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How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

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Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#121

Post by toasterlovin »

gregable wrote: post #110
toasterlovin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building a double-blind clinical trial regarding changing people's diets over their lifetime and observing cardiovascular mortality is very hard. But it is the only diet research that can actually generate knowledge. The studies you cite are nice and all, but the first two are for studies that measured outcomes after 6-8 weeks . If you assume an average lifespan of 70 years, the longest study represented ~1/450th o…

> But it is the only diet research that can actually generate knowledge. > The studies you cite are nice and all, but the first two are for studies that measured outcomes after 6-8 weeks. If you assume an average lifespan of 70 years, the longest study represented ~1/450th of a human lifespan. And, as you mention, they only measure what we think are valid indicators, not actual outcomes! And the third study may contr…

> However, many of the epidemiological studies are over very large populations and time periods, so it's not as though the body of evidence consists of a 6-8 week studies. And honestly the fact that the effects are so strong in such a short period of time strengthen the argument in some ways.

The studies all tell us nothing about the long term implications of diet. The long study tells us nothing because it is purely correlational. The short studies tell us nothing because they are not measuring the thing we care about (long term health outcomes). You can't somehow generate knowledge by combining two types of studies which each are incapable of generating knowledge about the thing we care about.

> I never claimed that meat was bad, only that leafy vegetables were good.

Yeah, I clearly was hallucinating. Nowhere did you mention red meat. And yet I rambled on about it for a paragraph. :-) Sorry!

But:

> I find it almost incredible that your argument against the nutritional value of leafy vegetables is that there aren't enough double blind clinical trials, and then your defense of red meat uses a time correlation that doesn't adjust for any confounding variables at all.

That's because correlation cannot demonstrate causation, but it can demonstrate the lack of causation. It's all about confounding variables, as you point out. If you have two trend lines which correlate, there can always be a third, unmeasured variable which is actually causing the two measured variables. However, if you have trend lines which do not correlate, then the only way they can be related is by some extremely convoluted chain of causation. Which, I guess, is technically possible, but rapidly approaches 0 probability.

In other words, epidemiology is very useful for narrowing the possibly explanations for some phenomena, and it can suggest places where we should continue focusing our attention, but it can't actually tell us if we've found the right culprit.

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#122

Post by chrisfinne »

djrogers wrote: post #25

That’s it - I’m going back to outsourcing all of my leafy greens consumption. I’ll let the cattle and swine eat it for me, then I’ll eat them!

"There's been a mistake. You've accidentally given me the food that my food eats." -- Ron Swanson

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#123

Post by SubiculumCode »

Alupis wrote: post #38
aphextron wrote: post #31

>Instead of shipping heads of lettuce or large carrot sticks that people wash, we chop them and mix them up in processing, then package them in plastic bags. In that process, Marler said, “The bacteria has a chance to grow. And a lot of people get sick.” This confirms what I had always been suspicious of. Those prepackaged veggies sitting in plastic bags are just a few degrees of temperature away from being perfect b…

Or... rinse it before you eat it. Just because it's already chopped and in a bag doesn't mean it suddenly doesn't need rinsing. If I recall, not rinsing pre-chopped lettuce was one of the things pointed out to Chipotle after their recent debacle, that may have helped avoid making customers sick.

I think its more that while it is being chopped, its tumbles with a whole lot of unaffected lettuce,

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#124

Post by toasterlovin »

windexh8er wrote: post #109
toasterlovin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just keep in mind that epidemiology is fundamentally not able to tell you anything about positive causation. In this case, individuals who eat more that 5 servings of fruits and vegetables probably also exhibit a whole host of behaviors that contribute to this outcome. Essentially, they are not a representative sample of the population at large, but rather a sub-group who is "healthful" in a whole bunch of ways.

This is likely the best reference we have to date given the size and timeframe of the study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... There are many other short term studies that support this fully. You may not want to believe red meat consumption is indicative of negative health indicators, but most notable cardiologists in the field fully support the position.

Hate to break it to you, but even cardiologists can’t summon causation from correlation.

