While the first three have a host of well-documented attendant dangers, it appears the bacon sandwich, that class-vaulting culinary staple for the ages, may prove the most dangerous by far. A new study released in the U.K. this month has found that British consumption of processed meat (meaning bacon, sausage, ham, mince or any meat that’s been salted, cured or chemically treated) can be blamed for an increased risk of early death, heart disease and cancer.  The findings were published in the journal BMC Medicine and are based on a study tracking the diet and lifestyle of almost 450,000 people in 10 European countries for an average of nearly 13 years. Admittedly, people who ate large quantities of processed meat were also more likely to smoke, drink heavily and have an unhealthy lifestyle.

Naturally, in my home, we are ignoring this study. As the old wartime poster says, we have resolved to “keep calm and carry on”—eating bacon, that is. As the columnist Suzanne Moore tweeted last week, most Britons would “rather die” than not have a bacon sandwich. Even the Guardian, that bastion of vegetarian liberal values, ran its own analysis in the wake of Bacongate, essentially telling readers to calm down; they probably weren’t going to drop dead from scarfing the occasional packet of pork rinds. And no less than the head of the nutritional sciences research division at King’s College London raised doubts about the study. “Tobacco use is such an enormously potent factor that it contaminates the findings,” professor Tom Sanders pronounced. His point is that while the researchers may have thought they were controlling for tobacco, the fact that most of the baconaholics were also regular smokers is just too persuasive a factor to be adjusted for.