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" (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...). 20% of 610,000 = 122,000/year. That the heart disease risk reduction is 162x more significant than the food poisoning risk increase, should be more than enough to outweigh the risk of food poisoning.
However, and less clear, there is also evidence that leafy green vegetables protect against diabetes, cancer, dementia, and Alzheimer's.
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.
I fully concede this (and jacobolus's) point. I'm not a health researcher either, so don't take my word for any of this.
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 < .001), and diastolic blood pressure decreased from 87.4 (SE +/- 1.2) to 83.4 mm Hg (SE +/- 1.2, P < .05) from tomato extract.
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.
> Building a double-blind clinical trial regarding changing people's diets over their lifetime and observing cardiovascular mortality is very hard.
But it is the only diet research that can actually generate knowledge.
The studies you cite are nice and all, but the first two are for studies that measured outcomes after 6-8 weeks. If you assume an average lifespan of 70 years, the longest study represented ~1/450th of a human lifespan. And, as you mention, they only measure what we think are valid indicators, not actual outcomes! And the third study may control for all of the things you mention, but it doesn't control for the other foods the study participants ate!
Really the only piece of information that you need to know regarding red meat is that public health messaging for the last 50 years has been that people should limit red meat intake. And it was successful. According to this[0], red meat consumption has decreased from 133lbs per person in 1965 to 107lbs per person in 2016. But it is during this exact same time period that the obesity epidemic came into existence. So, perhaps red meat is marginally bad for you, but it is almost certainly not cause of all of the various afflictions that we think are caused in some way by our diets.
> But it is the only diet research that can actually generate knowledge.
> The studies you cite are nice and all, but the first two are for studies that measured outcomes after 6-8 weeks. If you assume an average lifespan of 70 years, the longest study represented ~1/450th of a human lifespan. And, as you mention, they only measure what we think are valid indicators, not actual outcomes! And the third study may control for all of the things you mention, but it doesn't control for the other foods the study participants ate!
I fully agree with everything you wrote about the science here.
However, many of the epidemiological studies are over very large populations and time periods, so it's not as though the body of evidence consists of a 6-8 week studies. And honestly the fact that the effects are so strong in such a short period of time strengthen the argument in some ways.
> Really the only piece of information that you need to know regarding red meat is that public health messaging for the last 50 years has been that people should limit red meat intake. And it was successful. According to this, red meat consumption has decreased from 133lbs per person in 1965 to 107lbs per person in 2016. But it is during this exact same time period that the obesity epidemic came into existence. So, perhaps red meat is marginally bad for you, but it is almost certainly not cause of all of the various afflictions that we think are caused in some way by our diets.
Interesting response. I never claimed that meat was bad, only that leafy vegetables were good. I find it almost incredible that your argument against the nutritional value of leafy vegetables is that there aren't enough double blind clinical trials, and then your defense of red meat uses a time correlation that doesn't adjust for any confounding variables at all. It also cites a document from an meat industry group. If you look at USDA numbers (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per...), overall meat consumption has been consistently and slowly rising, however beef is being replaced with chicken, so yes red meat consumption is declining.
> However, many of the epidemiological studies are over very large populations and time periods, so it's not as though the body of evidence consists of a 6-8 week studies. And honestly the fact that the effects are so strong in such a short period of time strengthen the argument in some ways.
The studies all tell us nothing about the long term implications of diet. The long study tells us nothing because it is purely correlational. The short studies tell us nothing because they are not measuring the thing we care about (long term health outcomes). You can't somehow generate knowledge by combining two types of studies which each are incapable of generating knowledge about the thing we care about.
> I never claimed that meat was bad, only that leafy vegetables were good.
Yeah, I clearly was hallucinating. Nowhere did you mention red meat. And yet I rambled on about it for a paragraph. :-) Sorry!
But:
> I find it almost incredible that your argument against the nutritional value of leafy vegetables is that there aren't enough double blind clinical trials, and then your defense of red meat uses a time correlation that doesn't adjust for any confounding variables at all.
That's because correlation cannot demonstrate causation, but it can demonstrate the lack of causation. It's all about confounding variables, as you point out. If you have two trend lines which correlate, there can always be a third, unmeasured variable which is actually causing the two measured variables. However, if you have trend lines which do not correlate, then the only way they can be related is by some extremely convoluted chain of causation. Which, I guess, is technically possible, but rapidly approaches 0 probability.
In other words, epidemiology is very useful for narrowing the possibly explanations for some phenomena, and it can suggest places where we should continue focusing our attention, but it can't actually tell us if we've found the right culprit.
Correlation cannot demonstrate lack of causation, only lack of linear dose response. (Incl. Multivariate)
Any nonlinear enough process will show with wrong low correlations.
Suppose the process is stepwise - silly sample hypothesis, eating over x grams meat a day is harmful. It is binary. Correlation is meaningless for such a process. You have to use significantly more powerful statistic tools. Logistic regression will somewhat work for such a process for instance if the boundary is somewhat fuzzy. (You can put exact mathematical bound on how fuzzy.)
