Pork Sausage
Food · Protein · Food, Typed Supps
Nineteen grams of fat, 763 mg of sodium, and a Group 1 classification.
Stage by stage
- What is in it (The casing): Legally as little as 50% meat; cereal, water, fat and additives can make up the rest.
- Sodium (Stomach): 763 mg per 100 g — two sausages is over half a day’s suggested target.
- N-nitroso compounds (Colon): Nitrite curing and haem iron together drive the formation implicated in bowel cancer.
- Saturated fat (Liver): 7.87 g per 100 g, most of the 259 calories.
Timing
Nothing to time. What the epidemiology measures is habitual daily intake, so frequency across weeks is the variable, not any single meal.
Time to effect
- Per 50 g daily: An 18% relative increase in colorectal cancer risk, on a 1-in-13 lifetime baseline.
- Decades: The timescale over which the cohort estimates were accrued.
Allergens
None of the fourteen major allergens. May contain: Gluten, Milk, Mustard, Soya, Sulphites. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Keto. Depends on the product: Gluten-free.
Satiety
113 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — moderate. Modelled from the Holt et al. (1995) measurements.
Environmental footprint
12.3 kg CO2e and 1796 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Pig meat" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Mid — roughly £9 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 259
- Protein: 16.5g
- Carbohydrate: 4.5g
- of which sugars: 0.7g
- Fat: 19.4g
- of which saturated: 7.9g
- Fibre: 1.4g
- Sodium: 763mg
Food vs. supplement
The IARC classification separates processed meat from unprocessed red meat, which sits in Group 2A. The distinction is the curing, salting and smoking, which is why a fresh pork chop and a sausage made from the same animal are graded differently.
Kitchen tip
Grill rather than fry, and avoid charring. High-temperature cooking of meat generates the heterocyclic amines that are part of the mechanism.
Common myth
“Processed meat is in the same cancer category as smoking, so it’s just as bad.” In reality: The categories rank how confident we are that something causes cancer, not how much. Both are Group 1 because the evidence is solid in both cases. The magnitudes are not comparable: smoking raises lung cancer risk by roughly twentyfold, while 50 g of processed meat daily raises bowel cancer risk by about 18% relative — meaningful across a population, small for an individual eating it occasionally.
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