Who here hates bacon? Bacon is one of the best tasting, sinfully good red meat in the planet and has been known as a notorious culprit to mankind’s obesity and health problems. People have been chasing and avoiding this food, even health experts can not hide the fact that humans have gone addicted to this that removing it from diet plans seems to be more of a suicide than of help. People have grown so much fond of eating bacon that they would just stick it with every food making everything feel and taste better. From frying to baking, pasta and salads, as a pie crust, or a flavouring to candies or I can go on with the list but you get my point, the versatility of bacon is endless.
In the early times, people have never thought of it as a bad food, bacon is just a piece of pork belly meat, cured for weeks or months to withstand spoiling and still be good after a couple of days without consumption. Bacon is usually and originally cured with lots of salt in either dry or with brine process. Preparation after this may vary from, boiling, air drying by hanging, smoking and lots more to obtain different types of texture and flavor developed. Experts in meat curation especially those who prefer smoking meticulously chose the type of wood, temperature and meat cut to achieve the supreme taste of bacon. Now we are not going to explain here on how “bacon” is made as you can just usually go to wikipedia for that.
Recent studies have shown the bad effects of red meat in the health of people and we have been accustomed and common sense dictates that all cured meats including bacon is one of them. People who wants to stay fit and wants to maintain a good figure avoid such food. This type of lifestyle is indeed a hard way to live on, deprivation of food is one thing that takes a lot of discipline to maintain. A number of things actually that sets bacon to be in the list for “food to avoid” when losing weight:
- Fat content
- Incredible taste that would make you eat more and more
- Calories in cured meats is mostly double than that of not
- Red meats are harder to digest due to lesser fiber content
In most recent studies though it was discovered that eating bacon produces or makes the body produce niacinamide or nicotinamide which is popularly known as vitamin b3 that helps in reducing cholesterol in the blood. Niacinamide has been popularly used in different health issues such as skin, anxiety and other neuro cases like Alzheimer’s disease, cancer (post-chemo recovery) and others but this breakthrough finding out that bacon would help the body produce more of this incredible chemical is amazing.
A good news indeed for most who don’t want to ditch bacon as a part of their daily diet, it is advised by medical practitioners including Dr. Oz, that the moderate eating of bacon is not bad at all. It’s just like chocolate, it may go bad if you eat too much but gives a lot of benefits if taken moderately.
Check out this infographic static that bacon is such a darling for the health :)…