Yes even the most die-hard meateater will take notice at that headline. It's no joke.
If you're a meat-eater, bad karma was on your plate tonight. If you don't clean your kitchen right after preparing meat, you're leaving staph bacteria lying around your house.
Full disclosure: I'm a recent ex-meat eater. I got salmonella about a year ago and now won't touch meat. I'm also an ex-smoker (cigarettes that is) and I'm even less tolerant of those people stinking up everyone around them and yes causing others to get cancer from their second hand smoke.
The new study found more than half the samples contained Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can make people sick. Worse, half of those contaminated samples had a form of staph that's resistant to at least three kinds of antibiotics.
"This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant staph," Paul Keim, one of the study's authors, said in a statement. "Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer."
http://news.yahoo.com/...
What this means is that 1/4 of all beef and poultry has drug-resistant staph bacteria that is spread around people's kitchens when they prepare it. And you know restaurant workers don't give a shit how they're handling it. I was a cook many moons ago during college and I know what goes on in restaurant food prep....
Here's another article, and other bad news about food:
A sampling of grocery store meat in five US cities has shown a type of drug-resistant bacteria is contained in about one quarter of beef, chicken, pork and turkey for sale, according to a study.
Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can cause skin infections, pneumonia, sepsis or endocarditis in people with weak hearts, was found in 47 percent of samples, said the study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, released on Friday.
More than half -- 52 percent -- of the infected samples contained a tough strain of S. aureus that was resistant to at least three types of antibiotics.
Most of the time, the bacteria would be killed off during cooking, but risks of contamination can come from handling raw meat in the kitchen and touching other utensils, or from eating meat that is not fully cooked.
"For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial," said Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and senior author of the study.
http://www.google.com/...
In other food news, sugar is found to be poison. No joke here either:
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times,...
[snip]
The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”
It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”
Article on Lustig, his proof, and link to the video here:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Queue the commenters who say "something's got to kill you"...
My new response is "No, how about we try dying of old age"...