Bacon lovers at increased risk of dementia, new study suggests

The inflated price is enough to make you lose your mind – but wait, there’s more.

Millions of New Yorkers who start their day with a bacon, egg and cheese won’t like this news – a new study has linked consumption of the beloved Big Apple breakfast with an elevated risk of dementia.

A team of researchers — mostly from the Harvard School of Public Health — recently broke the latest bad news about bacon, the cornerstone of the iconic handheld meal, after analyzing a pair of studies dating back to 1976 and including nearly 170,000 nurses and other health professionals.

The focus of the study, published in the February 11 issue of Neurology, was to clarify the link between total red meat consumption and overall cognitive health.

Overall, the findings won’t please any dedicated carnivore. But for lovers of processed pork, the news is especially painful.

To conduct their research, experts looked at two different, decades-long studies, dating back to 1976 and involving around 170,000 mental health and other health care nurses.

Many years and many crunched numbers later, processed meats like bacon, hot dogs, sausage and bacon were cited for increasing the risk of cognitive decline and dementia by 13% in study participants who averaged just 0.25 servings per day, according to an analysis of the study published eating well.

According to the American Psychological Association, cognitive function is defined as “the performance of the mental processes of perception, learning, memory, understanding, awareness, reasoning, judgment, intuition, and language.”

Dementia, as defined by the Alzheimer’s Association, is “an umbrella term for the loss of memory, language, problem-solving, and other thinking skills that is severe enough to interfere with daily life.”

Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia, the organization said.

However, the solution to your breakfast problem may be waiting behind that same deli counter—the study also suggested that this increased risk could be reversed by replacing bacon with another NYC favorite, salmon (or any fish, really ).

“Replacing one serving per day of processed red meat with one serving of fish was associated with a 28% lower risk of dementia and a 51% lower risk of subjective cognitive decline,” reported Eating Well.

Don’t start eating a lot of lox, though, if you can even afford to do so these days—nutritionists, while praising the nutritional benefits of salmon, also warn against overdoing the smoked variety, due to its high sodium content.

The Bad Bacon News comes as the processed meat has already taken a significant beating from health experts.

The World Cancer Research Fund recently linked consumption to a rise in cancer rates among young people, for example.