Monday 5 November 2012

Bacon Vs Bread

I'm pretty sure that I read recently an article about how we should limit bacon because of it's high levels of salt. The article pointed out that bacon is one of the foods high in salt that we often eat, along with bread. It's easy to find articles that say we should limit salt/sodium in our diets but I don't think I've ever seen the recommendation that we should not eat bread the way they tell us not to eat bacon.

The truth is that many people eat bread daily. It's not uncommon for a person to eat a couple of slices at breakfast (toast for breakfast) and then another couple at lunch (sandwich), and that's a conservative estimate for the amount of bread many eat. It's certainly about what I used to eat. Bacon however is something that few people eat daily.

According to fitday.com a slice of white bread has about 141mg of salt, so about 282mg of salt in one sitting, or nearly 4000 in a week.

A slice of medium bacon is 184.8mg, so a couple of rashers in one sitting is about 370mg. So although there's more salt per slice, who eats four rashers of bacon a day?

Again according to Fitday bacon has more protein and fewer calories (more fat, but depending on source it's not such a bad thing) and bread has more carbs. But then no one has dry toast for breakfast, there's always at least some kind of spread and usually some jam or honey or other spread. So by the time you've added spread fat-wise they're probably about equal. So bacon gives you less salt, more protein and less carbs. The only problem is that bacon is more expensive.

Most importantly bacon is tasty. More tasty than bread. Most bread. Actually the best bacon will always beat the best bread, even if the best bread will beat poor bacon taste-wise. To me anyway. So in bread Vs bacon - bacon wins, just don't eat it like it's going out of fashion. Apart from anything variety of diet makes it's better nutritionally and taste-wise.

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