The festive season isn’t over yet – it is a time when we get together with family and friends and often have more social gatherings than during other times of the year.

Invariably, getting together involves eating and sometimes consuming excessive amounts of food, some of which might not be part of a healthy diet.

While treats and special occasion foods can add variety and enjoyment to our diets, unfortunately, eating poorly is already a daily lifestyle choice for many.

One of the items that gets a lot of bad reviews is processed meat, which has been associated with diseases like cancer and heart disease in numerous studies.

Red meat could also be another culprit. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer agency of the World Health Organisation (WHO), in 2015 convened a working group of 22 international experts to look at the issue.

Meat wheeze: consuming more than four portions of processed meat a week is a risk. Photos: Shutterstock.com

Their findings, published in the journal Lancet Oncology, found the risk of developing bowel cancer from consumption of processed meat remains small, but the risk increased with the amount of meat consumed. Each 50g portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of bowel cancer by 18 per cent.

The experts also found an association between the consumption of processed meat and pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer.

“Those who are overweight and those who are small and inactive have no room for discretionary foods, such as processed meats, in their diet,” said Bernard Stewart, a professor leading the study.

Processed meat contains many harmful chemicals that are not naturally present in fresh meat. Four or more weekly servings – considered to be a high dietary intake – seemed to have the greatest effect on symptoms, a study recently published in the journal Thorax has found.

“Eating processed meat increases the risk of life threatening diseases such as coronary artery disease, hypertension, stroke and diabetes mellitus,” said Robert Xuereb, chairman of the Department of Cardiology at Mater Dei Hospital.

Processed meat includes sausages, hot dogs, salami, bacon, ham, corned beef, luncheon meat, and canned meat. It is meat that has been preserved by curing, salting, smoking, drying or canning and contains harmful chemicals that are not naturally present in fresh meat.

“One of these chemicals is sodium nitrite which is added to preserve the red colour of meat, to improve flavour, and to prevent bacterial growth and food poisoning. Sodium nitrite damages blood vessels, making the coronary arteries more likely to harden and narrow,” explained Xuereb.

Eating a lot of cured and processed meat such as ham and salami seems to be associated with worsening asthma symptoms

He added that processed meats were also high in sodium, which contributes to high blood pressure, and in saturated fats which cause narrowing of the coronary arteries and heart attacks.

“It is highly recommended that people who base their diet on processed meat should shift their diet to obtain their protein sources from poultry, legumes and fish,” he said.

Eating a lot of cured and processed meat such as ham and salami seems to be associated with worsening asthma symptoms, according to research.

Cured and processed meat is rich in nitrites, which may have a role in airway inflammation – a typical feature of asthma.

Researchers recently used data from the Epidemiological Study on the Genetics and Environment of Asthma (EGEA), a prospective study that has been tracking asthma patients from five cities in France. The study included 971 people with a mean age of 43, of which 49 per cent were men.

Dietary intake was assessed using food frequency questionnaires. Intake of cured meat such as ham, sausage, and salami was classified as either low (less than one serving a week), medium (one to four servings a week), or high (more than four servings a week).

At baseline, 42 per cent of the participants had never had asthma, 51 per cent were never smokers, 35 per cent were overweight, and nine per cent were obese. The average cured meat intake was 2.5 servings a week. After a follow-up of seven years, 513 participants (53 per cent) reported the same asthma score as at baseline, 20 per cent had worse symptoms, and 27 per cent had fewer symptoms.

Among those who ate less than one weekly serving, the proportion of participants with worsening asthma symptoms was 14 per cent and in those who ate four or more servings the proportion was 22 per cent.

After the researchers took into account other factors such as smoking and physical activity, participants who ate the most cured meat were 76 per cent more likely to experience worsening asthma symptoms than those who ate the least.

Being overweight, which has previously been linked to worsening asthma, accounted for 14 per cent of this association. The researchers said that this suggested “a deleterious role of cured meat independent of body mass index.”

When asked for his comments, Stephen Montefort, lead consultant respiratory physician at Mater Dei, said: “This study suggests that cured meats make asthma symptoms worse and not increase asthma attacks as media has indicated. This could be due to production of nitrites that are pro-inflammatory.”

He added that “only symptom scores were used and no objective measures such as lung function tests were used”.

In fact, a good number of the subjects were not even diagnosed asthmatics, Montefort insisted.

“I feel this study is not strong enough for us to recommend stopping the ingestion of cured meat altogether to decrease asthma attacks. Too much cured meat ingestion is bad for our health for other reasons such as excessive salt intake, anyway,” he concluded.

This was an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect and the survey responses relied on participants’ memory when filling in the food frequency questionnaires.

The researchers said the symptom score may have been affected by smoking or COPD – chronic lung disease – that shares many of its symptoms with asthma.

They said that cured meat had a high nitrite content that could cause inflammation of the airways, but they added that more research was needed to help understand the potential mechanism.