To extend it for multivariate analysis you get to use such complex tools as nonlinear ICA. (Instead of CCA and PCA for linear.)
I’m using the wrong terminology, I’m certain, but what I’m getting at is that observational (which is probably what I mean instead of correlational) studies can negate a hypothesis, but they can never prove one. So, one hypothesis is that red meat consumption leads to heart disease. If the data shows the trend lines of heart disease and red meat consumption going in opposite directions, then you know your hypothesis is wrong. But if the trend lines are going in the same direction, the hypothesis hasn’t been proven; all you know is that it is a potential explanation.
Now, it may be that there is a different relationship, like the one that you mention: that eating more than X grams per day is harmful. The data from an observational study can negate this hypothesis (if there is no threshold pattern evident in the data), but it cannot prove the hypothesis. All it can do, at best, is let you know that the hypothesis might be true.
Observational studies can be post- interventional and in this case can prove or not a hypothesis that a certain widespread intervention was successful.
This is very rare and hard to run, so more direct interventional short term studies are used more often.
Suppose a certain country believed an observational study pointing that eating more than certain amount of sugar is harmful (suppose backed by other evidence). They instated hard tax and limit on sugar in foods as an intervention.
After some time a big observational study is ran and it is assessed if the intervention brought results.
This is precisely what observational studies (follow up) should do.
Not really try to find hypotheses - these need more direct evidence.
Yeah, but if there is an intervention, then it is not purely an observational study. The big problem with nutrition science is that most of the long term studies are purely observational. There is no intervention at all. All they are measuring is how certain observed measurements correlate (or not) with other observed measurements. These are the types of studies I'm talking about.
Ok, so your first link was bad because it included poultry, your second link is worse because it is total production, not per capita consumption (and some production is exported). You might be right, but still don’t have any data to support your claim.
This link[0] also from the USDA, shows availability of red meat (pork + beef) as decreasing from >120 pounds per person in 1970 to about 100 pounds per person in 2014. The best I could gather from the spreadsheets on the link you provided was that red meat consumption has gone up in the last 4 years (2014-2017, not covered by my link), but the overall trend has been way down over the last 40 years, unless I'm grossly mistaken.
And, given that this same time frame has coincided with the obesity epidemic, it seems hard to make the case that red meat is bad for you. I think the best argument you could make is that red meat is bad for you in a small way, but something else is causing the Really Bad Stuff™. I'm open to changing my mind, but the data has to lead me there.
I'm been chewing over your comment since last night, so thanks! These are just some thoughts, which I don't have a high degree of confidence in, but here goes anyway:
I guess the difference between astronomy and diet is that, in my conception, at least, the systems studied in astronomy tend to be less complex than the human body and, therefore, they can be modeled relatively easily. My hunch is that this has something to do the human body being a self regulating, though climate systems on earth are probably of a similar level of complexity, yet are not self regulating (or at least, not in the same way).
So, the difference in complexity between a astronomical system and the human body would be akin to the difference in complexity between a program which implements some relatively straightforward business logic vs. one that implements a system which can identify and hunt prey. You can probably prove the correctness of most programs which implement basic business logic, but I'm guessing a system which can identify and hunt prey probably cannot be proven to be formally correct. You would need to test it in the real world by tweaking inputs and measuring how it responds.
I think that's an interesting approach. For the record, I absolutely share your healthy suspicion that health sciences need a bit (much) more hand holding than some (most) other disciplines.
I'm glad you're giving this some thought, because this line of inquiry (or something like it) really affected the way I think about science and knowledge. It's an incredibly rewarding line to go down, though not entirely free of frustrating dead ends.
If you find this stuff interesting, you might want to poke around a bit in 20th century philosophy. There are some (needlessly lengthy) summaries at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, esp. under "Logical Empiricism." I hesitate to recommend that, though, it's long on history and short on significant arguments and though-provoking examples.
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" by Quine profoundly affected the way I think about all of this. It's not an easy piece, I had to read it a few times and kept turning it over in my head for months. At first I thought it was nonsense. Then I thought it was just wrong. Then it sort of wormed its way into my head and changed a few core things I believed about knowledge. Or reorganized them. Karl Popper, Rudolf Carnap, and Wittgenstein all had profound contributions here too.
At the end of Quine's paper he says that White basically said everything important on this already in "The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism." I haven't read that, but maybe it's the accessible version. One could hope.
Changing and tracking diet long-term is nigh impossible. Has there been any work that you know of using economic incentives as a proxy? i.e. test group is granted coupons good for fruits and vegetables, while control group is granted fully discretionary coupons
Obviously it's an imperfect experiment, but it seems like a pragmatic compromise.
There are many other short term studies that support this fully. You may not want to believe red meat consumption is indicative of negative health indicators, but most notable cardiologists in the field fully support the position.
So your claim is you have better scientific basis than industry experts? I'll gladly challenge you to a 6-12 month comparison of you eating meats and me eating a primary plant based diet and pay for WellnessFX panels. If you lose you repay me.
