Bacon not as bad as smoking, still bad.

Ed Yong provides a useful corrective to some of the media reports about the new WHO classification of processed meats and red meats in the same carcinogenic risk category as cigarettes:

These classifications are based on strength of evidence not degree of risk.

Two risk factors could be slotted in the same category if one tripled the risk of cancer and the other increased it by a small fraction. They could also be classified similarly even if one causes many more types of cancers than the other, if it affects a greater swath of the population, and if it actually causes more cancers.

So these classifications are not meant to convey how dangerous something is, just how certain we are that something is dangerous.

However, Yong also links to this article by Cancer Research UK, which he correctly calls an exemplary example of clear scientific communication, and which makes evident that although processed and red meats together pose something like eight-fold less absolute risk than cigarettes, that’s still substantial risk.

The article also contains a helpful graphic that gives you a visual sense of what 100g of meat actually is, and how much red meat you can eat in a day and stay within the guidelines. It convinced me that I should keep an eye on this in my own diet, and if chicken versus ham is a matter of indifference to me, I ought to choose chicken.