We have all eaten more than once the classic cooked sausage or hot dog of indefinite meat that can be purchased in supermarkets.
It is a tasty, satiating, and cheap food. It’s normal that it’s popular. But there are a few things you should know about these industrial sausages, that may take away your appetite…
First of all, it must be made clear that the classic frankfurter is a traditional food, coming from Germany. It is a completely healthy product (within what is a stuffed and scalded sausage), which is made with pork and sheep gut.
But they are something else entirely industrial frankfurters or hot dogs which are sold packed in bags with various sausages. Here the composition is very variable, especially if they are cheap.
The website Eat this, not that! it remind us 6 unpleasant things about these industrial sausages.
First of all, you have to know that although many use artificial cellulose casing, some They still use animal guts. so technically you are being eaten by the intestines of an animal. Although in Spain it is quite common, since many sausages use natural casing.
A traditional sausage is just meat and guts, but industrial frankfurters are barely 50% meat. 30% is fat, 10% water, and 3.5% different ingredients, from cereals to dehydrated milk.
While a homemade sausage is usually made with only one type of meat, industrial sausages carry meat from up to four animals at a timeall mixed: pork, chicken, turkey, and beef.
And as could be expected, This meat is not of very good quality. They are even offal. The Business Insider website describes it perhaps too graphically:
“Once the steaks, chops, breasts, ribs, thighs, hams, sirloins, and fillets are removed, a fair amount of gristle, fat, and offal remains on the animal“.
Euphemistically called “trimmings,” much of the meat that ends up in hot dogs is “lower-quality muscle trimmings, fatty tissues, head meat, animal feet, animal skin, blood, liver, and other edible by-products of slaughter“.
these debris they are precooked to eliminate bacteria, and stuffed like sausages.
It is also a product with a very high salt content. A single sausage provides 20% of the recommended salt per day. If you take 4 or 5…
And if that was not enough some brands add sodium nitrate as a preservative, because it kills bacteria and gives the meat a “healthy” pink color. But there are studies that ensure that sodium nitrate is related to some heart diseases and the development of diabetes.
None of this breaks any law, but it makes it clear that, from a nutritional point of view, frankfurters or industrial hot dogs They are a very poor quality product.that it is convenient to eat as little as possible.