Edit: vegetable --> plant, and if I win (we can agree on some defined objective comparisons and scoring offline) I'll even donate the money you'd have repaid back to the charity of my choosing. I'd be glad to make our miminal findings public as well.
No, what I’m saying is that correlational studies are fundamentally incapable of proving causation[0]. Furthermore, despite 50 years of nutritional advice in line with the study you linked to, and despite reductions in red meat consumption[1], health outcomes have gotten catastrophically worse, not better. So maybe the conclusions that people are drawing from these studies are wrong.
Read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes if you want to do a deep dive on how so many people can be so wrong about something for so long. It will completely undermine your faith in experts along the way.
That's not to say Taubes has not written a lot of good and important things, but it is an example of someone who is in so deep that they are missing the forest for the trees. Carbs are obviously not the devil, it's just that the overabundance of cheap, processed carbs have made the diseases of abundance commonplace.
That’s all fine and we’ll, but I’m not mentioning Taubes for his carbs hypothesis (btw, he goes to great pains in Good Calories, Bad Calories to make sure the reader understands that his hypothesis could be wrong because it is also lacking the necessary type of study to demonstrate it’s effectiveness). I’m linking to him because he has important stuff to say about the limits of epidemiology, in general, and the terrible state of nutrition science, more specifically.
The article in the NY Times is by a highly respected science journalist. It examines a bunch of epidemiological studies and explains why they are fundamentally limited. It should be required reading for anybody who wants to make decsisions based on epidemiology.
You should read it. Seriously. It’s way more important than anything else on HN right now. I promise.
You're choosing a position based on a personal bias and ignore scientific evidence by industry experts. You also won't back up your unfounded claims and chose to ignore the challenge I've presented. I wonder why...
> chose to ignore the challenge I've presented. I wonder why...
My guess here is that it's because you offered somebody a 6-12 month physical challenge on a discussion thread about nutrition. Unless you're willing to engage in a 6-12 month comprehensive study of messageboard thread challenges, which we will cofinance (but in the end, if we find that these types of challenges are generally accepted as arguments, I'll compensate you for your half of the research budget, and vice-versa), you must concede that that's a silly thing to wonder about...
No, I’m ignoring the experts because anybody with half a brain can see that they are wrong. And I ignored your silly challenge because it has no bearing on the argument we are having.
I have already done this for the past 5 years on a rather strict ketogenic diet eating a fair share of red meat. It's been nothing short of amazing for my health. I'm not saying it's the only way to be healthy, far from it. We are very adaptable. But for me at least, it does not seem to be detrimental in the least.
You've done panels? I had done Paleo for years and on a whim I decided to try plant based for 2018 and have seen many improvements as well. I'd be curious how your panels compare to mine, especially with regard to cardiovascular focal areas.
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. < 3 servings of vegetables (either among the general population or among heart disease sufferers), and (b) the risk number is about developing heart disease at all, not deaths (without even mentioning (c) these are cohort studies showing correlations, not proving causal relationships).
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.
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.
This type of article also triggers confirmation bias. "I found an article that said eating salads is sometimes bad for me." + "I ignored the body of research that says that eating salads is almost always great for me.".
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that we eat fewer leafy greens. I, however, definitely think that there could be a lot of improvements to the way that we farm them.
Would depend on the pathogen in question, how its on the lettuce (and indeed what kind of lettuce), etc. In this particular outbreak, it looks like the CDC's stance is "not really".
But there's a lot of ambient food poisoning that can be prevented by washing lettuce, especially in reducing cross-contamination (the lettuce wasn't contaminated, then got exposed during the cooking prep process, etc.)
Oh, yes, I’d agree that contamination risk must be small compared to whatever the dietary effect might be. (I’d say even the direction of that effect is unknown.)
I remember living in China for an extended period of time and never seeing raw vegetables as part of a meal; locals I spoke with found the very concept unsanitary.
It's unfortunate that some are advocating just abandoning chapters of our local cuisine as being no longer viable in our era. I'd rather we more strongly enforce regulations so we can hold onto our salads.
It's more fair that many, many places have done the same thing. When I was in Ghana for a summer in 1987, I was warned that "night soil" was often used in vegetable fields, and I should watch out for my tender American digestive system not being able to deal with the uncooked results. No slight against Ghana in particular, that's typical for countries at Ghana's level of development.
I don't think it is a slight against Ghana. They may well be ahead of the curve on something we may all have to move back to, i.e. "Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming"[1].
I'm all for sustainable farming, and poop is a manageable risk on fields where you cook what's grown there. But you don't treat vegetable fields with raw poop, which is what I was referring to... especially vegetables designed to be eaten uncooked.
Honestly, whatever form of cooking gets you to eat them is probably the best preparation.
Some nutrients in some vegetables are diminished by cooking (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-3841... for example). Some are also enhanced. For example: lycopene from tomatoes. Overall, it seemed to me that cooking often harms nutrition more than it helps.
This isn't my area, but I've heard that cooking is part of digestion.
