I understand that there would be a high fat content, but so long as it fits within your macros on a diet, why do people say to avoid them?
I understand that there would be a high fat content, but so long as it fits within your macros on a diet, why do people say to avoid them?
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Usually its the salt content. Sausage, bacon, cured ham, processed chicken, turkey etc. all use large amounts of salt in making. Salt is good for you in small amounts, but large amounts can cause increased blood
sugarpressure.As for the macros, yeah as long as it fits it’s not a problem.
High salt, high fat, and then things like nitrates
increased sodium and carcinogenic preservatives such as nitrites are usually found in high quantities in processed meats
Usually it’s the preservatives and add-ons and filler, and often time there’s lower grades and quality of the meat included in with ground meat and sausages. Back bacon on the other hand is ridiculously healthy compared to a lot of other cuts of meat. The fat itself isn’t so much as unhealthy, rather it’s the quantity and what you also eat with the fatty food. Back bacon is more meat than fat compared to regular bacon which is usually about 50/50 fat and meat.
Some people also have a digestive system that does not respond well to red meats and it’s more taxing on their body to digest and metabolize. In some cases, some people actually will have an adverse reaction to the meat because they have an intolerance to it.
Some people also have a fast metabolism and a little extra fatty food helps to contain the proteins and nutrients they eat for storage and later use, while others will just be too easily to store this food for later use and gain too much weight.
So healthy/unhealthy here is more or less subjective to a specific individual.
EDIT: I left out that many foods are grown with fungicide and herbicide use. Our gut biomes consist of a variety of bacteria and fungi, so you really have to watch out for preservatives because they are designed to keep fungi and bacteria from contaminating the food. This also leads to those same preservatives being passed into our guts and slowly killing off our own gut biome. This is why preservatives are often times regarded as so unhealthy compared to so-called other unhealthy foods.
To add to the other comments, it’s actually less about the amount of fat, since many fats are actually healthy, but about the fact that animal fats are very unhealthy.
Animal meat, especially pork and beef, has mostly saturated fatty acids which cause high cholesterol and heart failure
Macros say nothing about how healthy your diet is (unless you have beliefs about how much of each is healthy). They just divide your calorie intake, your energy, into how much you get from each source, from carbs, fats and protein. But there are differences in fats for example. Unsaturated fat is different from saturated fat. It has the same exergy content but it has different effects on your body. Some kinds of fats are considered healthier than others.
Processing of foods becomes potentially less healthy as things are added or removed from the raw materials. Bacon is mostly just cut into pieces. This sort of processing you would also do at home if you had bought a big chunk of pork. It is quite necessary so that it can be consumed. Sausages can be slightly processed or highly processed (ultra processed) since you can do a lot to the mixture that goes into the sausage.
I don’t really know why someone didn’t write the obvious yet, but saturated fat is linked to LDL which in multiple studies is shown to be an independent risk factor in cardiovascular diseases. So even if 100 grams of fat fits your macros for say weight loss, it would only be reasonable if the vast majority of that fat wasn’t saturated fat.
This is why an avocado is called a “healthy fat” in marketing, because while most of the calories in an avocado come from fat they don’t come from saturated fat. Most processed meats are full of saturated fat (in addition to other bad things like huge amounts of sodium and nitrates).
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow a macros based approach, but if you do, you should probably pay attention to the break down of those macros, and not just for fat either, you probably should consider fiber for example outside of the context of just total carbohydrates.
Quantity.
People saying it’s the salt content and such aren’t wrong but just like everything else, don’t eat it too often and it’s fine.
OP some of these comments are just plain inaccurate so I’d look somewhere other than Reddit for this info.
Nitrates in the curing salts. Is pretty much the big one. Go uncured if your that worried about it. Other issues would include things like sodium, fats, and cholesterol but those can be mitigated by not eating them all the time or in large quantities
We like to think we can examine a food and know 100% of what’s in it, but it’s just not true. You can’t eat 1 TSP of fat, 2 grams of carbs, and a B12 vitamin and get the same result as a food that has the exact same nutrient content.
Ultra-processed foods are an example of the same measurable nutrient content being much worse for you than the same nutrient content in a fresh food. Take Pringles for example. It’s just potatoes and salt…and endless processing and sitting on a shelf for weeks/months. Even if the nutrient content (or what we can measure as the nutrient content) is the same, it is much less healthy for you compared to a fresh potato and salt, even though we may not be able to “measure” exactly why.
As long as you are owner of factory and exactly know where each ingredient was bought and in which proportion it was added, and sure every one of your workers works exactly as prescribed by rules — everything is okay
But in real life situation, we just don’t know what happened to all this food during processing. Was half of filler was replaced with something cheap for sake of profit? Was worker which measure spices was in bad mood and don’t measured anything, just added twice as much salt as necessary? Is fat amount printed on label is real, or it is five time as much just because it was last chain of sausages at end of workday and they dropped into can everything they have as leftovers?
Really, any “processed” have inherent risk brought by each processing step. People make mistakes, people don’t care, people have other goals
Another part of story is taste. More tasty food we get, more chances we indulge ourselves in eating more than we planned. It is lot more easier to be firm in diet if you limit amounts on stage of cooking. But if you just needs one more slice of knife to eat another bit of perfect bacon — it became lot harder to resist