What's in a McNugget and other fun food facts

[Cyrrex]

Once you've had your finger in someone's butt your either a doctor or a porn star..........

Wait a god damn minute... if that were true, well I can assure you, I am no doctor which means... 

Dude.  It doesn't count when it's your own pooper.

[Nebu]

How malnutrition causes obesity.

Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I found it a really easy to read and insightful article.

[Lantyssa]

It's great, but also worrying in that even if you try to eat healthy, you're still not getting the same nutrients our grandparents did.

[MuffinMan]

I think you can, it's just going to require a LOT more effort.

[WayAbvPar]

It's great, but also worrying in that even if you try to eat healthy, you're still not getting the same nutrients our grandparents did.

Yeah, but they are dead! It couldn't have been THAT good for them.

[ghost]

Wow.  This is worth watching, if you want to know about food and sugar and obesity. 

[Nebu]

Wow.  This is worth watching, if you want to know about food and sugar and obesity. 

That's a Bloodworth, but still an interesting view. 

[ghost]

Hey, it's new to me.   

[HaemishM]

And thus did the Internet bestow upon the poster known as ghost the Blessing of St. Bloodworth!

[Engels]

I dunno of an hour and a half lecture can ever really be a BW. In any event, I'd not seen it, and its pretty cool. No idea of the veracity of what he's saying, but much of it is common sense.

[Lantyssa]

Summary for the video-impaired?

[Nebu]

Summary for the video-impaired?

HFCS is bad, um kay?

[01101010]

Summary for the video-impaired?

An Inconvenient Sweetener.

[HaemishM]

A bit more complicated than JUST HFCS. It basically says all fructose sweeteners (including table sugar) is poison.

[Lantyssa]

HFCS is bad, um kay?

Gotcha.  Right on.

Fructose is OK in small quantities or when in a complex with glucose.  By itself, the small intestine, instead of the large, takes it up in greater quantities and the liver prioritizes processing it over most other things.  This leads to both a fatty liver and not properly metabolizing other things we need (whether toxins or otherwise).

[ghost]

If you think about it, the human body just wasn't meant to utilize 300 pounds of sugar over the course of a year.  It was meant to process protein and fat and plant products (some fructose/glucose).  I'm surprised nobody thought of this sooner.

Well, back to the Atkins diet!   

[ghost]

BSE is usually transmitted between cows through the practice of recycling bovine carcasses for meat and bone meal protein, which is fed back to other cattle. In this case, the USDA reports that it was an atypical, rare form of BSE not likely carried by contaminated feed.

Mad Cow disease found in California


Ewwww.  More fucked up shit from our food producers.  Cows aren't meant to eat other cows.  There's a reason why.....

[MahrinSkel]

BSE is usually transmitted between cows through the practice of recycling bovine carcasses for meat and bone meal protein, which is fed back to other cattle. In this case, the USDA reports that it was an atypical, rare form of BSE not likely carried by contaminated feed.

Mad Cow disease found in California


Ewwww.  More fucked up shit from our food producers.  Cows aren't meant to eat other cows.  There's a reason why.....

The danger of this is overstated.  BSE was all through the cattle population in Britain, and there were around 1 dozen cases of Creutzfeldt–Jakob that they think *might* be linked, in some unknown way, to BSE, and that in a country where cow brain was a traditional part of the cuisine.

Yet when I went to Canada in 2004, I got nasty looks for ordering a steak (and got an overdone piece of shoe-leather instead of the medium-rare ribeye I ordered and paid for) because 3 cows in British Columbia (I was in Nova Scotia) had tested positive for BSE several months earlier.

People get stupid about novel ways to die.  Every indication is that if I eat a cut of meat from a BSE-positive cow, I have a better chance of choking on it than of catching CJD.

--Dave

[ghost]

True, particularly if you stay away from ground beef.  But it only takes one case of Cruetzfeldt Jakob to fuck your world.  It's a bit like tetanus- you only get it once.  Anyway, I'm more turned off by the fact that they are re-feeding cows to cows.  That can't be good for the cows, and if it isn't good for the cows it isn't good for us once we eat those cows or drink their milk. 

[apocrypha]

The danger of this is overstated.  BSE was all through the cattle population in Britain, and there were around 1 dozen cases of Creutzfeldt–Jakob that they think *might* be linked, in some unknown way, to BSE, and that in a country where cow brain was a traditional part of the cuisine.

Yet when I went to Canada in 2004, I got nasty looks for ordering a steak (and got an overdone piece of shoe-leather instead of the medium-rare ribeye I ordered and paid for) because 3 cows in British Columbia (I was in Nova Scotia) had tested positive for BSE several months earlier.

People get stupid about novel ways to die.  Every indication is that if I eat a cut of meat from a BSE-positive cow, I have a better chance of choking on it than of catching CJD.

--Dave

176 cases of vCJD, about 180,000 confirmed cases of BSE in cattle.

While the risk may be low that doesn't justify disregarding it. vCJD is a terrible disease and completely untreatable. It's also hard to diagnose and presents late. It can be transmitted via surgical instruments that have been used on contaminated patients and the prion protein agent is very hard to eradicate.