I know evolutionary biology isn't as intuitive as people always assume, but theoretically this fits within my model - digestion burns precious calories (at least in a world with too many calories), breaking down the food using fire somewhat allows for the body to spend less calories on breaking it down itself. So our ancestors who used fire to cook had an advantage because they could spend less calories on digestion.
Archaeological evidence suggests that humans can control fire between 700,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago.
But fundamentally, I wonder if we cook too much. Some compounds are very fragile, and cooking would harm nutrition (as you said). As I said, not my field, but I try to stick to a lot of leafy greens as is recommended by health services, and the occasional cooked proteins.
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.
It's not clear that this is relevant to heart disease. Vitamin C, for example, is degraded by heat, but has no role in preventing heart disease. "Antioxidants" is the smoke signal of the woo practitioner.
>Overall, it seemed to me that cooking often harms nutrition more than it helps.
This is such a common and annoying myth that I need to call it out as such. Humans literally evolved to eat cooked food.
The thing with leafy greens is, they rot faster, they need to be reasonably fresh. I know because last week I had to clean up a brown puddle of ooze coming out of a stored grocery bag. The salad was rotten within a week while the fruit still looked good. Carrots are similarly short lived, in my experience.
And there's a whole thing to say about frigerator hygiene - they are not sterile just because of lower temperatures, while they are hard to clean unless turned off, because water won't dry, whereas they are hard to turn off, when they are always filled. I'm being pedantic, I know.
Hydroponic lettuce is simply the easiest thing I've grown. I'm surprised I don't see it mentioned more often. I bought an Agrobrite 4 bulb T5 light on Amazon that runs 216watts. The math works out to $15/month if running 16 hours a day. It takes about 2-3 weeks for the 9 seeds to start, but I was swimming in lettuce in no time. It tastes excellent too. Search for Jeb Gardner on youtube for some entertaining lettuce videos grown in an office environment.
Seems like Mesculan type greens would work well with that setup. Can harvest in a little over a month (well outdoors, I don't know with that light but maybe similar).
It's mixed type greens, mustards, lettuce etc. Cut when leaves are about the size of the business part of a spoon. Cut it so it comes back and you can get 3 or 4 cuttings per planting. Plant it successively (i.e every week or two plant another section) so it's constantly available.
Faster to harvest, more sustained harvest, and it tastes better than lettuce because you can put little greens like collards and arugula in the mix. Indoors you'd avoid the insect troubles that plague these tiny greens outside as well.
The other cool thing about this is that you can let one go to seed and you will be swimming in seeds as well (though it's tricky to manage the light height because the flower stalk is quite tall).
Hydroponics are not just great for food, they are awesome for people suffering from lack of light exposure in winter months. When I lived in Canada, I used to put a 4 foot long plant stand with fluorescent daylight bulbs along each wall of my apartment. I can't remember how long I had the light timer set for (probably 14 hours). It's incredible the difference. These days you can get creative with various LED solutions and probably do even better.
I happen to be growing lettuce (and other things) in my office at work, and I can also attest to how easy it is. Only issue is that they need to be watered every other day.
One interesting thing ive noticed about chinese culture are the heuristics around cleanliness. Vegetables are always washed vigorously and cooked. Salads and sandwiches and other raw-like things are rather disliked. Hands are washed after petting dogs/cats. Slippers always worn around the house. Dislike of carpets. Windows opened every morning for fresh air. Other random stuff.
The safety heuristics cant be delegated to a larger system as one doesn't exists so individual households maintain this knowledge and many of them turn into habitual preference.
For some reason your comment shows grayed out to me, making me think it's been downvoted. I don't know why this would be downvoted.
FWIW I've seen the same behaviors you described in most developing economies where people don't seem to trust the larger system. I don't know if the end result is any better - food borne illnesses are still quite common despite these 'heuristics' (as you aptly named them), but there might be far more causes than just unclean veggies.
I remember watching TV growing up... Full house or whatever family sitcom. The kids laid the bed with their shoes on, school clothes. My mom comments on how dirty that is.
Additionaly it seems like only textbook are Americans using paper towels to open bathroom doors after washing their hands. My mom instilled that at a young age (I'm 36 now). Now it irritates me to see a Dyson hand dryer, and have to open the bathroom door by pulling it.
From a European perspective, I so often notice this in American movies. Everybody constantly with shoes in beds an sofas, apparently without a thought. Always grosses me out - it simply would not ever occur to me to put my shoes on furniture.
This chain has made me curious; has there been any study of the negative health consequences of people's behavior with shoes within their living space? I'm not aware of any health concerns (major or minor) over such a thing.
For example, if such things were a worry then I'd be more concerned over my dog's bare paws while outside and his nonchalant attitude of not wiping them as he comes inside.
I've only taken to using paper towels to open doors, after realizing how everyone touches that thing after using the bathroom. Why do bathroom doors open to the inside?
It's even worse in the cinema, where there's a lot more people using it and only those dyson things. Plus not everyone washes their hands. Some only sorta wave their thumb and index finger under a bit of water.
