Reminds me of the China milk scandal.
How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
111–120 of 200 posts
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I don't think it is the same. It easily comes to mind that most treatments of radiation while toxic to the body are used to kill types of cancer. If you are going to say this practice of eating lead and mercury for medicinal purposes is useful, I would think there would be at least a use that comes to mind that you could share instead of books. I don't think most traditional medicine practices are very useful. Sim…
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I guess that’s my point. Perhaps there are some things useful in Ayurveda but I suspect the vast majority is pseudoscience that was a best guess for the resources available at the time.
Not suggesting this traditional medicine is a religion but that it’s similar to a lot of the dietary restrictions from history. They had some use for the time but perhaps not useful now.
I know more about Chinese traditional medicine and have similar thoughts. Some of it is interesting but lots of it is pseudoscience. Also some of it was practical advice for the time. A lot of it is always about drinking hot water. Perhaps boiled water was cleaner in previous times? But again it’s mostly pseudoscience. If you visit a traditional doctor he feels your wrist for a while and is able to create diagnoses with that along with looking at you and talking.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather a large number of things are contaminated with heavy metals, because the food industry tends not to test for them and there's little regulation: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... ( "Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead: CR tested 126 products from McCormick, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other popular brands. Almost a third had heavy metal levels high en…
I thought XRF guns could go down to the ppb range? Why doesn't every food manufacturer test every batch?
Because nobody force them to, and they can get away with selling tainted food? Testing means testing costs plus throwing away lots that don't pass. So unless coerced they tend not to (some good companies do anyway but they are rare).
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ”Rather a large number of things are contaminated with heavy metals” Sure, but usually it’s because products are grown in contaminated soil and “naturally” pick up traces from their environment. Pretty much all rice contains arsenic, for example, but the concentration varies significantly depending on where it’s grown and how it’s processed. The turmeric problem is different because lead has been deliberately added…
Except that pretty much no plants bioaccumulate lead. The biggest lead vector for plant-based food is the soil that hitches a ride on the outside. So peeling potatoes, carrots, beets etc and washing your other fruits and veggies is really all that is needed. It's actually a little unfortunate that no plants we know of will take up lead because this would be a way to clean up soil. Plant a lot of plant X. Pull out the…
That's going to take a while; when you discard the plant, the lead will go back into the soil. You'd need to store the leady plant somewhere.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#115Title is misleading: it's lead chromate (that producers mix into turmeric power) that does the killing, not turmeric.
Very well identified, the cropping up of such an article should not be taken at face value. Consider such scenarios too which impact profit of specific industries namely Pharma 1. Demand for curcumin has greatly increased leading to an inflation of its market price in recent years 2. Turmeric is an age old go to antiseptic and antibiotic. During Covid it was very common for Indian families to consume turmeric flavore…
> the cropping up of such an article should not be taken at face value.
I assume the article appeared because recently the government of Bangladesh and/or India declared a big political victory over turmeric adulteration. Where there are ten articles, it's not a big surprise that there are 11 articles.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#116> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice. It’s really shocking to me that in the year 2023 people could be intentionally adding lead to food products at this scale. Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Ignorance? Distrust of modern medicine and health advice? I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people…
It (lead acetate) was added to hair coloring products as late as 2022, while not meant for ingestion the risk is there (I don't know if it can get absorbed). It's still in many eyeliners and used to be present in lipstick in notable quantities. Not things you'd want it in.
Where is this and what was the impetus for banning it?
I am too used to being in the EU, and counting on RoHS and adjacent laws. So I don't really think about it most of the time, beyond reading labels.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> propaganda that Ayurveda is a pseudoscience has been so successfully drilled into me over the decades that I have never been to an Ayurvedic doctor nor do I know of anyone who has. The propaganda/evil conspiracy angle is unconvincing here. More likely it's not propaganda, but facts and science, and it replaced centuries-old science because it is better and more accurate. For example, do you also believe there is 'p…
> geocentrism
The culture that gave the world Ayurveda and the Surya Siddhanta and the Nasadiya Sukta is very different from the ones which believe that God has said that the Earth is flat or ones where God's agents on Earth harassed/murdered scientists because their theories were in conflict with their interpretation of their belief.[1][2]
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Food adulteration is a common practice on ALL low income countries. What's the correlation between low income countries and low trust countries?
https://ourworldindata.org/trust#:~:text=A%20Gini%20index%20... . >"A common way to get a first-order approximation of this relationship is to estimate the correlations between trust and GDP per capita. This visualization provides evidence of this correlation... As it can be seen, there is a very strong positive relationship. Most academic studies find that this relationship remains after controlling for further char…
That article is interesting, but trust in institutions is probably just as important as trust in individuals and isn't really covered.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#119This is an incredibly misleading click-baity headline. It's not turmeric that's killing people. Unscrupulous Indian manufacturers are adding lead to turmeric as a coloring agent, and that is what is killing people.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Efficient markets, I suppose. // Isn't the Capitalist notion of efficiency bound with perfect information - we'd have to legislate to make sure that consumers know the product is 'laced with poison for the appearance of freshness; packaging contains carbon monoxide (CO) a deadly gas' and then see if the customers buy more of that product. You're accusing consumers of optimising towards products _looking_ fresh, but…
No comment on economic theory, but on the carbon monoxide thing, the issue here isn't its toxicity, but that vendors use it to mask the color appearance of non-fresh, unhygienic meat. Naive visual assessment is wrong.
I thought meat was more tasty/tender when it's "aged" for a while anyways.