New York: Bacon lovers took to social media on Tuesday to express disdain over a World Health Organization report that said processed meat is likely to cause cancer.

The hashtags #FreeBacon, #Bacongeddon and #JeSuisBacon were among the top-trending topics worldwide on Twitter for a second straight day.

Celebrities, politicians and ordinary consumers were reacting to Monday’s announcement by the WHO that eating processed meats including hot dogs, sausages and bacon can cause colorectal cancer in humans, and that red meat is also a likely cause of the disease.

The review by WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) also said there was some link between the consumption of red meat and pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer. The IARC examined some 800 studies during a meeting of 22 health experts earlier this month.

An analysis of social media sentiment by Thomson Reuters found that social media participants were not happy about the WHO review.

Negative tweets outnumbered positive ones by a ratio of nearly 7 to 1 on Monday and 6.5 to 1 on Tuesday, according to the analysis tool that tracks and aggregates positive, neutral and negative tweets with hashtags #cancer and #bacon in order to generate a sentiment score.

WHO’s initial tweet on Monday about its findings – ‘The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the #cancer agency of WHO, classified processed meat as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1)’ – had more than 3,040 retweets and 1,000 favourites on Tuesday.