Smart move, indeed. A minor chance of contact with E.Coli seems more dangerous than documented certain heart disease, cancer, and wait for it.. more E.Coli!
This is most certainly untrue. All you have to do is consider the fact that all uncooked meats come with a warning. This is because it is well known, and admitted by the meat and egg industries, that raw and undercooked meats and eggs are unsafe for consumption. This is because of the environments they come out of. Greens on the other hand are not fertilized with manure or subject to E.Coli laden environments during processing. The only unsafe greens are mainly things like alfalfa sprouts that can come into contact in the processing chain. I'm surprised at all of the disinformation.
The last big E. coli outbreak in spinach was because of an E. coli laden environment - notably, wild hogs in the field, and then contamination in a washing pool.
Not to be graphic here, but when they are picking lettuce where the portable bathroom is - is important. These guys are pushed for time -- and if the potty is too far away...
Also, to deal with this, some farms have movable portable bathrooms on wheels that hover over the produce or in between and follow the group, I am sure they leak.
This is an important part of the equation, and it's unfortunate that the article doesn't go into sufficient detail about the actual mechanisms by which the infection can happen. If anything, the article's mentions of "people are simply eating more fresh produce these days" and "some contamination can still slip through" foster an attitude of helplessness, as if this is a new normal we need to get used to.
Poor living and working conditions for migrant farmworkers is a contributing factor to outbreaks like this. Workers who are present illegally or are otherwise marginalized and taken advantage of, even if they are part of legal guest-worker programs, suffer conditions where poor housing facilities or the need to work under great time pressures leads to inadequate sanitation.
A 2017 story [0] illustrates this:
>Kristina Espinoza, a labor department investigator who recently visited the farm, described a "makeshift labor camp" that was "dangerous" and "unsanitary," according to court documents. [...] Gonzalez had workers shower in nine stalls inside a cargo container; there was no functional sewage system, so wastewater accumulated underneath the container, Espinoza said. The electrical cord used to light the facility was exposed to standing water, posing a risk of electrocution, according to court documents. The workers shared one toilet in the trailer and had access to port-a-potties.
>Instead of shipping heads of lettuce or large carrot sticks that people wash, we chop them and mix them up in processing, then package them in plastic bags. In that process, Marler said, “The bacteria has a chance to grow. And a lot of people get sick.”
This confirms what I had always been suspicious of. Those prepackaged veggies sitting in plastic bags are just a few degrees of temperature away from being perfect bacterial breeding grounds. Don't ever buy that crap.
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.
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 pressure water usage would flush whatever crap is in a pipe. Preventing any real contamination. Well...a quick google search shows that biofilm on residential water pipes is a huge problem. High pressure activity does not eliminate biofilm...of course stagnant water is more of an issue...
You probably don't want to know how we filter our water then [1]:
"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.
Downvoting me for this was stupid. You know know enough about food if you think bleaching is healthy. Apart of what makes salad healthy is the bacterial culture that's naturally on it. Think probiotics that are essential to maintaining proper digestion of the food you're eating. Seriously, get downvoted for anything.
"if you think the only thing that makes salad healthy are it's probiotics then you also don't know enough about food."
Learn about the gut micro-biome. The main reason salad is good for you it's effect on gut.
We eat to feed the gut, not ourselves. To imply that prebiotics/probiotics aren't the main reason vegetables have a positive health effect on us is beyond ignorant. That's the reason why diabetes, cancer and heart disease is now worse than all the wars of history combined.
"So just take a bunch of probiotics with your steak n shake, and call it good?"
Are you taking the piss?
"And, you meant to say salad that hasn't ever been washed in chlorinated water is good for you."
You're the one putting words into my mouth. I never said that because I don't believe that. Salad that's fresh from a traditional farm using healthy soil, practices and cultivar is good for you.
If you're satisfied with nutritionally bankrupt, sterile food, fine. Good for you.
It likely means they don't need to be cooked and not that they don't need to be washed. We don't wash strawberries we pick, but we wash those that we buy (even if they are ready to eat).
No, it explicitly means you can eat it straight from the bag. If you're going to wash it anyway you may as well buy cheaper, safer unbagged veg.
Of course, it is intended to mislead. People see "triple washed", the bag is sealed, they think they are getting convenience and safety, but they are not.
The bagged stuff is packed under inert gas to prevent spoilage. The human nose is exquisitely tuned to detect "off" flavours under ordinary circumstances, but the bacteria that thrive in a nitrogen atmosphere are different, and you can catch food poisoning without noticing that the food had gone off.
If anyone has even a passing interest in food safety from a scientific or academic perspective, the Food Safety Talk podcast is fantastic. The lawyer quoted in the article is friends with the two hosts.
What I've heard (and I'm only citing unverified word of mouth) is that E.Coli is within the leaf itself, it comes from the water it used. You cannot wash it off or clean it. An infected head of lettuce is garbage.
As to those wondering why this is significant:
- Eating burgers and fries that turn out to be poison... "told you so"
- Eating salad and veggies that turn out to be poison... wtf.
