What is the increased risk from eating moderate amounts of processed meat? That’s 50 grams a day, or about 2 ounces, roughly four slices of fried bacon, every single day, for your whole life. Drum roll please… 18%. Hmm. Bacon, 18%. Smoking, 900%. Your eyes should be rolling by now. Generally any time someone tells you a risk increase that is less than 100%, you can probably ignore it. Because risks that low are rarely significant compared to the kinds of risks you happily accept already.
This does depend, though, on the base rate. For example, smoking’s +900% is the increased risk of death, period. That’s bad. But bacon’s +18% is really only the increased risk of colorectal cancer. Not “of death.” By anything. Much less the cancer. But the base rate of colorectal cancer is already really small. If it were huge—like, say, anywhere near the risk level of dying by driving—an 18% increase would be a matter of some concern. It would translate into a lot more knocked off your average expected lifespan than a year or two. But this is not the case here. Even if all colorectal cancer were fatal (it isn’t, though it’s bad enough to suffer through it, so I’ll consider that fact of little concern to your calculations), you will almost certainly never get it. No matter how much processed meat you eat (unless you eat such prodigious quantities as to be self-evidently foolish).