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The ‘Uncured’ Bacon Illusion

posted by chromas on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:20AM   
from the Food-and-Science dept.

captain normal writes:

It's actually cured, and it's not better for you. When was the last time you read a story where the villain was celery? Pull up a chair.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-uncured-bacon-illusion-its-actually-cured-and-its-not-better-for-you/2019/04/19/0c89630c-608c-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html

The issue is that "uncured" bacon is actually cured. It's cured using exactly the same stuff — nitrite — used in ordinary bacon. It's just that, in the "uncured" meats, the nitrite is derived from celery or beets or some other vegetable or fruit naturally high in nitrate, which is easily converted to nitrite. In ordinary bacon and cured meats, the nitrite is in the form of man-made sodium nitrite. But the nitrite molecule is the same, no matter its source.

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Original Submission

• Cured != use of nitrite Cured != use of nitrite (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:32AM (2 children)

  by c0lo (156) on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:32AM (#833647) Journal

  Food preservation by curing [wikipedia.org] does not necessarily imply the use of nitrites/ates.

  Curing is any of various food preservation and flavoring processes of foods such as meat, fish and vegetables, by the addition of salt (also called sodium chloride) with the aim of drawing moisture out of the food by the process of osmosis. Because curing increases the solute concentration in the food and hence decreases its water potential, the food becomes inhospitable for the microbe growth that causes food spoilage. Curing can be traced back to antiquity, and was the primary way of preserving meat and fish until the late-19th century. Dehydration was the earliest form of food curing.[1] Many curing processes also involve smoking, spicing, cooking, or the addition of combinations of sugar, nitrate, nitrite.

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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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• Re:Cured != use of nitrite Re:Cured != use of nitrite (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:34AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:34AM (#833649)

  Sure, but in this case uncured := nitrates. It's not even wrong.

  Parent

  • Re:Cured != use of nitrite (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:41AM

    by c0lo (156) on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:41AM (#833653) Journal

    Sure, but in this case

    I wouldn't know [soylentnews.org]

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

    Parent