I thought I'd heard it all. Clearly, I hadn't. We live in a day and age where there is a new diet concept almost every week. Some have a small amount of logic to them and others are just asinine.
Despite the debate that me and fellow elitefts™ columnist Alexander Cortes had a couple days ago, bacon in no way, shape or form could, ever, or will be seen as a healthy food. Yes, it's about the most awesome creation of a small amount of protein and incredibly sumptuous fat that most of us have ever satiated our desires with (minus maybe foie gras, but I digress). But making the argument that bacon is healthy is probably more about the love of arguing than it is about whether a food is actually healthy or not. Still, the lesson learned here is that Alexander opened up the floodgates with a post on nutrition with people who, though they might be good debaters, are certainly not well versed in nutrition.
Because I was on a deadline and didn’t have the opportunity to jump into the ignorant chaos of this debate on Facebook, I'll give my response now as to why the intellectually exempt responses were nowhere near factual or well articulated, which is odd considering that at least a couple of the people arguing were intelligent. One was a med student presumably wanting to prove that by being a med student, he is well versed on any and all things related to the body. This would be analogous to my daughter, who is a sophomore in high school right now and wants to be a chiropractor, lecturing me on why my test levels are low at 44-years old. Sometimes, it's wise for people to focus on their scope of practice and not be overcome with arrogance thinking that they have answers to things they know little about.
In reality, there isn't anything about bacon that is healthy. There is literally no benefit from eating bacon other than the orgasmic feeling you get from the taste of over salted, greasy, messy awesomeness. The protein is minimal and, when I say minimal, it's probably on par with the protein content of Jell-O (exaggeration here, so if you're getting riled up and wanting to argue, don’t bother). The sodium content alone should be an obvious sign that this food isn't a great idea whether you have healthy blood pressure or not. It would be healthier to lick a salt block.
Yes, bacon has B vitamins, but these are comparable with beef, and with beef, you have a variety of options to choose from that provide much higher protein content with much lower fat content. The phosphorus and choline content of bacon is yet another weak argument. Eating bacon because you need phosphorus or choline is what would be referred to as one of those asinine arguments I alluded to earlier. What I find quite ironic is that one of the main causes of a phosphorus deficiency is alcoholism while one of the main causes of choline deficiency is liver damage. Using the same asinine logic when arguing that bacon is healthy for you, you might say that eating bacon might help you if you were an alcoholic with liver damage. However, using this logic would be, well, illogical considering the better option might be to quit drinking instead. Logic, however, isn’t always ample in supply during an internet debate.
Nitrates and nitrites? Nah, those aren’t a problem if you don’t overcook or burn the bacon, right? It has even been recommended that you cook the bacon in the microwave for this reason. WTF? Bacon blasphemy. Who cooks bacon and eats it soft and gooey? If I'm eating bacon, I'm cooking it crisp and the thought of cooking it in the microwave is about as appealing to me as a limp dick is to a cock gobbling nympho. Not exactly living up to expectations.
Bacon provides energy. That is about it. This one is a big “duh.” Fat is energy, so yeah, it clearly is an energy source. And so are French fries, trans fats, and Twinkies. This is the same logic as saying that if you have heart problems, you should start drinking a lot of red wine. Where do these people come from?
One of the arguments was that butter isn't any better than bacon. Let’s take a closer look. Bacon comes from a pig and, as Jules so poignantly pointed out in the Bonnie situation: “A sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie. I’ll never know ’cause even if it did, I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I don’t wanna eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense to disregard its own feces.”
I'm with Jules on this one. Not only do they roll around in their own shit all day, but they are fed as much corn as they can eat. Why? To fatten them up of course. If you don’t know why corn-fed meat isn't all that great of an option for you, you probably shouldn’t be on the side of the argument saying that bacon is good for you. I would assume that antibiotic use would have to be much higher in pigs than other animals based on the filth they live in. I could be wrong, but this seems like a logical hypothesis, though I don't stand strongly on this opinion, because I don’t know for sure. There are mixed reports depending on whether you talk to pro-porkers or anti-porkers. Yes, I'm witty like that.
Butter bad for you? People in the nutrition industry (and bodybuilding nutrition industry) tend to understand that the healthier options for beef, poultry, and dairy come from grass-fed animals. If you don’t, again, you probably should do more listening and research than arguing and debating on the internet. Butter from a grass-fed cow would be an option that I would take over bacon in a heartbeat for the aforementioned reasons listed above.
Here's the bigger part of the problem as I see it. People tend to classify a food as “healthy” or “unhealthy” based on whether they'll have a positive or negative response to eating a small portion of it. An example is an artificial sweetener. If you eat a small amount of an artificial sweetener, the chance of getting cancer is low, much like smoking one cigarette or drinking a small amount of diluted water in a swimming pool. Anyone care to drink straight chlorine? How about smoke three packs of cigarettes a day? A small amount of arsenic won’t do much of anything to you, either. Or so my wife says...
Eat a pound of bacon a day for a while and see what happens. Eat a couple quarter pounders a day and see what happens over time. If it isn’t good for you in larger portions, it isn’t good for you in smaller portions. Now, if your argument is that it won’t kill you, you win. It might not kill you, and even if it does over time (and bacon might contribute just like a fast food burger might if you eat enough of them over time), I won't argue that. My point to this rant is simple—bacon, even in small amounts, isn't good for you or healthy. And arguing that it is…all together…is asinine.
I've said it a million times and I'll say it again. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. It's just that some opinions are credible and might have a lot of experience behind them and others might not have a damn thing behind them. The problem with the internet is that you don’t know who you are arguing/debating with. It could be that you're having an exchange with a very experienced and knowledgeable person. Usually, though, when something sounds absurd and illogical, it’s just someone who has enough knowledge and has read a couple “studies” to be dangerous.
For people like myself, nutrition is my career. It's how I feed my kids, it's how I make my house payment, and it's how my wife is able to pour Bud Light down her white trash throat on a Saturday night while she's out whoring with her cougar BFFs. So when I see or hear someone ranting something stupid on the internet about nutrition, I turn into a “mushroom cloud layin’ motherfucker motherfucker. Every time my fingers touch brain, I’m superfly TNT. I’m the guns of the Navarone.” Just sayin’.
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