After reading this study, you will never look at a pork chop the same way again.

 

 The pink colour of ham is not natural, it is due to a food additive known as E250: nitrite salt. It is a mixture of salt and sodium nitrite. Before cooking, the meat is pricked to inject nitrite salt and preserve its beautiful pink colour which gives it a fresh appearance. Without nitrite, the meat would have a rather gray color after cooking like roast pork. Without this pink colour, manufacturers claim that no one would buy ham.

Nitrite, a carcinogenic additive

This food additive is suspected of playing a role in the development of one of the most common cancers, colorectal cancer. This is because nitrite molecules react with the proteins in the meat. This chemical reaction gives rise to nitrosamines, which are extremely dangerous and genotoxic chemical compounds, which means that they can cause DNA damage and mutations, break down the structure of cells and consequently promote the development of cancer cells. According to scientists, this kind of damage can appear very quickly during a large consumption of meat. Nitrites have also been classified as carcinogenic by the WHO.