – that actually chomping your way through a pack of Bowyers finest adds years to your life, prevents Alzheimers and puts up the price of houses. Who do you believe these days?

A little bit of what you fancy, my granddad always said, does you good. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, especially if you fancy a bread and dripping sandwich, but I suppose as long as you don’t dine out on lard every day of the week, you should be okay. I could never do a little bit of what I fancied, especially on the food front. I could not possibly eat a bag of chips or a hot dog without the word large appearing before them.

I have conducted some research on this report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and it turns out that by eating industrial sized portions of bacon and sausages on a daily basis – “an astonishing amount”, say scientists – you increase your lifetime risk of getting cancer from 6% to 7%. This equates to an increased risk of around 16%. It does not mean you’re 16 times more likely of getting cancer, which was what I took the Daily Mail story to mean (I should have known better).

Tucked away in the story was the revelation that in fact alcohol was much more bad for me than a bacon sarnie. This was doubly shocking as I had literally just poured out my first red wine of the evening. I had been following some Express advice from last years which suggested red wine was actually good for me and acting on it with relish. To resurrect a very old joke, mu uncle once told me that he had been told by his GP that drinking three beers a day would reduce his chances of having a heart attack by 50%, so he was instead having six beers a day to eliminate the chances altogether. You can’t fault that logic, can you?

We do need to heed these warnings and not just make very cheap jokes about them, but there is something else. All the evidence suggests that if you give up alcohol, smoking, sex and now sausages and bacon, you might not live any longer but it will certainly feel like it.

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