BSE is spread in cattle because of intensive farming methods and cost-cutting, i.e. feeding animal carcasses to the rest of the herd. Arguing that such food production methods are a bad idea isn't being stupid, and BSE is just one in a very, very long string of reasons why they're a bad idea. Remember H1N1? Salmonella? Add it to the list of unecessary risks caused by having profit dictate food production methods.

[Yegolev]

It sounds like the cows were not properly cooked to 160F before being served to the other cows.

[Lantyssa]

I don't think you can reverse prion damage with cooking.  Well, not with normal cooking.

[apocrypha]

And the prions themselves are remarkably resilient I seem to remember. Because they're just protein - i.e. no DNA or RNA (no other infectious agent is like this, everything else, viruses, bacteria, etc., has genetic material) - then they're very hard to render non-infectious.

I just looked up the recommended proceedures for sterilizing surgical instrument suspected of being contaminated with prions and they involve fairly strong sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) at high temperatures (121^oC) and then normal autoclaving. Pretty extreme and certainly not applicable to foodstuffs in any way.

Of course just not feeding ground up dead cows back to the herd would kinda obviate the need.

[ghost]

I don't think you can reverse prion damage with cooking.  Well, not with normal cooking.

The prions are abnormally folded proteins that self replicate, so no, you're not going to get them with cooking. But they're only found in central nervous system cells, so that is why it is so important to have good procedures at meat processing plants.  It generally is only going to be an issue with ground meat.  I tend to try to stay away from ground beef, and have been seriously considering avoiding even "organic" beef at the store.  I'm going to try to get a part of a local cow next year and buy a deep freeze.

[Lantyssa]

I was trying not to nerd-out on people.

From an academic perspective they're pretty cool.  Proteins folded in an unusual fashion which cause other proteins to fold in the same way.

[ghost]

I was trying not to nerd-out on people.

From an academic perspective they're pretty cool.  Proteins folded in an unusual fashion which cause other proteins to fold in the same way.

Trying not to nerd out around here?   

Prions are super cool.  Unless they're in your body. 

[Merusk]

US Expected to reach 42% obesity rate in the next 18 years.

Based on my recent trip to Disney:

1) We'll hit that goal a lot sooner than 2030. Go USA!
2) I need to invest in Hutt Palanquins electric scooters.
3) Someone will bring up this being a national security issue and be shouted down for being a vegan communist.
4) We will continue to ignore this and fat will be the new normal in only 10 years.

[ghost]

Fat is already the new normal.  They'll continue to dick around with this until people are living to an average age of 60 and everyone is diabetic.

Those fucking scooters make Disney intolerable if you are taking the Disney transportation system.  There were probably 1 in 10 people when we were there that actually  needed them.  The rest were just fat asses.

[Merusk]

No, I think what used to be "big" is the new normal. With "fat" when I was in high school now being "just a little big." We've got another step before the morbidly obese (those whose genitalia are hidden by the gut fat...) are only considered "a little big"

Yeah, on the day we took it the bus had to stop for 3 scooters, only one of whom was an elderly person.  We drove everywhere after that nonsense.

[ghost]

So apparently Beef Products, Inc., the producer of "pink slime" is suing ABC for defamation. 

The company filed its lawsuit in a South Dakota state court seeking at least $1.2 billion in damages under a state law that gives agricultural companies the ability to sue when their products are criticized.

Dan Webb, a lawyer representing BPI, said ABC defamed its products by simply calling the beef additive "pink slime." Mr. Webb said BPI blames ABC for causing consumers "to believe that our lean beef product, which is 100% beef, is something called pink slime; that is some type of unhealthy and repulsive liquid product that is not even meat."

 

I've got a new rule.  If I can't tell what something is prior to eating it, it's not going in my tummy. 

[Nebu]

I've got a new rule.  If I can't tell what something is prior to eating it, it's not going in my tummy. 

That's a great rule.  My shopping cart is filled with fruits, veg, seafood, whole grains, eggs, and baking materials.  About the only premade food I eat any more is yogurt and I'm getting away from that due to all of the additives.  Bread, pasta, and tortillas take almost no time to make and I've almost completely eliminated bread from my diet.   If I go to a restaurant with friends now, I can tell immediately if something on my plate was prepackaged, frozen, or canned.  It almost makes me not want to eat out any more.

[Signe]

Yogurt is pretty easy to make yourself.  Even the Greek style yogurt.  My sister used to do it all the time.  She lives in an area where there are a lot of dairy farms though and now usually buys fresh made yogurt from them.  She gets raw milk there, too, although the government hates that.

[Paelos]

Yogurt is pretty easy to make yourself.  Even the Greek style yogurt.  My sister used to do it all the time.  She lives in an area where there are a lot of dairy farms though and now usually buys fresh made yogurt from them.  She gets raw milk there, too, although the government hates that.

I saw a travel thing in Iceland where they make Skeer(sp?) which is some sort of icelandic yogurt homemade cheese thing. Sounded awesome.

[ghost]

You may have missed my carbohydrate/sugar paranoia, Signe.     Yogurt is a killer.

I'm a little sketchy on dairy.  I do cheese and some Yogurt, but try to avoid it if I can. 

[Sky]

BPI blames ABC for causing consumers "to believe that our lean beef product, which is 100% beef, is something called pink slime; that is some type of unhealthy and repulsive liquid product that is not even meat."

As opposed to some type of unhealthy and repulsive liquid product that is meat.