91–100 of 242 posts
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USDA rules aside, how would you define "organic". It's a rather ... synthetic concept to begin with.
I don't know how I'd define organic... But the on list of disqualifying things - "subjected to a specific wavelength of light for a moment" wouldn't be one of them.
Keep things in perspective though. That article mentions 3,000 people per year die from food poisoning, and leafy vegetables are the cause of 1/4 of that, or 750 deaths/year. However, heart disease alone causes 610,000 deaths per year ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ). "Individuals who ate more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per had roughly a 20 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease" ( h…
You don’t avoid concern about increasing food borne pathogens in lettuce because of heart disease. The issue is the economic and regulatory environment that is making contaminated lettuce a thing.
If it’s like E. coli problems in meat, the primary contributor is poor production, handling and packaging process.
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glyphosate has been scientifically tested and found harmless. There are a number of organic chemicals that have been tested to equal (or lesser) standards and found harmful.
The WHO says glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic," which is not harmless at all. http://www.who.int/foodsafety/faq/en/
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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...
FTFY.. it's a bad idea to make absolute statements like that
Keep things in perspective though. That article mentions 3,000 people per year die from food poisoning, and leafy vegetables are the cause of 1/4 of that, or 750 deaths/year. However, heart disease alone causes 610,000 deaths per year ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ). "Individuals who ate more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per had roughly a 20 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease" ( h…
Your general point is reasonable enough, but this arithmetic per se is not really supportable. (a) There is no breakdown there of the number of people who ate > 5 vs. It is possible that e.g. serious heart-disease cases likely to cause death result from causes unrelated to vegetable consumption, while many non-vegetable-eaters develop minor heart disease cases which they would not have if they had eaten vegetables, but which still do not result in death.
Likewise, it is likely that of the 610,000 deaths, many (most?) of them were of people eating > 3 servings of vegetables per day.
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E coli don't rinse off; they form a biofilm with significant adhesion. You have to cook them to kill them.
Once I found out about biofilms from the cat fountain I built from NSF silver infused antimicrobial tubing, I never can look at plumbing piping the same. Biofilm formed even on the parts that should have been impervious. Even areas where water is constantly running and splashing. First the minerals deposit on the antimicrobial surfaces, and then the bacteria attach and film. I had always thought that constant high pr…
"Slow sand filters work through the formation of a gelatinous layer (or biofilm) called the hypogeal layer or Schmutzdecke in the top few millimetres of the fine sand layer."
Treating all bacteria as the enemy is really solving the wrong problem — the question is not how to kill all the bacteria (which is impossible, from almost thermodynamic considerations (if there is free energy and the ability for life colonize it, then there will be life)), but how to manage the bacteria so we favor nonpathogenic or useful species and help them outcompete the 'bad' bacteria.
Incidentally, this is the same strategy our own bodies use—the immune system spends enormous amounts of effort discriminating between commensal/mutual and pathogenic species, and favoring the former as much trying to outright kill the latter.
We need to pick the right analogies. How to herd, tame, and recruit allies, not just how to fight and kill.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_sand_filter#Method_of_ope...
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So this is the logo used to show that food is irradiated: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Radura_intern... This is why I hate big-food. They use any and all opportunities to mislead about what truly is going on.
Should food grown with natural fertilizer say "Created with feces!" On the package? Similarly, someone might not know what canola is - they may know it by the name rape. And some people avoid it - maybe the package should say "Warning! Rape oil." Certainly that's additional truthful information, but it's also more misleading, not less. Sinilarly, because the average person (maybe including yourself, judging by your c…
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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.
Yet most of these products have a label that explicitly says "Ready to eat!".
Keep things in perspective though. That article mentions 3,000 people per year die from food poisoning, and leafy vegetables are the cause of 1/4 of that, or 750 deaths/year. However, heart disease alone causes 610,000 deaths per year ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ). "Individuals who ate more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per had roughly a 20 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease" ( h…
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.
Building a double-blind clinical trial regarding changing people's diets over their lifetime and observing cardiovascular mortality is very hard.
Some clinical studies do exist, but they are usually looking over shorter terms and at heart disease risk factors rather than mortality. These show similar results:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16368299 - Systolic blood pressure decreased from 144 (SE +/- 1.1) to 134 mm Hg (SE +/- 2, P https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26328470 - In the subgroup of hypertensives, quercetin (onion skin extract) decreased 24 h systolic BP by -3·6 mmHg (P=0·022) when compared with placebo (mean treatment difference, -3·9 mmHg; P=0·049).
Many of the epidemiological studies also adjust for many of the features that you might look for. For example https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/1/130/619054 adjusts for "age, randomized treatment, body mass index (BMI), smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, history of diabetes, history of hypertension, history of high cholesterol, and use of multivitamins" and comes to the same conclusion.