Check this out, Internet. This isn’t news, per se. It’s not like I read this and spit out my coffee with a “Holy Toledo! Processed meat is terrible for me?!” For one thing, I don’t like coffee, so I would have spit out my tea or something. For another, the old “don’t eat processed meats” story is as old as the hills. The thing that makes this noteworthy is the way the message was phrased this time, “too dangerous for human consumption.” This is one of the things that scares me most about the world we live in: there seems to be a sort of lifecycle of products in which they are invented, praised, become part of our lives, and are finally discovered to cause fatal diseases.
Lead paint, for example, stays bright and fresh looking much longer than the safer stuff, and was used just about everywhere, until it was banned in the 1970s for causing serious brain damage. The use of DDT as an insecticide won the Nobel Prize for Hermann Muller in 1948 and got sprayed over just about every plant we ate until it was banned in 1972 for causing cancer. What else is lurking in your kitchen, waiting to strike you down? I mean, it’s hard not to think like a tabloid here, but it’s true. We often find out that things are harmful to us only after they are used widely.
What’s to blame for this? Are food and other industries too willing to use risky chemicals in their products? Can we really get a safe level of “riskiness” defined when the reasons that a product might be harmful might not even occur to us for decades? Is medical research too slow to identify health risks? Too underfunded to take chances on studies of innocuous products on the off chance that they might harm us in some way we haven’t thought of yet? The only optimistic point I can think of is that this kind of medical research, this kind of thinking that things we use in our daily life might harm us in unknown ways, is relatively new, and each new discovery adds to a pool of knowledge that only grows with time. For instance, carcinogens, which are the cancer-causing substances in sodium nitrate (processed red meats), DDT, tobacco, and loads of other things, were only discovered in 1910. That’s a hundred years ago, and at least 3000 years too late to prevent humans from picking up smoking habits, but once we knew what to look for, we found it. Once we found it, we started working on banning the dangerous products. It will always be slow going, but the trick is to keep working at it. And when scientists tell you that processed meats are bad for you, remember to stop buying them.
