I agree with the list. Have been avoiding them for years, especially sprouts!
But he’ll get into a car and drive, where the risks are probably much worse.
We all make our own risk/reward decisions, but give your brain too much focus on a specific risk and you’ll have a very clear aversion to it. That’s a protective response in our biology.
I always eat rare steak. If I die from eating steak, I would say I had a good life. Also, I prefer eggs with runny yolks. Life is too short to worry about this stuff.
MMMMMMMM.....rare steak, oysters on the half shell, eggs over easy........
I have been eating raw oysters, sashimi, sunnyside up eggs and rare steaks my entire life, raw milk as a kid growing up and have never gotten sick from any of it.
No one can take me from my raw oyster “shooters.” No one.
Only eating well-done meat seems a bit too general. Ground meat, maybe, but only well-done steaks? That just seems silly.
My brain is muddled. I thought the JITB E-Coli was in the mid early to late 80’s. Not 1993.
I’ll eat rare steak and eggs easy-over. But I absolutely avoid the rest of that stuff. I used to like sprouts, until I realized that I got sick every time I ate them.
Food safety is a huge concern to the scientific committee. Every American Society for Microbiology meeting that I have attended devotes a lot of time to that problem. Going to one of those meetings is a real hair-raising experience. Our delivery system in the US is second-to-none, with the ability to deliver foods to stores anywhere in the country within a day or so. What this means is that a tainted food can be on the store shelves in 18 states before food testing catches up to the fact that it is tainted.
There is a tough balance, here. Fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a necessary component of a healthy diet. However, uncooked foods are the likeliest source of pathogens. Trying to come up with a better way to ensure food safety is a real challenge for the scientific community (and, by extension, the regulatory agencies who depend on the scientific advice to make decisions).
Many of our foods could and should be irradiated, but the anti-nuclear activists would wet their pants. Here as elsewhere, the luddites are killing people. If I saw an irradiated and a non-irradiated pack of hamburger side by side on the supermarket shelf, I would buy the irradiated one.
I love raw oysters followed by a medium rare filet mignon, all washed down by a nice red wine. Let’s not get carried away with these food scares.
Except for the unpasteurized milk, I eat them all. However, I also either catch (oysters & clams) or produce (eggs from my hens, sprouts, oranges for juice) my own. Haven't figured out a way to raise beef yet on my small property so I still rely on the store for that. