It’s a shame that we still have to explain how and why randomised controlled trials work. They are one of the great intellectual inventions of the human race, allowing us to get a limited view of causality without the blinders of our emotions. In summary: the evidence for a link between eating processed meat and the incidence of various cancers is not there, and where there is a pointer, it is of such low intensity that we would have to say: we just don’t know. NB “we don’t know” does not mean “actually, we think it there is a link but can’t prove it”; it means we don’t know, it could go either way.

[Update: as Simon said, the title should have been sausages won’t kill you more or less than anything else will kill you.]