When I was a lad, we learned to put sprains in the hottest water you could stand, to put butter on burns and to apply a tourniquet to stop bleeding. Then, as an adult, I learned that sprains were best treated with ice, that butter is not an appropriate spread for burns and that a tourniquet is a bad thing which ought not be used except to prevent someone from immediately exsanguinating. Okay. These observations stand in the great tradition of "Everything you know is wrong." What medical science solemnly told us in ancient times (my youth, that is) has now been reversed on many fronts.
The end of it all came for me one day, long ago, while driving a grain truck in Eastern Washington. I was listening to the WSU campus public-broadcasting station on the truck radio and there was a discussion about things that cause cancer. One of then studies offered was a Canadian study which "proved" that crisply-fried bacon was more likely to produce cancer than limp undercooked bacon. Or so it appeared, if the diner were a Canadian rat. Then one of the people participating in the discussion revealed that, if one translated the amount of bacon consumed by the test animals into human terms, one would have to eat twenty-some pounds of crisply-fried bacon per day for a year to get anywhere near the "dosage" which produced the Canadian results in rats.
In that I prefer my bacon crisp and in that I don't eat bacon more often than once a month in any event, I have plugged my ears to such silliness and will cook my bacon any way I like, thank you very much, medical "science" notwithstanding.
