So-called cured meats have been preserved and flavored by the addition of various combinations of salt, nitrates, nitrites, and sugar. Examples of such processed meats include bacon, ham, prosciutto, corned beef, pastrami, and pepperoni. “Cured meat intake, a typical food in industrialized societies, has been associated with many chronic diseases, including lung cancer and COPD, but its association with asthma remained unclear,” study leader Dr. Zhen Li told Reuters Health in an email. Li is a researcher at Inserm and Paul Brousse Hospital in Villejuif.
Bacon is fried up in a pan in a kitchen
As reported in Thorax, the research team had data on 971 adults from five French cities who answered questions about diet, weight, and asthma symptoms between 2003 and 2007. On average, participants ate 2.5 servings of cured meats per week. Just over 40 percent of the participants said they had had asthma at some point, and around half said they had never smoked. Each participant was assigned an asthma symptom score, ranging from zero to five, based on difficulty breathing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath during the previous year.
Follow-up surveys completed between 2011 and 2013 showed that about half of the participants had no changes in their asthma scores, over one-fourth said their symptoms had improved and about 20 percent felt their symptoms had gotten worse. After accounting for other factors such as smoking, physical activity, age, other dietary habits, and education, researchers found that participants who ate the most cured meat (four or more servings per week) were 76 percent more likely to see a worsening of symptoms compared to those who ate the least (less than one full serving per week).
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