Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, Baconeers: bacon causes cancer.

Yup, yet another publication has thrown out a sensationalist headline with dubious findings in order to get some free press and media. This time, it’s the World Cancer Research Fund International, which we won’t link because we don’t want to give them any more publicity than we already are. We’ll go ahead and link to the study hosted by their American partner, the American Institute for Cancer Research, so you can do a deep dive yourself.



To save yourself the trouble, though, the study’s big claim is that there’s “strong evidence that consuming processed meat increases the risk of stomach cancer.” For every 50 grams of processed meat you consume per day, the risk of stomach cancer increases 18%. That’s about 3 strips of bacon.

Here, again, is the problem with making conclusive statements using tricky math like percentages: that 18% increase in risk starts from an absurdly small starting point, almost 1 in 10,000. In simpler terms: it’s analogous to saying buying a second lottery ticket doubles your chances of winning. Yes, that’s true… but it still makes your overall chances of winning the lottery really low.

Their other conclusion is that if you eat 1.5 bacon strips instead, your risk increases by 2.6% instead of 18%. But, given the misleading 18% statistic, we’ll take our chances with the extra bacon strip and a half.

So, thanks, World Cancer Research Fund International, for giving us another opportunity to prove your alarmist tactics wrong.

Make sure you eat your daily allotment of bacon today and bacon on, Baconeers.