Dosage and context are important.
Eating 10 tins of Spam a day - not healthy and possible carcinogenic risk.
Eating bacon or a ham sandwich in moderate amounts and frequency- not a problem
Those Fray Bentos cans are lethal - my fingers still bear the scars!
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Mine too!
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Yes, Liam, I am addicted to McDonald’s Happy meals & their breakfast meals.
Chicken nuggets, fries, fruit bag & a fresh orange drink, plus an adult coffee.
Breakfast, an egg mcmuffin, no cheese, a pineapple stick & a coffee.
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Fill yer boots Tiff.
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Convenience food is destroying traditional values.
People need to get back to the old ways.
A cow in the back yard milk and cheese, chickens for eggs and meat.
A mill on the nearest river to grind wheat for flour.
Potatoes silverbeet carrots in garden. Fruit trees.
Get back to nutritious tasty traditional meals like gruel, tripe and onions, black pudding, and delicious desserts like sago, prunes molasses and hard tack biscuits.
It would have to be an exceptional situation for me to buy a takeaway these days, I would have to be desperate to eat and unable to cook, it’s a last resort, so that’s not a choice. Maybe worth defining what “fast food” means on this thread.
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See, if you cook a tasty burger at home, put a cheese slice on it, some red sauce and encase it in a bun. that’s Ok, if you buy a Cheese burger from a well known “Fast Food” restaurant you are a slob. 
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how often you buy takeaway wasn’t really my point.
My point was that there are lots of takeaway fast food options and if people want to go low carb, as it seems yo u were saying you do, then there are options for that.
as we ll as for other dietary requirements like vegetarians, for example.
Fast food to me is any pre prepared food in a ready to go format
May not apply to you, but many people consume bacon, ham and other processed meat on a daily basis,the amount of nitrites/nitrates they are ingesting are proven carcinogenic.
I think with bowel cancer you can offset the risk if you have an otherwise healthy lifestyle and diet and if you aren’t at risk because of your family history. According to the cancer sites 50% is caused by a high fat low fibre diet, smoking, drinking, obesity a sedentary lifestyle. The other 50% you can’t influence (e.g. your genes). I’m slightly worried as they found and removed some non cancerous polyps a couple of years ago. They have much better diagnostics these days so they expect bowel cancer to fall in future.
well that is what I said - context and dosage.
If people are consuming lots of processed meats on a daily basis obviously that is increasing their frequency and may present an increased risk - ie dosage
How much of a risk also depends on other things - family history, smoking, other dietary factors etc - ie context.
For most people, eating sensible amounts in moderation is OK.
Well they say it’s increasing at an alarming rate, particularly among young people which didn’t happen previously.
This is both in the UK and the USA.
I expected to find the same, but was looking at the Cancer research site and was surprised to see a different view.
Any interesting breakdown of the causes :
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Living here it’s a two hour drive to the nearest McDonalds so whenever I get the chance ie about once per year I enjoy a McDonald’s.
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who are ‘they’?
Annie’s post says otherwise for UK and this link says otherwise for Australia - scroll down to Figure 2 - rates have fallen slightly since 1982 https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/cancer-types/bowel-cancer/statistics
Even if rates were increasing, which I cant see any evidence for such - that doesnt meant processed meats are the culprit, unless there was also evidence that processed meat consumption had increased and all other known factors (smoking, obesity, aging population etc) had not
The effect of eating red meat or processed meat intake is here
not related to this thread but interesting nonetheless :
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In my opinion: no.
Why? In case you have good reasons to die sonner than later, then yes. Otherwise no.
Simple if you aksked me (being 95% vegan)…
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Personally I would rather eat and drink what I enjoy rather than live a few years longer eating miserable tasteless healthy food that I don’t enjoy. Life is short enough as it is without making it miserable too.
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It’s interesting that my vegan/ veggie friends have been very unlucky with their health problems. I have a very strong suspicion that soy is not good for man nor beast. I would love to be veggie or vegan for ethical reasons but whenever I have tried I feel very unwell. I decided to do veganuary a couple of years ago and it took me a long time to lose the stone I put on from veggie ready meals. They are full of fat, salt and goodness knows what else.