THE Ulster fry just got a bit healthier, thanks to an innovation from a Co Down-based meat producer targeting bacon's cancer risk.
Finnebrogue, which last year opened a new £25 million food processing plant on its sprawling estate near Downpatrick, today launches nitrate-free bacon.
The company, which first came to note as a venison producer, said the bacon is the first of its kind to be completely free from the compound which the World Health Organisation (WHO) says can cause cancer.
It has been hailed by an academic as a "major step forward for food safety" and will be in shops from January 10.
The new bacon is also said to top blind taste tests when measured against traditional rashers which are cured with nitrites that are considered as dangerous as asbestos and smoking when ingested.
It is estimated that 34,000 bowel and colon cancer deaths per year worldwide are directly attributable to diets high in processed meats - with eating two rashers of nitrite cured bacon per day said to increase the risk of contracting bowel cancer by almost a fifth.
Professor Chris Elliott, chair of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen's University Belfast, who ran the British government's investigation into the 2013 horsemeat scandal, welcomed the new product.
"Finnebrogue have used a combination of innovation and natural fruit and spice extracts to come up with a bacon that is made without the need for added nitrites.
"...To have a bacon produced naturally, that doesn't require such chemicals to be added or formed during processing, is a very welcome development."
Some bacons have celery juice added to the process - but this only changes the nitrates from manufactured to naturally occurring, which are potentially just as harmful.
Finnebrogue has worked with a Spanish chemist to develop a new way of flavouring traditional bacon without nitrites.
The flavour is used in continental style hams in the EU, but it will be the first time the technology has been used on bacon.
Denis Lynn, Finnebrogue chairman, said the problem "is dead simple".
"Bacon contains nitrites, nitrites produce nitrosamines in your gut and nitrosamines are carcinogenic. Nitrites should not be in food," he said.
"I've been all over the world to figure out a way to make bacon without nitrites - and up to now we'd never made a single rasher of bacon because we couldn't work out how to do it.
"For more than a decade I have insisted we not touch bacon until such time as we can make it better and safer - and now we have."
