MRSA? MRDA.

[avevale_intelligencer]

Sparked off by pbristow:

We are gradually and painfully absorbing the fact that people are neither completely good, nor completely evil, and that portraying them as such in a story is less than plausible. And yet the story we are being told about our food seems, on the face of it, just that implausible. There are "good" foods (vegetables, preferably raw) and "evil" foods (just about everything else) and all the "good" foods are nothing but good for us, and all the "evil" foods keep getting more and more scary stories told about them. I've been trying to think of a health scare story linked to carrots, or cabbage, or Brussels sprouts, and I can't. Red meat, on the other hand, just keeps getting them piled on. Cancer, heart disease, strokes, gods know what all. Now medical experts are apparently saying that bacon is what has given rise to MRSA, and not hospitals at all.

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they. :)

Comments

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

Health scare related to vegetables: lots of US people got some awful kind of botulism (or something similarly horrid) from bagged spinach last year.

My mother always points out that what is portrayed as "good for you" is often what the government has a lot of at any one time.

I stick with eating what I fancy and seeing how it makes me feel, healthwise. I certaintly feel better when I eat more veggies, so that's what works for me. But I'm not listening to the government on the subject anymore.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the 'bagged' spinach was evil processed food. There are of course a load of nasty things which one can get from vegetables which haven't been properly preserved or are unripe (or overripe), but for some reason most of those seem to get brushed under the carpet. Penicillin isn't the only mold...

(Is butter good or bad this week? I've lost track. I like it so I eat it...)

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

Well, I personally prefer to avoid things that are bagged like that (I read a book called "Not on the Label", and whilst I try not to preach to anyone about their diet, it certainly changed how I looked at food and how we treat the people who produce it for us...), but I wouldn't say that it was processed by being put into a bag. However, everyone's view of what constitutes "processed" is different, and YMMV to a great extent.

If you mistreat *any* food, or eat it when it isn't ready, or is in a state of advanced decomposition (all food, by it's very nature, is in *some* state of decomposition) it can make you poorly.

A mouldy carrot isn't going to be good for you, just by dint of it being a vegetable.

I object to the nanny-state telling me what I should and shouldn't eat, as I do have a functioning brain and enough nouse to figure out that chocolate 24/7 gives me headaches and I get more energy when I eat green stuff...

I would, however, point out that if you ever get the chance to experience industrial food-processing, then it is a very interesting and slightly worrying thing. Tim worked for years in a bread factory and then in a processed meat factory (processing raw product into sausages, burgers etc.) There's a very good reason why I buy that sort of thing in a butcher's where I can check what's gone into it, and actually see the machinery used to produce it.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Yes, I too object to the nanny-state, or pressure groups, telling me what I mustn't eat or drink.

I haven't experienced the food processing industry directly, but I have known some people involved in it who related what sort of things happen. It's enough to make someone give up eating anything they haven't grown themself. I very much agree about butchers, I like to see them cut it off the animal (plus that way I can get decent pork chops with crackling and no kidney). And at some of them (particularly small farm shops) I can ask for mince made only from lamb with no beef or pork in it (since some of my family are allergic to one and some to the other), and with the herb mixture I like.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

The nanny state, like everything else in this universe, has its good points as well as its bad, but in this context I'm with the rugged individualists. I know what I like, and I like what I know, and I have weighed up a longer life without bacon sandwiches against a shorter life with them and made my own decision. Which is why I feel a little got at when they seem to keep trying to find new things to threaten me with if I carry on my wicked ways.

[cleverthylacine]

Hi, actually, bagged spinach is not evil processed food, it is just raw fresh spinach that has been washed. The problem was apparently there was bad e.coli in the fertiliser.

I live in California and in the area that was affected--I eat bag spinach all the time, so I a) am lucky i didn't get sick and b) know whereof I speak!

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Yet the fact is - and it is a fact - that almost all poisons come from plants, and that, saving Polar Bear's liver and some parts of a few species of fish, animals are edible. This is because plants have had an awfully long to time to evolve poisons to stop animals eating them - since long before mammals, or even mammal-like reptiles, came on the scene.

