Nitrates are not nitrites. Nitrates have additional bonds with Oxygen and are therefore more stable than Nitrites.

This article is explicitly about nitrites being a clear risk of cancer and only contains a single reference to the world nitrates. The article you listed equates the two substances, but that's not the way the chemistry works here.

As the prime example of how different -ites and -ates are: Carbonate is CO3(2-) which is a constituent part of calcium carbonate or Sodium bicarbonate and carbonite is a cloud backup service because chemically, one less bonded oxygen is CO2, carbon dioxide, and that's how it works with carbon because of bonds valence bonds form between electrons, you'll have to forgive me if I'm fuzzy on the finer details, it's been a decade.