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If the nitrites in foods like ham and bacon cause lung damage, what about “uncured” meat with “no nitrites added”? “Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified processed meat as carcinogenic to humans.” Also known as cured meat, such as bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage, processed meat is definitively cancer-causing. What’s more,

There is a toxin in lychee fruit that can be harmful, but is it harmful only under certain circumstances? Lychee fruits have been widely used in many cultures for the folk medicine treatment of everything from farting to testicular swelling. (Arsenic, mercury, and lead are also included in many “traditional” remedies.) Lychees have also apparently

Laboratory models suggest that extreme doses of heme iron may be detrimental, but what about the effects of nutritional doses in humans? In muscle meat, there is a heme protein that contributes to, well, the meaty taste of meat. There’s also a heme protein in the roots of soybean plants that can be churned out

Is heme just an innocent bystander in the link between meat intake and breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure? In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the chair of nutrition at Harvard pointed out that many plant-based meats, such as burgers made by Beyond Meat and Impossible

The influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous intestinal virus of wild ducks. What turned a harmless waterborne duck virus into a killer? In his classic book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM, founder of NutritionFacts.org and New York Times Best-Selling author, traces the human

Clinical trials on Quorn show that it can improve satiety and help control cholesterol, blood sugar, and insulin levels. You may have heard about meats made from wheat protein (like Field Roast sausages and Upton’s bacon seitan), meats made from soybean protein (like the Impossible Whopper and Gardein’s wings), and meats made from pea protein

There are so many ways we eat potatoes—baked, mashed, hashed, fried, scalloped, roasted, and more—but should we be eating them at all? Potatoes and Diabetes In 2006, the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which had followed the diets and diseases of tens of thousands of women for 20 years, found that greater potato intake was associated

What are the effects of plant-based meats on premature puberty, childhood obesity, and hip fracture risk? As noted in an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association on plant-based meats, if you look only at the nutrition facts information for a conventional burger versus a Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger, as seen here