A majority of plants are either inedible or poisonous. Even some staple foodstuffs - I am thinking here of casava but you could also include potatoes - have to be processed to be edible, and can only be eaten at certain stages of ripeness.

My own, personal, foam-at-the-mouth moments come when some of these so-called experts use the word "nutrients" to mean "vitamins and minerals" when it actually means sugars, starches, fats and proteins! They tell us that sugar "contains no nutrients" and here am I yelling, "Not when I went to school!" And starches, I might point out, are all broken down to sugars in our guts, anyway.

Sorry to take over your rant, which I agree with entirely.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

No, that's fine. I was expecting to be leapt on, especially for the cheap shot at the end (which gave me a title I just couldn't pass up).

The one I like is when things are touted as having "all natural ingredients." You know, like cannabis, opium, aconite and hydrochloric acid.

[occams_pyramid]

Or the cosmetic whose name means "Beautiful lady". Belladonna.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I lodged for a time with a family who were very into 'herbal' supplements. But they weren't drugs, they said, these were 'natural' from plants. For some reason they objected to me suggesting that I bring some other natural plants into the house, I believe I suggested cannabis and opium...

At their suggestion I tried one of their 'natural' supplements which "helps you sleep". It did, indeed -- until they ran out of it, and I was awake for three days straight...

[hrrunka]

Curiously, it is possible to eat too many carrots. A friend with an eating disorder subsisted for a while almost entirely on carrots, turned a rather unhealthy shade of yellow, and suffered from some strange liver complaint as a result.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

I had an aunt who did a very similar thing with oranges. She turned orange and got some kind of liver issue which never went right again.

I don't know any medical details about it, but it was always told to my brother and I as an Awful Warning about how it's possible to overdo anything.

And I had a university friend who got scurvy because he lived for over a year on beer and porridge. Porridge because it was the only thing he knew how to cook and beer because he was a student and preferred beer to food, even takeaways.

I don't know what happened to him in the end, but I was at least able to congratulate myself that my diet (Chinese takeaways, chips and beer) was better than his. Mine at least had some vegetables.

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

I had a friend at college with Crohn's - he subsisted during one very prolonged flare-up on just Guinness. He was usually to be found legless (although he was *ridiculously* cute when drunk), but he survived a flare-up that the doctors thought would kill him.

Can't say I'll be trying it myself, though!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It's not bacon as such, though the "hook" of the story doesn't make that very clear. It's the practice of giving antibiotics to meat animals that aren't sick. Apparently this makes the animals gain weight faster. The downside, which has been known for a long time, is that when antibiotics are abundant in the environment, bacteria that are resistant to them have an advantage over bacteria that aren't, and antibiotic resistant bacteria become common. The only part of this that is news is that a particular strain of antibiotic resistant bacteria has been, unsurprisingly, found to be associated with pigs.

Meanwhile both spinach and tomatoes have been linked to E. coli outbreaks in the news--tomatoes several times--and apples have been "outed" as being contaminated with pesticides, and so on.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

It's not bacon as such, though the "hook" of the story doesn't make that very clear. It's the practice of giving antibiotics to meat animals that aren't sick.

Not in this country, at least, not legally. This is a large bone of contention between the EU (where it is not practiced) and the USA, where it is... rather like GM foods, really.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Not in this country, at least, not legally.

Granted. I was making the point that it's not the consumption of meat that's being held up as unhealthful in this article, but rather this aspect of its production in the US.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I think it's also a return to the puritan idea that we are more righteous if we suffer. "If you like it, it's bad; if it tastes nasty then it's good for you." Anything which people enjoy doing seems to be attacked, and things which no one likes are "good for you".

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

Bummer. I like vegetables. Should I give them up?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Only if you're a puritan!

[occams_pyramid]

The only food which contains all four essential food groups is Irish Coffee, which contains Alcohol, Caffeine, Sugar, and Fat.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Well said, that man!

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Ah no. No cholesterol or salt. No good for Nyronds.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the emphasis is on eating a varied diet. Nyronds can get their cholesterol and salt from other foods, as long as they eat a variety.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

No cinnamon or chocolate!