quote:I believe most resturaunts that will acutally serve a true "rare" or "blue" usually get their raw meat irradiated, in one of several ways (often UV based) before cooking.
Huh.
quote:
Also, were you aware that many fruit juices are pastuerized also?
Makes sense. I don't drink much fruit juice, though. Too processed, and I don't enjoy it enough to be worth it. Christmas shortbreads on the other hand... Mmmmmm. I blame my food sins on my move-related stress. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Many raw vegetables are not as bioavailable in nutrients as the cooked (or otherwise processed) version. Not cooked to mush, but cell wall change at least. For example, those that use corn as a main food source without processing it will be deficient in Vitamin B12 and will develop pellegra*** (with hallmarks of diarrhea, dementia, dermatitis, and death: the "4 Ds of pellegra"). Lycopene is more bioavailable in tomatoes that have been processed, and beta-carotene is made more available as well. These are the most commonly cited. There are others.
Mind you, I believe the diet steven recommends would be high in bioavailable forms of Vitamin B12, for example -- organ meats should be stellar sources of this. And, also, the fact that many important nutrients are more available in processed vegetables does not mean that all processing is good, or that some nutrients may be more accessable in raw foods, or that there might not be other (maybe even more important, arguably) reasons to eat less-processed or unprocessed foods.
It just means that the claim that raw foods are better for you isn't true, not a a categorical statement. The details of when and where it does or does not hold is complicated, messy, and not nearly as aesthetically appealling.
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***Edited to add: Which is why the Mayans processed corn with ashes (lye), and why the Europeans who first started using (unprocessed) corn as a staple after discovering the "New World" were then stricken with a rampage of pellegra. Alton Brown covers this well, along with his favorite nutritional anthropologist.
posted
PS: That's me ("ssasse"). I logged in using an old login here, more relevant to my given name and which is a current email moniker. Still having migraine issues. Didn't mean to be confusing.
FWIW, any and all of my names here are either ClaudiaTherese ("CT") or some version of my given name ("Sara Sasse"). Other play throw-aside names aren't in use. I try to just be CT here, as it is what I am most well-known by.
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quote: The details of when and where it does or does not hold is complicated, messy, and not nearly as aesthetically appealing.
Details are like that.
Yeah. It makes trying to figure out what does and what doesn't work in any particular area much less fun when you get down & dirty with it than it would look from the outside.
Same, I would suspect, for raising kids, farming, or making a living as a musician.
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PS: And yet my personal food philosophy is to eat foods as minimally processed as possible. A good general rule (I think) is to eat fruits & vegetables as close to off the vine as possible. Given that I eat a lot of processed (canned, frozen, otherwise prepared) f&v too, though, I don't fuss about the details. There is enough overlap and redundancy in that system.
But I worry about making the transition to a more restricted diet, such as raw-foodism, without doing a lot of careful preparation and research in advance. Same for any severe food restriction -- often it can be done, just has to be done with a lot of planning (and then may well be quite an improvement, depending on the details.)
It sounds so good, though! There are many, many ways in which the categorical appeals (here particularly as well as generally). But, again, it can lead one quite astray.
posted
The human digestive tract can't break down cellulose, the material those oh-so-sturdy plant cell walls are made of, so a little cooking of the veggies can help you get to the goodness locked away inside the cells.
I'm going to have a big ol' rare steak for lunch tomorrow. I guess I was wrong, good things are coming along in this thread. Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
I still bias my diet toward unprocessed. In general, there is plenty of evidence to support this, and from many perspectives. Not the least of which -- fiber! Raw fruit as opposed to juice, much better (in general) for sure.
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quote:Same, I would suspect, for raising kids, farming, or making a living as a musician.
Or teaching, or writing, or being a friend.
The devil, as they say, is in the details.
And I am also a fan of raw and unprocessed, mostly for fiber and vitamins. But no steak tartare for me.
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posted
As I understand it, there are very stringent requirements for sushi-grade fish and the equivalent for beef. I rarely trust an unknown source for eating these things raw -- big city, obvious good nearby source (no landlocked sushi for me, as a rule), and a restaurant with both a stellar and long-standing reputation as well as the prices to support the additional work to maintain it accurately forms my list of minimal requirements.
If it isn't dealt with very carefully, meat is a horribly easily-contaminated food. And shellfish? Uncooked and unfrozen shrimp have to be kept on ice, not near it or just in the cold. The results of doing otherwise can be quite spectacular for your partyroom full of guests. Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
I remember dining out with a set of professional academics in my undergraduate years. It was a department dinner for a visiting lecturer. These were not un-smart folk in the typical meaning.
