Member-only story
Hot Dog Fan? Jerky Fan? Check This!
A Bite-Size Read for Your Health and Waistline
Listen…everyone likes a hot dog at the family barbeque and at the ballpark! In the off-season, maybe you’ve been enjoying some jerky or smoked meats. Either way, foods like these have gotten a bad rap. Admittedly, I’ve contributed. In my other article on hot dogs, I mentioned nitrates and nitrites should be avoided. Other times, I’ve talked about the benefits of them! It can be confusing, so let’s clear it all up.
First, a quick foundation of definitions. Nitrates are chemical compounds containing both nitrogen and oxygen, while nitrites are formed by the oxidation of ammonia and nitrobacter bacteria. In normal words, both happen naturally in the nitrogen cycle. Nitrates combine nitrogen and oxygen to be NO3, which plants need to grow. Nitrites combine nitrogen and oxygen to become NO2, which is what you’ll find in food preservatives.
Whether nitrates and nitrites are helpful or harmful comes down to two factors: the source (being either natural or man-made) and the nutrients they’re paired with (like proteins and certain minerals). When humans first discovered how to produce nitrates and nitrites synthetically is where we started to run into problems.
The first red flags around nitrates and nitrites came in the 1960s when food manufacturers used them to cure…
