There was good news and bad news this week for Earl Berry, a prisoner on death row in Mississippi. The convicted murderer and kidnapper was granted a last-minute reprieve by the supreme court. Tragically, though, the food Berry ordered for what he believed to be his final meal was barbecued pork chops. If only the convict had waited for the report from the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) - which fingered red meat as being almost as certain a killer as Berry himself - he would have realised that, even as he escaped one death sentence, his choice of gallows snack was condemning him to another.
Thank God, though, that the prisoner didn't opt for a bacon sandwich as his valedictory meal - according to the report, it's cured meats in particular that put the eater beyond a cure.
The cancer doctors' attack on pork also raises a dilemma for the prime minister who, according to a profile published this week, treats himself and his closest advisers to a "big plate of bacon sandwiches" for their brain-storming meetings every morning at 7.15. Now advised that, even as his brain storms, his body is sustaining a hurricane of dangerous oxidants, will Gordon Brown rethink his power breakfast?
If he did, the PM might find himself caught between the priorities of doctors and spin doctors, because there are strong signs that this medical assault on a nationally symbolic foodstuff is becoming a patriotic issue. The Sun, having previously defended sausages against the EU's banger police and eggs against their identification by Edwina Currie as a salmonella threat, has come to the aid of this third element in the Great British Breakfast, with yesterday's front-page headline: Save Our Bacon.
The complexities of this debate, however, are shown by the suggestion elsewhere that strips of sizzled pig might not be the most dangerous aspect of a bacon sandwich. Yet another nutritional report released in the past couple of days - these medical researchers are so industrious you have to wonder what they're on - warns that the addition of folic acid to food could increase the incidence of bowel, prostate and breast cancer in 20 years.
The paper, from the Institute of Food Research, challenges the view that folic acid should be added to bread to reduce the risk of birth defects. The UK's Food Standards Agency recommended recently that our daily loaves should all be "enriched" in this way.
The apparent trade-off between saving babies from spina bifida and giving adults cancer is a stark example of the way in which the health advice industry is becoming, to borrow from the plate police's apocalyptic language, a "ticking timebomb". After several decades of propaganda for the benefits of folic acid - with GPs encouraging pregnant women to knock it back - a separate set of scientists now frets that mothers, because of the precaution they took, may not live to see their healthy children grow up.
Such disagreements are most likely to have the effect of leading patients to believe that medical advice is cyclical and cynical: that, if we wait a few years, another report will come along arguing that any parent who fails to stuff junior with a bacon butty every morning is guilty of neglect. This see-saw research is now so common that a recent newspaper health supplement contained one article suggesting that middle-aged men should drink three glasses of red wine a day, while another suggested that even a thimble of Shiraz was as risky as walking across the M25 at rush hour.
In the past I've argued that these confusions are the fault of journalism. Failing to acknowledge that medical science is a system of advocacy, in which prosecution and defence teams test a theory to destruction, newspapers have tended to present theory and argument as if they were fact, turning footnotes into headlines.
But the current commotions over bacon and folic acid suggest that the problems of exaggeration and hysteria now lie with the doctors. The general escalation of rhetoric in modern life - in which every movie is the new Citizen Kane and each bureaucratic error a resignation offence - has spread to science. Keen for publicity and funding, research groups now treat individual drinks and foods as if they were nutritional Osama bin Ladens, while the truth is that the risk of developing cancer is a complex equation of genetics, environment, lifestyle and plain bad luck.
As the British cancer specialist Professor Karl Sikora seemed to acknowledge by calling the WCRF report "too severe", such surveys ignore the belief of most GPs that targets for patients should be reasonable and achievable. The WCRF evokes a nightmare vision of a future in which the US supreme court is required to rule not on whether humans can be executed by lethal injection, but whether they can eat a fry-up first.
And, oddly, despite the obesity timebomb, the alcohol timebomb, and now the bacon sandwich nuclear bomb, insurance companies have just published a report, drawn from actuarial figures, predicting that half of all current 30-year-olds can expect to live to be 100. This odd world in which everything we do is killing us quickly but everyone is living longer can only encourage a bemused and fatalistic shrug.