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#125

Post by gruez »

John_KZ wrote: post #119
gruez wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Produced using processes that we've tested for centuries. We're not sure they work, but we're sure they're not ridiculously dangerous. There's a bunch of stuff that we "tested for centuries" and thought were safe... until they weren't. see: lead, smoking, asbestos, cured meats.

You can still buy all of these things if you want. They come with the appropriate labeling. I'm sorry if your concern is purely linguistic, but "organic" isn't a reserved word. Benzol is organic too. Organic laws are a thing too. Different kinds of organic. Some people want to eat the same way people ate for millennia. Good for them. It's one of the benefits of living in a free market society. People have mistakenly…

>but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide.

my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. something being used for thousands of years merely means it doesn't cause harm in small enough timescales so that people can associate it with the effects. see: smoking, which is dangerously poisonous, but the effects are on such long timescales that its negative effects are dissociated from it.

>Finally I don't understand why people are so angry at organic produce. I rarely buy it too, but what's the big deal? It sounds like they need to prove something. I don't get it.

I guess the anger is directed to both the people that are gullible enough to buy it and continue to perpetuate the myth that it's somehow better, and the companies pushing organic produce (by exploiting said ignorance, and perpetuating said ignorance as a way to sell high margin produce)

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#126

Post by hideo »

dlwdlw wrote: post #104

One interesting thing ive noticed about chinese culture are the heuristics around cleanliness. Vegetables are always washed vigorously and cooked. Salads and sandwiches and other raw-like things are rather disliked. Hands are washed after petting dogs/cats. Slippers always worn around the house. Dislike of carpets. Windows opened every morning for fresh air. Other random stuff. The safety heuristics cant be delegated…

For some reason your comment shows grayed out to me, making me think it's been downvoted. I don't know why this would be downvoted.

FWIW I've seen the same behaviors you described in most developing economies where people don't seem to trust the larger system. I don't know if the end result is any better - food borne illnesses are still quite common despite these 'heuristics' (as you aptly named them), but there might be far more causes than just unclean veggies.

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#127

Post by John_KZ »

gruez wrote: post #125
John_KZ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still buy all of these things if you want. They come with the appropriate labeling. I'm sorry if your concern is purely linguistic, but "organic" isn't a reserved word. Benzol is organic too. Organic laws are a thing too. Different kinds of organic. Some people want to eat the same way people ate for millennia. Good for them. It's one of the benefits of living in a free market society. People have mistakenly…

>but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide. my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. something being used for thousands of years merely means it doesn't cause harm in small enough timescales so that people can associate it with the effects. see: smoking, which is dangerously poisono…

>my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts.

This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts.

You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This is a much better guarantee than a paper published on nature. For me at least, because this is an opinion. You're free to be wrong, just as I am. Time shows who's gullible and who's not.

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#128

Post by jessaustin »

echlebek wrote: post #81
goldenkey wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hydrochloric acid in the stomach is pretty strong, about 1.5 ph. Cooking is mild for most compounds compared to dissolution in strong acid. I don't think we cook too much. Like you said, it is mostly just predigestion.

Cooked food provides more energy than raw food. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calori...

Is that something that most people on HN want? More energy from their food?

Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US

#130

Post by windexh8er »

toasterlovin wrote: post #124
windexh8er wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is likely the best reference we have to date given the size and timeframe of the study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... There are many other short term studies that support this fully. You may not want to believe red meat consumption is indicative of negative health indicators, but most notable cardiologists in the field fully support the position.

Hate to break it to you, but even cardiologists can’t summon causation from correlation.

So your claim is you have better scientific basis than industry experts? I'll gladly challenge you to a 6-12 month comparison of you eating meats and me eating a primary plant based diet and pay for WellnessFX panels. If you lose you repay me.

Edit: vegetable --> plant, and if I win (we can agree on some defined objective comparisons and scoring offline) I'll even donate the money you'd have repaid back to the charity of my choosing. I'd be glad to make our miminal findings public as well.

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