A bit of a banger will not kill you

The new alert on the risks of eating processed meat comes from the World Cancer Research Fund, the same people who last year said we should stop eating bacon. The latest scare is based on the same studies.

Processed meat includes any that is preserved by smoking, salting and any method except freezing. It includes bacon, ham, pastrami, salami and hot dogs.

Sausages and burgers are also considered processed if they are preserved with added chemicals.

Professor Martin Wiseman, the WCRF's medical and scientific adviser, admits the only thing new is a survey showing most of us are unaware of the risk. So should we be? Sun Health asked David Spiegelhalter, Professor of Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, to analyse what the alert means.

For a man, the odds of getting bowel cancer are one in 18, and for a woman, one in 20.

But Prof Spiegelhalter points out that those are lifetime risks.

The odds of being diagnosed before your 65th birthday are 70 to one if you're a man and 90 to one for women. He calculates that if you are under 65, eating processed meat will raise your real risk by less than half a per cent.

For men under 65, the odds rise from 1.1 in 100 to 1.3, if you are a woman it will rise from 1.4 in 100 to 1.7.

The WCRF also assume we are eating 50g of processed meat every day of our lives – and Brits don't. On average we eat 31g a day – a third less than the amount the charity warns is dangerous.

Prof Spiegelhalter says if you eat a lot of processed meat, or there is a family history of bowel cancer, you may want to cut back. But you may decide the risk is relatively small, and continue to tuck in – as the Professor says he will.