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Food

The World Health Organization Says Hot Dogs Are Giving Us Cancer

Bacon—along with sausages and pretty much all processed meat—increases your chance of getting bowel cancer.
Photo via Flickr user eric molina

Read: This Guy's Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years

On Monday, the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer released a report saying that there is "sufficient evidence" that processed meats such as bacon, sausage, hot dogs, ham, beef jerky, and lots of other delicious forms of flesh increase the risk of bowel cancer, according to Reuters.

The WHO report, which was drafted by 22 international experts, makes a clear case for processed meats being "carcinogenic for humans" and says that eating the equivalent of two slices of bacon a day raises your chance of getting cancer by 18 percent. It also says that regular old red meat will probably fuck you up pretty bad too, classifying it as "probably carcinogenic."

The meat industry was less than enthusiastic about the WHO panel's findings. "We simply don't think the evidence support any causal link between any red meat and any type of cancer," Shalene McNeill of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association told the Washington Post.

Ultimately, the WHO study doesn't suggest cutting all red meat out of your diet, just to maybe try and rein it in a bit.

"For an individual, the risk of developing [bowel] cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed," WHO's Dr. Kurt Straif said.

That makes sense. Kobayashi is probably fucked, though.