Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuffworks dot com where smart Happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, what is sodium nitrate? It seems like lots of meats contain it? Is it in any way harmful? Sodium nitrate and it's close relative, sodium nitrite, are preservatives that you find in lots of processed meats. Stuff like salami, hot dogs, pepperoni, bologni, ham, bacon, and spam all contained. Sodium nitrate is one of the ingredients.
Fresh meats don't contain any added chemicals, So the question is why is sodium nitrate added to all these processed meats. There are two reasons for adding these chemicals. First, they preserve the color of the meat, meaning that it looks pink like spam rather than gray like a cooked hamber. Here, you've probably noticed that nearly all meats that contain sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite remain pink or red even though they're cooked during processing. These chemicals also inhibit botulism to
some degree. The jury is out on how harmful these substances are. Sodium nitrite reacts with stomach acid and other chemicals in the stomach to produce nitrosamines, which have been shown to cause cancer and animals when consumed in large quantities. However, there's not much sodium nitrate in meats, and we consume sodium nitrate from other foods as well, so it's not clear that they're harmful in the quantities we get from meat. Some people recommend that small children and pregnant women avoid
these chemicals altogether just to be safe. Since neither canned chicken nor tuna have any redness to preserve, they generally do not contain these nitrates and of other topics. Because it has staff works dot com, audible dot com is the leading provider of digital audio books and spoken word, with over one thousand titles to choose from. Audible lets
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