Bacon

Bacon is cured and often smoked, so histamine builds during curing and keeps building in the pack once opened. Fresh pork does not behave like this — it is the curing and the storage, not the meat.

Some cured bacon carries sorbitol as a humectant, added to keep the slices supple. It is not universal - this is a case where the ingredient list, not the food name, decides.

Bacon is brined for days rather than cured for months, and it is cooked - so its tyramine sits at the bottom of the cured-meat group. The versions that climb are the dry-cured and the long-smoked, which are a different product sold under the same word.

Bacon is pork cured in salt, and pork carries no fermentable carbohydrate. The cure is where a question can enter: maple and honey bacon carry the sugar they are named for, and honey is the one that belongs to this axis rather than to the calorie count.

The pork carries no oligosaccharide; the cure might. Bacon is cured with salt, nitrite, sugar and often garlic, and it is the garlic in the recipe rather than the meat that decides whether a given bacon stays at this level.

Bacon is cured with salt and, in most recipes, a little sugar - it balances the salt and helps the surface brown. The amount is small and varies by producer.

Bacon gets no salicylate from the pork - the cure supplies it. Plain smoked bacon stays low; peppered or herb-rubbed versions do not.

Bacon: animal tissue is low in nickel - the metal comes from plants that take it out of soil, and it does not build up along the food chain the way mercury does. Bacon is meat, salt and smoke. The nickel here follows a national survey covering four decades - the kind of series that shows whether a level is drifting, which a single study never can.