A silly comparison, but it does raise the concern that even those that watch what they eat and try to be healthy can't escape the widespread bacterial problems in food in modern industrial food processing.
Does dumping it into a colander, and running water across it not count?
(Essentially, the same way one would wash fruit such as blueberries or strawberries, though I usually use the box those come in since they already have holes.)
Not mentioned is that organic farming doesn't allow irradiation which would kill e-coli. Everybody looks for organic foods thinking they are better but the truth is organic doesn't mean either.
I buy both organic and non-organic produce. I've never encountered irradiated non-organic produce either. I don't know why irradiation isn't more common, but organic certification certainly isn't the prime culprit; most of this tainted lettuce wasn't certified organic in the first place.
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 complaint) does not know how nuclear physics works, a clearer statement on packaging would actually cause more people to believe incorrect things.
So what should the logo be? The radioactive trefoil symbol? You'd think that's the most "honest", but that's not an accurate depiction either, because irradiating the food doesn't cause the food itself to become radioactive.
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.
Produced using processes that we've tested for centuries. We're not sure they work, but we're sure they're not ridiculously dangerous. Contrast glyphosate.
You can still buy all of these things if you want. They come with the appropriate labeling.
I'm sorry if your concern is purely linguistic, but "organic" isn't a reserved word. Benzol is organic too. Organic laws are a thing too. Different kinds of organic.
Some people want to eat the same way people ate for millennia. Good for them. It's one of the benefits of living in a free market society. People have mistakenly thought a lot of things to be safe or dangerous, but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide.
Finally I don't understand why people are so angry at organic produce. I rarely buy it too, but what's the big deal? It sounds like they need to prove something. I don't get it.
>but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide.
my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. something being used for thousands of years merely means it doesn't cause harm in small enough timescales so that people can associate it with the effects. see: smoking, which is dangerously poisonous, but the effects are on such long timescales that its negative effects are dissociated from it.
>Finally I don't understand why people are so angry at organic produce. I rarely buy it too, but what's the big deal? It sounds like they need to prove something. I don't get it.
I guess the anger is directed to both the people that are gullible enough to buy it and continue to perpetuate the myth that it's somehow better, and the companies pushing organic produce (by exploiting said ignorance, and perpetuating said ignorance as a way to sell high margin produce)
>my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts.
This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts.
You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This is a much better guarantee than a paper published on nature. For me at least, because this is an opinion. You're free to be wrong, just as I am. Time shows who's gullible and who's not.
>This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts.
You're throwing around the word "fact" a little too liberally. "people did x for thousands of years" is a fact, but it's not a guarantee of safety. "x is safe because people used it for thousands of years" is a guarantee of safety based on your opinion, but it's not a fact.
>You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This is a much better guarantee than a paper published on nature.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you accepting that harmful substances that cause mild, low-level symptoms can "fly under the radar" of "the test of time"? Or are you saying that the fact something is used for a long time is automatically a better proof of safety to you than a study published in nature?
>This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on.
I don't really follow you here. You mean that the guarantee is about safety? I mean back then our life expectancy was lower. The fact that humanity survived with old methods doesn't mean what we did was safe(r) in general. It just means that enough people survived so that humanity didn't die off as a whole. That is a very weak guarantee.
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 weight of scientific evidence is on the other side. The WHO had to ignore a lot of evidence and cherry pick which studies to use to get that result. In short I would call it scientific fraud that they make this claim.
>JMPR’s risk assessment found out that based on the weight-of-evidence approach these compounds are unlikely to cause cancer in people via dietary exposure.
I await the day where the human genome is fully sequenced (even the so called "junk parts") and we find out many of the encoded proteins are teratogenic. News Alert: "human body produces carcinogens!"
I believe it's defined as 'you feel good after buying it'.
It's why petro-chemical fertilizers, or the crops grown with them are in-organic, but passing corn grown with petro-chemical fertilizers through the digestive system of a cow magically makes said fertilizer organic.
If it's good enough for my chemistry professors, it's good enough for me.
Is there any way to regulate marketing terms so that hippy-dippy ad-men don't seize upon words that have meaning and then proceed to dilute that meaning with steaming loads of nonsense?
I'd be happy enough if a label said "this has never touched poop".
I hope you don't mind if I expose you to a specific wavelength of light for a moment and witness chances in your chemical composition. You get a pretty green stamp too.
Probably depends on what your definition of "organic" is (I mean, isn't nearly all food organic?).
I'd imagine many people are coming at it as something like "not produced or processed via industrial processes." And irradiation would probably be considered an industrial process.
> Leafy vegetables were also the second most common cause of food poisoning-related hospitalizations.
I never quite got to like lettuce. I don't know why people like it. It just doesn't have much taste, its leaves are too big, so have to shove them in awkwardly.
I'd rather have a salad with chopped ripe tomatoes, onions / chives, cucumbers, cabbage, etc. Even with those, I often wonder if people don't eat more veggies because American veggies from grocery store taste like plastic. So eating them is a chore, because well, it's "healthy" but not because they taste good.
