Interesting that cured meats are in the news as a major source of cancer. Meats like hot dogs, bacon, and ham contain about 10 parts per million of sodium nitrite as a preservative. But beets, arugula, and celery all contain hundreds of time that level of nitrites! Human saliva itself contains far more than 10 PPM of nitrite.
Some nutritional authorities claim that "vegetable nitrite" is harmless because those vegetables contain ascorbic acid which prevents the conversion of nitrite to carcinogenic nitrosamines... But so do bacon, hot dogs, and ham: The pickling solution contains ascorbic acid and has for many years.
So what is going on here? Is this just the latest of so many food scares? I have never heard of a high vegan cancer rate, and they are consuming way more nitrite than the rest of us.
