Leave My Bangers Alone

They are coming for your sausages.

Regular meat-eaters are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions than those who shun or ration animal products, a study has found.

The research from the University of Oxford found a meat-lover who eats 70 grams of meat  — processed or unprocessed — more than a peer is at 15 per cent higher risk of heart disease, 30 per cent more likely to get diabetes and almost a third (31 per cent) more likely to develop pneumonia in the future.

You know what? I’ll take the risk. I’d rather live a shorter life and enjoy it than live forever on a diet of cardboard. Life is all about risk. I take a risk every time I straddle a motorcycle. I take a risk every time I step outside my front door. I take a risk with every breath I take.

So, I’ll have my sausages, bacon, red meats and whatever else I damned well please.

This suggests some of the correlation between meat and health problems is caused by overweight or obese people — who are at increased risk of health conditions due to their weight — that eat a standard amount of meat.

Repeat after me, correlation is not causation.

As a result, it is hard to say how much eating lots of meat directly causes health concerns or if it is a case of people who eat meat are more likely to be fat and therefore more at risk of these same health concerns.

The whole thing is bollocks, then.

 

31 Comments

  1. A relative risk of 1.3! Basically bugger all then. What’s betting the confidence levels had to be set very low to even get those paltry numbers.

  2. Latter-day puritans: if you enjoy it or it makes you happy, it must be banned or at least severely discouraged.

    Bollocks (vegan, of course) to ’em all.

  3. “a standard amount of meat” reminds me of this quote –

    ‘It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week.’ George Orwell, 1984.

  4. Someone suggested a tee shirt slogan: “Make 1984 fiction again.”
    A good slogan with a nod to the bad orange man.

  5. The correlation they never mention is that people classed as overweight in the new NHS approved BMI charts are:
    a) Likely to live longer than those classed as normal weight – (big clue here)
    b) More likely to survive an encounter with OURNHS or surgery
    ( Its almost as if animals with sufficient fat reserves to carry them through bad times will live to see another season)

    • Quite so, accepting that there are a host of factors affecting a person’s health, in terms of BMI, the morbidity / mortality U curve bottoms out close to a BMI of 28. The risk for “normals” and mildly obese is about the same. It is only the morbidly obese and anorexics who are at significantly greater risk.

  6. The war on meat continues, softening us up for a diet of plants and edible insect dishes.
    There is a bakery in Wales which produces biscuits using ground crickets – featured on Beeb’s The Food Programme a few years ago; around the same time the Beeb had another radio programme featuring savoury dishes where the meat substitute was insects.
    Beetle Biriyani, anyone? And if you fancy a tasty snack:

    https://www.eatgrub.co.uk/shop/

  7. You know what? I’ll take the risk too. I’d rather enjoy life

    Bacon – yummy

    Morrisons “The Best” sausages are very good and imo better than Hecks

  8. I think that the inability to get on with your own life and leave other people alone to get on with theirs is a serious personality flaw. There always seems to be someone telling you what you should eat, what you should drive, how much exercise you need to be doing, how you should heat your house and on and on. I’d like to be able to stick them all on an island somewhere and make them live by their own rules.

  9. Give up anything and everything pleasurable and you’ll live to a grand old age. Then you’ll be on your death bed dying of nothing.

    • “…Give up anything and everything pleasurable and you’ll live to a grand old age…”

      Actually, you probably won’t, but it will seem like it.

  10. It was quite depressing to see this “research” printed yesterday in so many of the UK/s media. In each case it was just written up as fact – no attempt to seek a counter point or challenge what is at best dubious claims was made.

    Such is the state of British journalism at the moment. So much is just lazy copy/pasting

    • The copy and paste journalism always reminds me of the scene out of the Life of Brian where there is a guy outside the stoning venue selling stones that he has just picked up off the ground.

      • I knew someone who sent good money to a ‘fortune teller’ for one of her lucky stones.
        He couldn’t be convinced that she’d just gone down to the local beach.

  11. Lincolnshire sausages are very nice. Those are the ones we choose to eat, with bacon and eggs of course. Tough we used to call them erren when I was a boy.

  12. As my late father always advised, “If you don’t drink, don’t smoke and don’t go with mucky women, you won’t live any longer, it’ll just feel like it”.

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