Nitrates & Bacon - What You Don't Know Will Shock You

Being the owners of a bacon specialty-foods company comes with some issues. Yep, even bacon has baggage. We've been accused of being trendy (despite the fact we started the biz without knowing about bacon salt, baconnaise, or bakon vodka), not to mention the comments we've endured about eating meat in general (see previous blog post for the benefits of eating fatty meats!). But one topic - nitrates - has been a constant concern since day one for us here at Bacon Forever. We've actually only had about a dozen people (out of thousands we've spoken to in the past year) inquire about nitrates, so really, this issue was one that concerned us more than anything. Questions we've asked ourselves since the beginning include "should we use nitrate-free (uncured) bacon despite the cost and shorter shelf-life?" and "we eat uncured at home (*at the time), why would we sell something that we don't agree with...?"

Well, to settle the issue we went ahead and did some research (in Google we trust) and were shocked at what we learned about this preservative widely believed to be carcinogenic.

We could summarize what we learned in our research, but the source of our confident conversion to using bacon containing nitrates is this detailed explanation from a great food blog, titled "Does banning hot dogs and bacon make sense?" The writer is an RN and has won awards for her health/medical-based blog.

We highly recommend it to you if you, too, are curious about the history of nitrates, why they exist both in nature and in foods like cured meats (as well as drinking water), and whether they truly are carcinogenic.