Damn you Greggs, that cheap morning breakfast deal with yer sausage or bacon bap and a latte for only £3 you've been condemning us all to a later life of demented misery!
It turns out that a diet high in bacon may increase your risk of dementia,
NB It's not exclusively bacon, it's the broader category of processed red meat more generally. So it's not just yer bacon that's gonna kill your brain cells, it's yer sausage too.
The data....
There's a handy data set on diet in the US in which 130K people have answered questions about their diets on a regular basis for over two decades, with an average age of 49.
Analysis of this data by a team from Harvard, MIT, and Mass General Brigham, found that those who ate two 85 gram servings of processed red meat a week had a 14% higher risk of dementia than those who ate only three such servings a month.
They also found that replacing one helping of processed meat a day with nuts, legumes, or fish would reduce the risk of dementia by around 20%.
There are a number of factors that could be behind this correlation such as:
- the preservatives used in processed meat. For example nitrites have been previously been found to be associated with neurotoxicity,
- or higher levels of salt which can raise blood pressure, which can damage blood vessels, including those in the brain.
Or this could just be spurious correlation...
Looking back at the above data that's A LOT of meat for a relatively small increase in risk... we're going from three a month to eight a month, that's almost trebling the amount to get an increase in risk of dementia of just 14%.
Or there could be a range of other factors which heavier meat eaters have in common which explains the higher rates of dementia.... compared to those practically vegetarians at the other end of the scale!
Final Thoughts...
Hmm I am not convinced about the causal link between having two bacon sarnies a week and getting dementia in daily life.
Not quite time to give up on those Gregg's breakfast deals yet!
Posted Using INLEO