Cured Meat: Curse or Cure?

Nitrites and Nitrates have been vilified, but they've been used for 1000s of years.

I was never convinced meat was inherently unhealthy, but anti-meat propaganda did get me to avoid cured meat for years, then one day I realized that people have been curing meat for centuries, basically using the same method we use today - i.e. adding nitrogen in the form of nitrate to meat, which is converted by bacteria within the meat into nitrite. The nitrite acts as an antioxidant, dries out the meat and inhibits the growth of bacteria.

The Phoenicians, Romans and Ancient Greeks used various naturally occurring nitrate salts to cure their meat going back 1000s of years. 

However, like so many other things that people have done for millennia, curing meat was singled out as harmful in the last century when Big Business and Big Government started to meddle with what people since time immemorial knew to be true about nutrition and health. Studies seemed to show a correlation between meat consumption, especially processed meats, and various chronic diseases. It was postulated that the harm came from nitrosamines that were formed by the combination of nitrites/nitrates with amino acids when the cured meat was cooked. 

However there are some inconvenient holes in this theory. 

First nitrites & nitrates are much more common in plants than in meat. And many plants also contain amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, so cooking them should also form the supposedly harmful nitrosamines. Yet plants aren’t demonized like meat is.

We also need nitrites/nitrates to form nitric oxide, which is an essential signaling molecule and very important for vascular health. In fact nitrates are the name of an entire class of medications with nitrate in them, that are used for heart disease to increase the bodies nitric oxide levels.

But perhaps the biggest reason this theory of nitrites/nitrates in meat being harmful holds no water is that our own bodies make far more of the supposedly harmful nitrosamines than we can ever possibly eat. 

So basically it was a bad psyop all along that collapses under the most cursory examination (and yet there are so many of these types of dysinformation psyops out there no one has time to examine them all and they mostly go unnoticed).

If there is no coherent theoretical mechanism for harm and many different people have done it forever it’s likely that any signal you find in a study is from systemic bias (Ioannidis, 2005). 

There is clear anti-meat bias in the scientific establishment because the government funds most science and the government needs science that helps it to cover up and minimize the inflation it causes by printing too many dollars.

As inflation causes the prices of healthy food to climb and normal people can no longer afford it, the government is incentivized to convince everyone that it’s not actually good for you anyway, which is why in 1966 then US president Lyndon Johnson called the Surgeon General and said he needed some “science” showing that eggs were bad for you.

Shortly thereafter the media spread the myth that cholesterol and therefore eggs high in it, were bad. Many generations of Americans were thoroughly convinced that not only were cholesterol and saturated animal fats bad, but that cheap grains, seed oils and sugar were good. 

So now I have a useful rule of thumb: if government funded science (most science nowadays) says anything it’s almost always, if not always, agenda driven, statistically manipulated garbage that is very likely to be in gross error. 

A few minutes on the search engine of your choice is usually long enough to discover the truth, unless its a topic that really scares the establishment like an unusually effective therapy that threatens Big Pharma profits (I’ll be writing about one of those for heart disease soon so stay tuned and subscribe if you haven’t don’t do so already). 

While nitrites and nitrates appear to be benign (and perhaps even health promoting via nitric oxide), it’s important to acknowledge that not all processed and preserved meats are created equal.

Many processed meats are of low quality, and contain various chemicals, unnatural preservatives, colorings and flavorings that should be avoided. Some can hardly be recognized as meat during their excessive processing (highly processed foods are generally acknowledged by everyone to be less healthy than minimally, traditionally processed ones). For example there is a famous video of pink sludge making it’s way through a large factory before it ends up as sliced deli meat. I for one don’t think my final meat product should begin it’s life as a liquid pink sludge.

So curing is fine, but what about the meat itself?

That was the broader psyop, of which the nitrite/nitrate controversy was but a side note.

The primary focus was on the saturated fat in meat and animal products like milk and butter.

But we now know for a fact that all the research was severely tainted. Early research by Alan Keys was clearly cherry picked to create a false narrative.

It’s since been pretty conclusively shown that saturated fat is healthy, dietary cholesterol does not usually influence blood cholesterol levels, and moreover blood cholesterol is not the cause of coronary artery disease. It’s actually the only solution some peoples bodies can find for their badly inflamed and damaged arteries, given the bad hand they’ve dealt themselves.

People in “blue zones” who are purported to live longer than anyone else and were supposed to eat little meat, actually eat more meat than researchers let on. For example Okinawans eat more meat than their closest co-ethnic neighbors who live shorter lives. There’s evidence that groups like the 7th Day Adventists who say they don’t eat meat for religious reasons actually do. On Sardinia they don’t eat what the media portrays as a “Mediterranean Diet” - generally high in carbs and low in saturated fats. They actually eat more fish, meat, and full fat dairy products, while consuming relatively less grains than we’ve been led to believe.

But just because cured meat and meat in general isn’t inherently bad, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for a particular person either.

For example it may be better for many of the chronically ill to prioritize fatty fish over meat for their DHA content and other important nutrients. For someone who has overeaten Omega 6 rich seed oils for years they may not benefit from focusing on chicken or grain fed beef that is also rich in Omega 6 fats. For someone seriously depressed it’s usually best to avoid the meat of stressed out and depressed animals, because their psychological state also imbues their meat (stress hormones and water memory). For someone with cancer, its usually best to avoid anabolic foods like meat all together.

But in general, fresh or cured meat is an important part of a healthy, balanced diet and theres nothing wrong with enjoying it.