However, one of the women ordered steak tartare, and after being razzed about it, claimed quite seriously that it "was shaved so thin that any worms or bad stuff couldn't survive." (Bacteria are microscopic, as are the ova of meat parasites.)
It isn't a matter of general intelligence, but of information. And if you don't have the information, you just don't. Mind you, this woman had chosen a perfectly acceptable (by my standards) place to eat steak tartare. It was just that her comment revealed that she wouldn't have known how to accurately distinguish a safe place from a not-safe place -- if it was shaved really really thin, she thought she was covered. Not so. Not a dumb person, just not fully informed.
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posted
Generally, restaurants need a special OK from health authorities, called a variance, to serve food which might be considered dangerous, such as sushi or uncooked meat. This isn't to say that it's always safe to eat sushi or blue steak, but that it is regulated. Eating anything is a risk, although usually less so than eating nothing.
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posted
In my Lebanese family, the eating of raw meat is common. Trust me, the utmost care must be taken. When my grandmother prepares kibbeh(a wonderful combination of ground raw meat and bulgur wheat) she takes it out of the freezer and grinds it. To prevent the meat from thawing, she grinds it with ice chips. She serves it still cold. I have eaten raw meat before, and not gotten sick.
However, when me and my family were eating at a restaurant, I was given a piece of chicken that was slightly undercooked. I was throwing up for hours.
So, yeah, umm, what CT said.
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posted
Freezing meat doesn't kill most dangerous microorganisms, nor does it protect from any harmful byproducts they may produce. It does retard the growth of bacteria, so it is important to store, prepare, and serve meat properly.
Unfortunately, the greatest possibility of contamination or mishandling of raw meat comes between the time it's still alive and when you buy it, so while safe handling at home is important, knowing and trusting the supplier of your meat is really the key, if you plan to serve it raw or undercooked.
Of course, people in countries with poor sanitation and no real health regulations manage to survive.
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It's good to have specific regulation (variance) for particularly challenging food storage. Although things can work out overall otherwise, the difference in sanitary regulation (both food and water) is a big reason behind a large gap in morbidity and mortality rates between developing and more developed countries. The primary cause of death worldwide for children is diarrhea, for example -- but not for children in the US or Canada, or other more developed regions. It just isn't as much of a problem, and sanitation is a large part of that.
I also worry more about ground beef than blue steak. The really high concentrations of bacteria would be on the outside of the hunks of meat, and grinding it (regardless of later freezing, as MightyCow notes) "seeds" the inside, where -- especially when later the inside is only partway dethawed or warmed -- the bacteria can find a nice, anaeorbic/aerobic mixed place to multiply.
That's why the cases of E. coli outbreaks in restaurants come from fast food chains that use prefrozen hamburgers. It's ground meat that may not be fully cooked through but which was not treated as meat that may end up being served without thorough cooking. Blue steak gets at least a light sear on the outside, and the bacteria wouldn't have seeded the inside through grinding. Regardless, if a restaurant serves blue steak, they should (again, as Mighty Cow notes) be under a controlled variance for food safety as well.
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posted
We eat kibbeh raw, too, rivka, at a restaurant we trust. In fact, we took CT there at dkw's henna party.
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On the subject of meat being so very corruptable, does anyone here know about the practice of aging a meat carcass and can you explain it to me? I have only heard of it in passing. It is not something that I understand at all. I have heard people talk about hanging a carcass and letting it age for days, and cutting off the mold that grows on the ends of it, but how that mold is in no way harmful to those who would eat the meat.
The whole concept kinda freaks me out, but I figure if there weren't something to it, it wouldn't be a common practice.
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: Just rivka is fine.
But it seems so inadequate following "O immolated one".
What if we used "O ensnaring one".
Then you would get one of these: O_o
Because I failed to get the reference. Wikipedia helped . . . except I don't believe it is correct. While I have heard many attempts to translate the name (and my preference is for "beautiful," natch ), I have yet to come across any which made much sense. There simply is no "root" which corresponds to רבק.
And hey, I'm not the one who chose a multi-word SN which begs for elaborate short versions.
I think I'd prefer "captivating" over "beautiful" and its definitely better than "ensnaring" although technically equivalent.
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posted
I also have had digestive problems from undercooked chicken, back when I ate more cooked food.
Sara--Dr. price very much controlled for age. Sorry I didn't make that clear sooner. He specifically mentions at least a couple dozen situations where the older children in a family, born b4 Western foods arrived, had much better health, teeth, and general skeletal structure than their younger brothers and sisters who were born to a mother eating the Western foods and were also raised on those foods. he also has pictures of at least 6 or 8 of these families.
