Photo: TheBusyBrain, Flickr

Hot dogs kill. Or at least that's what Cancer Project president Neil Barnard wants you to know before you dig into a juicy dog at your family barbecue this summer. He's filed a lawsuit against several big processed meat producers, including Oscar Mayer and Hebrew National, demanding their products come with warning labels stating that hot dogs increase the risk of cancer, in the same way cigarettes carry warning labels about lung cancer, emphysema and so on. Perfectly reasonable or a little extreme?

Consider this: An American Institute for Cancer Research report claims that a 50g serving of processed meat a day (about what you'd get from a hot dog) can increase your risk of colorectal cancer by 21 percent.

This is thought to be because of nitrites -- preservatives used in processed and cured meats that, when broken down in the digestion process, might be carcinogenic. But that hasn't been confirmed yet. Colorectal cancer kills approximately 50,000 people every year in the U.S.

CancerProject.org recently put out an ad about the connection between colon cancer and processed meats. The ad (which you can watch below) depicts school kids announcing that they have colon cancer, interspersed with images of hot dogs, pizza, and sliced ham, which are all common hot lunch offerings. Studies show that adults who frequently eat processed meats have an increased risk of developing colon cancer.

Critics point out that the children in the ad don't actually have cancer, something some may find misleading. They also say that studies have been done on adults, not children, and that an occasional hot dog hasn't been implicated in an increased risk of the disease.

But here's my argument. Kids who eat hot lunch every day AREN'T getting an occasional serving of processed meat. They're eating them every day. The menu at our school reads like this: hot dog, pizza, meat gravy, chicken nuggets, sliced ham... all with french fries or mashed potatoes. Every week. Though there might not be a direct link between these kinds of meals and colon cancer, this is obviously poor nutrition, and we're serving it to millions of school kids every day.

I'm not sure how I feel about this ad, but I do think our hot lunch programs need a serious overhaul. What do you think?

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