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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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".

[occams_pyramid]

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