also celery salt, or juice in those bougie organic hot dogs, in places like whole foods is all nitrates too. nitrate/nitrite salts have distinctive taste and smell. many orgnaic brands might have celery salt. your safe if the ingredients isnt mentioning any salts or celery.

when your heating up nitrates, it forms things like nitrosamine which have been implicated in lab studies of causing cancer in model organisms.

smoked and UNCURED meat might still have the same nitrates in them.

[–] DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

So what I'm hearing is we just need to return to tradition and start curing our own meats in our backyard smokehouses?

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Curing (removing moisture from food by means of salt) is a distinct process from smoking (adding smoke to food as well as removing moisture via heat). Curing with nitrite and nitrate based salts (sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite) is what’s been implicated in cancer.

Smoking meat is much more complicated from a chemistry perspective. Different types of wood, different temperatures, moisture content, salt content, and cooking durations can all affect the concentrations of carcinogenic compounds in the food. For example, softwoods (such as pine) tend to produce a lot of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known class of carcinogens, but thankfully softwood is undesirable as a smoke wood anyway so is rarely used.

Smoking technique can also dramatically affect the result. Poor smoking technique allows the wood to smoulder at a lower temperature, producing a harsher smoke with more carcinogenic, toxic, and bitter compounds. Expert smoking technique uses a smaller, hotter fire which produces a much cleaner smoke that also results in better flavour.

[–] DahGangalang@infosec.pub 2 points 4 hours ago

TL;DR: Cancer is coming for us all.