Iceberg lettuce is the most pointless waste of time and money in the entire agricultural industry.
You are absolutely correct in your assessment of vegetable quality. Everything is bred for transportability, appearance, and shelf life, then flavor and nutrition go out the window.
It's exactly the same story as the Red Delicious apple. They were bred to be very red, not at all sour, and to not bruise too easily. So they look good, but taste like garbage.
I have noticed the same devolution in watermelons. You used to be able to get huge, arm-filling watermelons, juicy and sweet, but shot through with big black seeds. Now at the supermarket they're all seedless, nearly flavorless, and small.
Same with strawberries. They used to be small, but intensely flavored, and ranging from very sweet to slightly sour. Now you can find them as big as your clenched fist, but then bite into one, and it just tastes like dirty water.
I don't buy food to look at it. It seems like the greatest minds of the last agricultural generation have all been wasted on making foods look like they'll taste good, and look like they're worth the money, but then become a total disappointment to your tongue.
My parents used to have a small garden growing up and we grew tomatoes once in a while. It was pain, because they needed a lot of watering, but they had an intense delicious flavor. I'd just go and eat them one after another right off the vine. Here in US it's hard to find that flavor. Some of the little green and yellow mixed tomatoes kind of have flavor, they are call heirloom tomatoes, I usually buy those.
> They used to be small, but intensely flavored, and ranging from very sweet to slightly sour.
The most delicious strawberries I have ever had, were wild strawberries. They were very smaller, about the size of a raspberry or smaller and would find them the woods in Eastern Europe when we went to pick mushrooms.
This seems an impractical suggestion, at best. To spend $450 and fly 2000 miles, to then spend $21 on a lunch-menu salad. Made with iceberg lettuce. Instead of any of the fresh oysters on that menu that I cannot get at home.
That recipe seems to be for disappointment.
If the only way to redeem an otherwise boring and useless chunk of iceberg lettuce is to put better foods on top of it, like steak, why not just throw out the lettuce and eat the other foods instead?
Can you suggest any use for iceberg lettuce that I can test at home that would not be vastly improved by either leaving the iceberg out, or substituting Romaine, Bibb, or leaf lettuce in its place?
Now that you mention it, none. They're all just better than iceberg.
Green cabbage is the lowest vegetable on the hierarchy that I'll actually eat by itself. Though even with that, I sometimes put a red cabbage leaf on top of it.
American lettuce mixes are actually pretty unique for how tasteless they are compared to the availability of edible greens in nature. If you were to make a salad of, say, arugula, endive, radicchio, and various leafy herbs like basil and oregano, you'd have quite the taste sensation.
Add a simple vinaigrette to that, and tell me when to show up for dinner.
Not sure what your definition of lettuce is. All greens or just something like iceberg? If you want taste, then eat Arugula... loads of flavor. Arugula and spinach are probably the two main greens I consume.
The lettuce readily available in American grocery stores doesn't have much taste, yes. But try some fresh Laitue, Bibb, Mâche, Endives or Arugula. There's a world of flavor in lettuce but as with most other things here we have a abundance of good-looking, large, bland lettuce.
That's largely a problem in the US. All produce looks really good, but are all noticeably bland when compared to produce you can find in other countries.
My grandparents would always tell me it was one of the few fresh vegetables widely available in 1950s America. Forget ripe tomatoes, let alone chives - you got a mound of iceberg lettuce with boiled eggs (them coming from the cuisine of the Punjab no less).
Organic produce from local growers, if you're lucky to have a grocery store or farmers market near you selling the stuff, is simply incredible. Even the lettuce is delicious with nothing on it.
I just spent winter away from my usual SF bay area haunts and have had to shop at a grocery store more along the lines of a Safeway with a small selection of overpriced corporate organics on a little island in the produce department. This stuff is maybe slightly better than the conventional produce sold alongside it, it's pretty awful, and really helps me appreciate why most of the public doesn't seem to see any difference with organic vs. conventional outside of the price.
It really is an exceptional privilege to have access to quality organic produce in the USA.
Agreed. Once I discovered it I realized that tomatoes from the farmer's market might as well have been a completely different fruit from the tomatoes at the grocery store as the taste difference was that striking. I went from being pretty indifferent about tomatoes to them being my favorite fruit/vegetable.
Just in the last couple of years I have noticed the same with lettuce that I have been gifted from a neighbor's garden. I think I missed my window for planting it this year but plan to next year.
Have you tried fresh spinach instead of lettuce in your salad? I like it a lot, it tastes better. There are also other greens, rocket is quite popular in Europe. We also eat ramsoms in the spring - it tastes like garlic but has a fainter taste without the garlic stink.
Exactly! I and think if veggies had a more intense flavor, nobody would feel the need to add any dressing. Maybe oil, salt, and a bit of vinegar. But if the bulk of the salad is romaine lettuce, then without dressing is like eating crunchy water.
