You might want to rethink you’re ‘Biggest Breakfast in Ireland’ tour as a new study says eating rashers and other processed meats can lower a man’s sperm count.
We featured an article yesterday that was filled with mounds of baked beans, sautéed mushrooms and more bacon than you could ever want (it was all about Ireland’s Biggest Breakfast), but today there’s some worrying news on the fry-up front.
According to researchers from Harvard University – and not just some vegetarian trying to scare us off tasty meat – men who regularly eat processed meat had significantly lower amounts of normal sperm. The ‘processed meats’ in question includes foods like bacon, sausages, hamburgers, ham and mince.
Researchers studied the diet along with the size and shape of sperm from 156 men who were having trouble conceiving with their partners. Men who ate the equivalent of less than a rasher of bacon a day – so only two or three rashers a week – had 30 per cent more ‘normal sperm’ than lads who ate rashers on a regular basis.
Dr Myriam Afeiche, from the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, said: “We found that processed meat intake was associated with lower semen quality and fish was to higher semen quality.”
It’s just something to mull over as you tuck into ten sausages, ten rashers, ten eggs, five hash browns, five ‘large’ pieces of white pudding, a bowl of chips, a ‘hill of beans’, three grilled tomatoes, a portion of mushrooms, ten slices of toast and all the tea you can drink at the Hard Boiled Egg Café in Cavan.
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