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steven, that isn't the same as "controlling for age" (it's a technical term of analysis, although one might easily think the definition is less precise when using the words in ordinary language), but I suspect that you and I aren't going to get much out of that particular discussion. Shall we agree to disagree? *smile
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Edited to add: If anyone is interested, there is a more technical explanation of the topic (although in different language) in the Encyclopedia of Public Health section on analysis of variance. Unfortunately, the reasons why being precise matter are themselves a complicated matter. (As noted at the bottom of the excerpt below.) I'm including it for completeness, just in case someone wants more of the language to parse through the meaning for him- or herself.
quote:One-way ANOVA evaluates the effect of a single factor on a single response variable. For example, a clinician may be interested in determining whether there are differences in the age distribution of patients enrolled in two different study groups. Using ANOVA to make this comparison requires that several assumptions be satisfied. Specifically, the patients must be selected randomly from each of the population groups, a value for the response variable is recorded for each sampled patient, the distribution of the response variable is normally distributed in each population, and the variance of the response variable is the same in each population. In the above example, age would represent the response variable, while the treatment group represents the independent variable, or factor, of interest. [other variables would be "controlled for," i.e., folded into the analysis in a way that lessens the likelihood of them acting as as confounders]
... In public health, agriculture, engineering, and other disciplines, there are numerous study designs whereby ANOVA procedures can be used to describe collected data. Subtle differences in these study designs require different analytic strategies. For example, selecting an appropriate ANOVA model is dependent on whether repeated measurements were taken on the same patient, whether the same number of samples were taken in each population, and whether the independent variables are considered as fixed or random variables. A description of these caveats is beyond the scope of this encyclopedia, and the reader is referred to the bibliography for more comprehensive coverage of this material. However, several of the more commonly used ANOVA models include the randomized block, the split-plot, and factorial designs.
quote:Originally posted by steven: splitting hairs much?
No, she's trying to inform you that "controlling for age" has a fairly specific meaning and that what you described does not fall within that meaning.
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It looks like splitting hairs unless you are familiar with how and why things go wrong when this isn't taken into account. Then, it looks like heaving aside boulders with a heavy-duty crane.
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I, on the other hand, am sure that you asked CT, not me. However, you chose to do so in public on a discussion forum, and therefore implicitly invited response from others.
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posted
steven, is it that you think people have not seen the link, or that restating your assertion repeatedly will make it true?
If Price's research so clearly controlled for age (which does NOT mean simply noting the difference between older and younger members of the same family or group, but actually accounting for it as an additional variable), please cite specific pages.
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posted
back to beverly's question, I've been curious about the same for a while on 2 fronts:
1) "aging" of meat, i.e. a very nice steakhouse I went to in DC prided itself on well-aged steaks, which were quite good I must say. Is this referring to just slaughtering the cattle at the best age, or marinating etc...?
2) smoking and the like. I'm vaguely aware that the smoking process takes on the order of weeks at low temps, how does this not invite a bacteria-fest?
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posted
The question is, what about confounding variables, such as age, genetic variation, etc.? If those are not accounted for (and I see no reason to think they were, and many reasons to believe they were not), then the studies do not show a link -- because they are too many OTHER factors that could account for every difference.
Repeating your assertion that there is a link simply doesn't make it so.
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posted
The question is were the sampling and statistical methods accurate. Because if they aren't, then it's only a nice sounding fairy tale, and unfortunately you've been hornswoggled.
posted
When a study controls for age, it says so. And, somewhere, it demonstrates how this is done. Just link to that page to answer rivka's question.
Nothing in your three points demonstrates anything about controlling for any variable. All we are told about is the independent variable - diet - and the dependent variable - health.
posted
Unfortunately, the link does not have page numbers, only chapters.
Here's the main thrust of my argument:
1. Numerous animal studies showed very similar a. types of degeneration, and b. degrees of degeneration, when given the exact same deficient diet. You can see this in Chapter 18. Pottenger's cats also are an excellent example of this.
2. Whenever Price found a group in transition, it was easy to find the ones who ate the Western foods, even if they had just started. They came right out and told him. They were invariably extremely proud of their new diet, and looked down on their traditional-eating neighbors for eating and living the traditional way.
3. Price found huge differences in the groups he studied, even between neighbors, in some cases. People with excellent health, straight teeth, and no cavities, living right beside people with awful teeth and terrible health.