Have you ever had woodstock dressing, tho? Because I was just thinking to myself for the millionth time earlier today about how I would TOTALLY drink a glass of it/eat it as a soup if it wasn't, y'know, 100 calories for 2 tablespoons or whatever.
There's no caesar salad on McDonald's US menu right now, but last time they offered one, it was 440 calories including grilled chicken, dressing and croutons. A Big Mac is 540. They did once offer a kale and caesar salad with crispy chicken that hit 730 calories with dressing in Canada.
People don't eat more veggies, because (1) The people forget about them and then they go bad, thus instilling a mental stigma about veggies, and (2) food deserts.
Cut the lettuce before serving. Use chopsticks instead of forks, which after you are accustomed to chopsticks are frankly ridiculously barbaric implements. I am western but I loathe eating many things with blunt knives and clunky forks. Learn to appreciate the texture and color of food, not just the taste.
I do like chopsticks. Especially for kimchi, I can eat and ungodly amount of that very quickly. And I use it for other foods as well. Never quite got used to eating rice with chopsticks though, end up getting frustrated and switch to a fork after some time.
The solution is clearly automation. Less humans, higher reliability processes, better tracking of environmental factors (humidity, temperature, etc.) and time in storage/transit. Faster and more modern supply chains with faster and higher reliability unit processes mean lower risks. The area is evolving: for example there has been a shift in Europe from chlorine washes to washing with ozone or ozonated water as well as increased use of UVC. It seems the rest of the world is yet to catch up. In the US https://omidyar.com/ recently funded http://safetraces.com/ ... we actually reached out to them this week but haven't heard back at all. I suspect high impact large scale improvements may be popularized in China with European technology.
> Marler also blames Americans’ love of convenience for the problem. “Mass-produced chopped, bagged lettuce that gets shipped around the US amplifies the risk of poisoning,” he said.
> Instead of shipping heads of lettuce or large carrot sticks that people wash, we chop them and mix them up in processing, then package them in plastic bags. In that process, Marler said, “The bacteria has a chance to grow. And a lot of people get sick.”
So it's not just the lettuce heads that get contaminated, it's how they are processed. This is reminiscent of the issues with large meat packing plants.
I've often wondered what effect that processing has on lettuce. Personally I prefer to buy a head and clean it myself because it tends to last a lot longer than a bag that's usually full of consendate and mashed onto the shelves by store employees, bruising half the contents...
> I've often wondered what effect that processing has on lettuce.
Yeah the difference is the head of lettuce is alive and the chopped stuff is dead. Better is it's been 'washed' AKA inoculated with whatever bacteria is living in the wash water.
That's something I think about when buying mushrooms as well; there's the chopped mushrooms, and then there's the whole mushrooms, and the former always looks kind of worse for ware so to speak, as if the chopping process transmits bacteria from the blades to the mushrooms.
I buy the whole mushrooms for that reason and simply because they're cheaper.
It's less bacteria and more general oxidation. They're not more dangerous, just less pretty (also likely less nutritious since many nutrients are destroyed by oxidation)
The reason vegetables are poisonous is because of the animal waste that is being used to grow plants. If there wasn't such a huge livestock industry, people wouldn't be using their excrement for fertilizer and our plants would be safer.
And while the C.D.C. recommends washing all produce with water, including heads of lettuce, it does not recommend washing other forms of bagged lettuce, which has already been washed before bagging. “Your chances of contaminating it in your kitchen” — with contaminants that may already be on your kitchen countertop, hands or elsewhere — “are actually higher than if you didn’t wash the salad greens,” notes Dr. Gieraltowski.
I really wonder what's the problem. Either the factory or the restaurant washes the salad for you or you do it yourself.
Here in an European country I can buy pre-washed salad like sliced sugarloaf or lettuce. I toss this directly on my plate and chow away. It's more expensive, but it's convenient and probably safe. I trust the shop to sell me good quality.
I'm loving this whole debate. People have eaten unwashed food for millennia. Now all of a sudden our food is only safe to eat if it's been sterilised with radiation!?
Yes, I re-read but decided to leave the comment as is. Because contaminated lettuce shouldn't be sold at all. Contaminated lettuce is just defective produce. In other words: Just buy non-contaminated lettuce pre-washed or you wash it yourself. Problem solved because quality is good.
Be curious how the US compares to Europe. We often ate packaged salads there for the convenience factor, so it's not like everyone is lovingly hand-washing their artisanal lettuce leaves ...
3000 victims/year?! When is the POTUS addressing the Nation to launch a War on Food? Someone must end this carnage of innocents at the hand of terrorist salads!
I think most citizens would support a blanket fine of $1 million for every CDC-verified victim. It would help the victims and possibly eliminate the problem.
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" (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...). 20% of 610,000 = 122,000/year. That the heart disease risk reduction is 162x more significant than the food poisoning risk increase, should be more than enough to outweigh the risk of food poisoning.
However, and less clear, there is also evidence that leafy green vegetables protect against diabetes, cancer, dementia, and Alzheimer's.