Everything causes cancer, like Joe Jackson says, but some things cause cancer faster than others...

Eating hot dogs, ham and other processed meat can cause colorectal cancer, and eating red meat "probably" can cause cancer, the World Health Organization's cancer agency reported Monday. Kurt Straif of the International Agency for Cancer Research said the risk of developing colorectal cancer from eating processed meat remains small but rises with the amount consumed. Consuming red meat was linked to colorectal, pancreatic and prostate cancer, but the link was not as strong, the IARC report said. “In view of the large number of people who consume processed meat, the global impact on cancer incidence is of public health importance," Straif said.

I don't know if I can give up bacon and ham. But I'm pretty sure I gave up hot dogs after reading this...

Clear Foods is a new California-based (where else) start-up whose goal is apparently to conduct genetic tests on mass-produced food in an effort to combat food-borne illness. To that end, they recently product-tested 345 commonly-available hot dogs and sausages to find everything in them that should not have been, and released it under the extremely clever and original name “The Hot Dog Report.” Spoiler: boy, did they find some stuff that wasn’t on the ingredients list.

The report says Clear Foods “found evidence of meats not on the labels” in about 15% of all tested samples, which make sense, as you wouldn’t expect hot dog-makers to actually tell you they’re serving you weasel rectums. OK, OK, to be fair, they didn’t actually find any weasel rectums in the hot dogs (that they’re willing to tell us about, anyway—never know if Big Anus is threatening them to keep it under wraps), but they did find a surprising amount of pork being substituted in chicken and beef hot dogs. This is an obvious issue, since as the report points out, there are a lot of people who don’t eat pork for religious reasons. Also, 10% of the vegetarian samples tested positive for chicken or pork, which I am reasonably sure are not vegetables.

More problematic is the fact that in 2% of the samples tested, Clear Food claims to have found “Human DNA.”

You can read the full "The Hot Dog Report" here.