Given all three points, what's the question? If you think I'm lying, read chapters 15-19. If you do that, but think Price was lying....I would invite anyone to go to rural Costa Rica or Brazil, etc. and study some of the people who live there and eat their traditional diets. I lived in Costa Rica for a while, and had an excellent chance to study up close the physiques and teeth of the Indians who lived so far back in the jungle that you had to hike 3 hours through mountainous virgin rain forest just to get to the reservation. They had no access to Western foods, but man did they have wide ribcages and straight teeth. They were all beautifully built.
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posted
"A bunch" is not a particularly useful sample. How can you know that the two groups of people were in any way comparable, aside from their diet?
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In fact someone could go through their entire life seeing only red apples. Does that really mean all apples are red?
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quote:Originally posted by steven: b. his adult patients ALL had straight teeth, but their children, of pure European stock, ALL had crooked teeth.
steven, I have straight teeth. I grew up on a Western diet. I've never had any corrective orthadontics, and have had more than one dentist tell me that my teeth are beautiful, and perfectly arranged.
I know plenty of other people who have straight teeth, too. I find it difficult to believe that ALL of Dr. Price's patients of a certain age had crooked teeth while their parents ALL had straight teeth.
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quote: Unfortunately, the link does not have page numbers, only chapters.
Here's the main thrust of my argument:
1. Numerous animal studies showed very similar a. types of degeneration, and b. degrees of degeneration, when given the exact same deficient diet. You can see this in Chapter 18. Pottenger's cats also are an excellent example of this.
2. Whenever Price found a group in transition, it was easy to find the ones who ate the Western foods, even if they had just started. They came right out and told him. They were invariably extremely proud of their new diet, and looked down on their traditional-eating neighbors for eating and living the traditional way.
3. Price found huge differences in the groups he studied, even between neighbors, in some cases. People with excellent health, straight teeth, and no cavities, living right beside people with awful teeth and terrible health.
Given all three points, what's the question? If you think I'm lying, read chapters 15-19. If you do that, but think Price was lying....I would invite anyone to go to rural Costa Rica or Brazil, etc. and study some of the people who live there and eat their traditional diets. I lived in Costa Rica for a while, and had an excellent chance to study up close the physiques and teeth of the Indians who lived so far back in the jungle that you had to hike 3 hours through mountainous virgin rain forest just to get to the reservation. They had no access to Western foods, but man did they have wide ribcages and straight teeth. They were all beautifully built.
Here's another bit. What was the infant survival rate of the people in Cleveland compared to the people in Costa Rica?
What if the infants with straight teeth were actually healthier, and more likely to live without medical care than the ones with crooked teeth? Then in a society where there was adequate medical care for weaker babies to live past their 1st birthday you'd have more people with crooked teeth, becuase in the society with straight teeth they simply would have died long before Price could have counted them.
quote:BTW, I have almost perfectly straight teeth. Do I eat right?
Tom, you are asking the wrong question. I'm not sure anyone here (with the possible exclusion of steven) has made the claim that eating right==straight teeth. I certainly haven't. Not only is correlation not causality, it is even farther removed from equivalency.
quote:Whenever I hear that someone has "converted" to one way of thinking after setting out to prove the opposite, I always discover that they were lazy or incomplete in their original attempt.
While your own anecdotal life experience may have taught you this, it doesn't follow logic for me. People are far more likely to be lazy or incomplete when they already believe something. When someone is convinced of the opposite of what they believe, there is a lot of initial friction to overcome, higher bar of skepticism and all that.
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quote:My point is, animals and humans being as similar as they are, if you see four groups:
1. a bunch of sick animals, on a deficient diet,
2. a bunch of healthy animals, on a good diet,
3. A bunch of sick humans, eating a Western diet, living next door to
4. A bunch of healthy humans who are very closely related, genetically, to the sick humans, eating their traditional diet,
I don't know, it seems obvious.
Which is exactly why we have methods to control for confounding factors.
Just in your description, for example, we have one possible confounding factor: "healthy humans who are very closely related, genetically, to the sick humans."
If, for example, the effect one's diet has on one's health is related to genetics,* then a study of closely-related groups might not control for the effect genetics can have on how food affects health. And this is only one possible confounding factor.
Were the people with access to western diets more prosperous? Did this prosperity lead to other behavioral differences?
*And we know this to be true - lactose intolerance is much more common in Asian than European people. Scandinavians relied on a dairy-centric diet for at least a thousand years. Lactose intolerant people had a much harder time surviving in Scandinavian cultures. (This is from memory, so I could be off on specifics.)
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