Processed meats
- Examples include bacon, sausage, hot dogs, pepperoni, prosciutto, beef jerky and salami, meats often preserved by curing, salting or smoking, or with chemical preservatives.
- Research has found that eating 50 grams of processed meat—the equivalent of four strips of bacon or one hot dog—every day increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent.
- If you do eat processed meats, look for nitrate- and nitrite-free versions, which don’t have added preservatives, Langlois says.
Salt-cured meat or fish and pickled foods
Salt-cured fish, which is popular in China, is high in nitrates and nitrites — known carcinogens in animals that may also cause cancer in humans. The chemical compounds can damage DNA, spurring head and neck cancer.
According to Cancer Research UK, "People from China, or with Chinese ancestry living in the UK, have higher rates of nasopharyngeal cancer than other ethnic groups. This might be due to their diet."
Eating lots of pickled foods can also up your risk for stomach cancer.
Processed white flour
Oprah famously lost a lot of weight by cutting out anything white, especially the big culprit – white flour. You may have heard it’s bad for you, but you probably don’t realize that chemically-bleaching flour with chlorine gas kills all of it’s healthy nutrients. Chlorine gas can be deadly when inhaled, so why would we want it in our dinner? White flour also contains a high glycemic rate, which raises blood sugar and insulin levels and can directly cause diabetes. Cancerous tumors feed on sugar in the bloodstream, so by avoiding refined grains like processed white flour, you can avoid or starve deadly tumors.
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