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The inflated price is enough to make you lose your mind — but wait, there’s more.
The millions of New Yorkers who start their day with a bacon, egg and cheese won’t love this news — a new study has linked consumption of the beloved Big Apple breakfast with an heightened risk of dementia.
A team of researchers — primarily from the Harvard School of Public Health — recently broke the latest bad news about bacon, cornerstone of the iconic handheld meal, after analyzing a pair of studies dating back as far as 1976 and involving roughly 170,000 nurses and other health professionals.
The focus of the study, publishing in the Feb. 11 issue of Neurology, was to clarify the link between all red meat intake and overall cognitive health.
Overall, the findings won’t cheer up any dedicated carnivore. But for lovers of processed pig, the news is particularly painful.
To conduct their research, the experts took a look at two different, decades-long studies, beginning as far back as 1976 and involving in the neighborhood of about 170,000 mentally-sound nurses and other healthcare pros.
Many years and many crunched numbers later, processed meats like bacon, hot dogs, sausage and ham were called out for increasing the risk of cognitive decline and dementia by 13% in study participants who averaged just 0.25 servings per day, according to an analysis of the study published by Eating Well.
According to the American Psychological Association, cognitive function is defined as “the performance of the mental processes of perception, learning, memory, understanding, awareness, reasoning, judgment, intuition, and language.”
Dementia, as defined by the Alzheimer’s Association, is “a general term for loss of memory, language, problem-solving and other thinking abilities that are severe enough to interfere with daily life.”
Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia, the organization said.
The solution to your breakfast problem, however, could be waiting behind the same deli counter — the study also suggested that this increased risk could be reversed by replacing bacon with another NYC favorite, salmon (or any fish, really).
“Replacing one serving per day of processed red meat with a serving of fish was associated with a 28% lower risk of dementia and 51% lower risk of subjective cognitive decline,” Eating Well reported.
Don’t start eating a lot of lox, though, if you can even afford to do so nowadays — nutritionists, while praising salmon’s nutritional benefits, also caution against overconsumption of the smoked variety, due to the high sodium content.
The bad bacon news comes as processed meats have already taken a considerable beating from health experts.
The World Cancer Research Fund recently linked consumption with an uptick in cancer rates among young people, for example.
