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How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

economist.com

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Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#81

Post by reducesuffering »

coderedart wrote: post #78
vasdae wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the result of a heterogeneous, low trust society - you don't care if you are killing someone who's not like you.

why you gotta generalize a whole country like that? ever think of how an indian teenager might feel when they read your comment? Anyway, Adulteration is just simply ignorance and self-centered greed. People will indirectly harm anyone if it means making profits. We have already seen this during Covid. That people will not follow safety practices like wearing masks and even rioting to remove the lockdown. Was it becau…

Should facts about a country be ignored because they paint it in a less positive light and some citizens might not feel great about that?

Only 16.7%, decreasing, of people in India think “most people in my country can be trusted.” However in Norway it’s 73.7%, increasing. Should we never talk about GDP per capita discrepancies? First step in addressing these issues is acknowledging there may be a problem.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#82

Post by netzego »

tety wrote: post #47
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Greed, since consumers are fooled into believing they're buying a fresher, more yellow product. The Indian government has a webpage dedicated to detecting adulteration in various kinds of food, including turmeric[1]. [1] https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

This talks about detecting it in whole turmeric, any way of doing so for powdered turmeric?

It's right there :)

`Test 15 : Detection of artificial colour in turmeric powder`

- [1] https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#83

Post by infecto »

ta_vf7xjd34cc wrote: post #79
Zufriedenheit wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major factor is ignoring evidence based medicine. In India you can still commonly buy traditional medicines which have heavy metals like lead and mercury as ingredients.

[flagged]

What does ingesting mercury or lead fight against? While I understand modern medicine does sometimes use things that are toxic, it usually in net fixes what was needed. What does lead and mercury help with when eaten?

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#84

Post by oska »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #71
oska wrote: post #63

The last three paragraphs read very strongly like propaganda to me, which makes me wonder if the subject (tumeric adulteration) was chosen as something to write about just to put pressure on Bangladesh's and India's current rulers.

I read it as exactly that - pressure to reduce the prevalence of lead in turmeric. That seems like a reasonable thing to do and place to apply pressure?

The pressure was much more than that, they are pushing for an "openness to foreign expertise" and a "willingness by the government to work with [NGOs]". And they criticise Modi for "driving out foreign donors and dismantling any NGO he considers unfriendly to him".

I don't think the problem of tumeric adulteration is something that needs 'foreign expertise' to solve. It's an undeniably serious problem but one that any country should be able to address on its own.

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#85

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

pseudo0 wrote: post #25
freetime2 wrote: post #20

> 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 is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_gly... That was only a few wineries though, and it was pretty quickly caught and harshly punished. This is apparently a whole industry where the practice of poisoning consumers with lead is normalized.

Not really comparable. The glycol is only ~4 times as damaging as the alcohol that wine contains anyway, and there were no known health issues triggered by it.

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#86

Post by mlinhares »

coderedart wrote: post #78
vasdae wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the result of a heterogeneous, low trust society - you don't care if you are killing someone who's not like you.

why you gotta generalize a whole country like that? ever think of how an indian teenager might feel when they read your comment? Anyway, Adulteration is just simply ignorance and self-centered greed. People will indirectly harm anyone if it means making profits. We have already seen this during Covid. That people will not follow safety practices like wearing masks and even rioting to remove the lockdown. Was it becau…

People often forget that developed countries have already done all that before becoming what they are today (the US itself has a very long history of poisoning its population for profit, both the private sector and the government): https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-t...

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#88

Post by ta_vf7xjd34cc »

infecto wrote: post #83
ta_vf7xjd34cc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What does ingesting mercury or lead fight against? While I understand modern medicine does sometimes use things that are toxic, it usually in net fixes what was needed. What does lead and mercury help with when eaten?

> What does ingesting mercury or lead fight against?

This is a question for those who are experts in the field of Rasa Shastra.[1][2] Just like questions regarding which poisons/toxins are injected into the human body as treatment, why, and for which illness are questions for experts in the appropriate specializations of modern medicine.

[1] A Text Book Of Rasa Shastra(Iatro-Chemistry And Ayurvedic Pharmaceutics) (https://chaukhamba.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&pro...)

[2] Introduction to ‘Rasashaastra’ the Iatrochemistry of Ayurveda (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252715/)

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#89

Post by hermitcrab »

jliptzin wrote: post #80
hermitcrab wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?

Interesting, when I was in school the preferred way to shut the school down was to call in a bomb threat from a pay phone

Remember that this was a boarding school. We didn't get to go home, so there was no benefit to getting everything shut down. Also they were quite into using peer pressure via collective punishment.

Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people

#90

Post by selimthegrim »

keepamovin wrote: post #75

Another test you can do is, here: https://youtu.be/PwbOV_Q5u6c?si=EgyrXUpuqlpJsMoy I imagine that some pesticides are also a concern, tho perhaps less acutely poisonous, of no less serious concern for good health to be avoided.

They have a whole website of these tests for different adulterations.
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