May 11, 2014: Mother's Day Bacon, and "Is Bacon Healthy?"

MY LIFE WITH BACON continues this week with a review of Boar's Head "SLICED BACON" on Mother's Day, and a brief tease about the question of the day.

BACON IN THE NEWS starts off with a Wall Street Journal article of last week, entitled "The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease".

In it, the author takes a look back at the history of the "low fat" movement's science (or questionable science).  It is a classic case of 'confirmation bias' - the original researcher (in the 1950's) simply used the data that supported his thesis - that saturated fat causes heart disease.  He ignored data that didn't support that conclusion.  Then, multiple studies of dubious quality through the 1970's came to his same conclusion: basically, that eating saturated fat causes cholesterol to go up and causes heart disease.  Here's a key quote from that article"

"Too much institutional energy and research money had already been spent trying to prove Dr. Keys's hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense."

The goose was cooked.  Everyone believed that eating fatty and cholesterol-laden foods give you high cholesterol and heart disease.  Remember "Stop the Insanity" with that crazy lady, Susan Powter? Eveyone bought in.  Hence the advent of Lipitor and statin drugs, which some people believe are a big mistake.  Guys like Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple...


I get comments and questions all the time:

• "I hope you're on cholesterol medication."
• "With all that bacon, your arteries must really be clogged."
• "You really have to be careful, eating bacon isn't healthy."
• "Isn't bacon bad for you??"

Of course, just as people still think that butter and eggs are bad for you, they couldn't be further from the truth.  For some people, eating a paleo-type diet is much more healthy.  In a future post, we'll go into this in a lot more detail, but for now, if you want to do some reading, here are a couple of good links.  Start with the WSJ article, linked above, and then read an article about which I've written before on the 10 reason's bacon is healthy, and reasons not to worry.  Believe me, there are many naysayers, and I'll try to give the future argument equal treatment.  Stay tuned, the science is NOT settled on this yet (at least not in the public eye.)

MAPLE OAT NUT SCONE AND BACON was what I gave my honey this morning for Mother's Day.  Happy Mother's day to all mothers present and past!   I got up a little early, and baked her the scone which appears at the top of this post, and of course, bacon to go with it.  Maple icing and bacon sure do go together well.  The recipe for the scone came from here.  It's a replica of a long-out-of-production scone that Starbucks sold, but discontinued for some odd reason.  Good stuff!

ON TO THIS WEEK'S BACON:

BRUNKHORST'S BOAR'S HEAD SLICED BACON

The packaging was attractive.  Nice colors, and the bacon looked great through the 'window'.  The package doesn't say it's smoked, and I actually detected a slight smokiness in the aroma, but very faint.

The package label was one pound, and I got .4 ounces extra.  Post cooking, the bacon weighed in at 4.1 ounces, and produced a typical 150ml of rendered fat.

Quality control on the thickness was an issue, with some very thin slices, causing a loss of slice integrity while cooking.  But the good news was that the bacon did not have a high stickiness quotient, so flipping the bacon was easy, even with the thinner slices (although a few came apart).  The slice thin-ness caused me to prep the bacon in two batches; the photos are of the first batch only.

Flavor was blah - rate it at 2.25, below average.  It's crispiness was just ok, 2.5 and very little succulence, rating of 2 out of 5 in that category.  This was meh bacon.  I wouldn't throw it out, but it's on the lower end of the scale.  See you next week!