Category Archives: health

health, nutrition, raw milk

Specious species claim

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I read a lot of blogs and books on real food, farming, nutrition, and so on. (Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist or a farmer, just a food blogger and an eater of real food.) There is one recurring truthy, specious factoid out there that just won’t quit. (Vocabulary below.) That one persistent truthy, specious factoid is “humans are the only animal to drink milk from other species.”

Here’s the real fact: humans are the only animal that figured out how to obtain and store the milk of another species so that we could consume it on demand. Lots of other mammals would love to drink the milk of another species but have to rely either on extra-species largesse or on humans to get it. The proof is in the pictures.

Cats emulating bipeds:

happy cat

Some serious interspecies sharing:

sharing...

Even this (ewww):

Now here’s something you don’t see every day (unless you have a cat):

Scottie pinwheel dance for goats milk:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDa0z0gEvI4&w=480]

 

As it happens, humans are the only species that pay to live on the Earth.

 

Vocabulary

specious (Google)

  1. Superficially plausible, but actually wrong: “a specious argument”.
  2. Misleading in appearance, esp. misleadingly attractive: “a specious appearance of novelty”. In other words, sounds true but it isn’t

truthiness

Coined by Stephen Colbert: the quality of knowing something in your gut, or your heart, as opposed to in your head.

From Merriam-Webster:

  1. “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005)
  2. “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

factoid (Wikipedia)

A factoid is a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated) statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”.

 

health, nutrition, politics

Studies show water may not have health benefits

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In an attempt to standardize language to describe food and food processing and to protect the consumer from potentially false claims, some bureaucracies don’t know when to call in their logic team. Here’s the latest example:

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration.

Yes, you read that right. Since it has not been proven that water actually prevents dehydration, it would be misleading to label the bottle with that claim so such language is now banned in the EU. Really.

Yes, it took them three years of study to negate a previously undisputed fact. That implies that it wasn’t a fact. Am I anti-science if I still believe water is good for me?

As noted, history will not be kind to these folks.

farms, health, politics

Soylent Pink

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Jamie Oliver shows where the various cuts of beef come from on the cow. After the good cuts are gone, what happens with the waste trimmings? It gets made into pink slime.

If you don’t have the time or stomach to watch, here’s the synopsis: Butchers pay companies to take away the parts of the cow that cannot be fed to humans. This is usually used to make chicken and dog feed. But thanks to good old Yankee ingenuity, some clever entrepreneurs figured out how to take these remnants and separate the fat so they could access the remaining meat. They “cleanse” that meat in an ammonia solution to kill the e.coli, salmonella, and other pathogens. Then they grind it and it looks just like ground beef.

By law, up to 15% of this pink slime can be mixed into regular ground beef. This filler is popular with fast food chains and grocery stores. Since the ammonia is a processing agent and not an ingredient, there’s no requirement to list it on the label.

Still wondering if my local beef is worth the price? The real question is: Are our legislators and administration officials worth their price?

UPDATE:

I’ve been asking “my” farmers for their assurance. The following farms confirm there is NO pink slime in their ground beef (and that means no ammonia in or on any of their meat either):

Note: Not all the replies are in yet and I will continue to update this list.

If “your” farmers have given you their assurance, please post it in a comment. Thanks.

farms, health, politics

Senate Passes S510

The Senate passed S510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, 73-25. The bill has a ways to go before it becomes law. The House and Senate still need to hash it out (while there’s plenty else going on) unless the House decides to simply vote on the Senate bill.

According to the NY Times,

The bill is intended to get the government to crack down on unsafe foods before they harm people rather than after outbreaks occur.

If only.  If only we all had the same ideas about what makes foods unsafe then a preemptive strike wouldn’t sound so ominous.

Michael Pollan is for it, believing a food safety overhaul is long overdue and that the bill won’t adversely affect small farms because of the Tester amendment. I hope his trust is not misplaced.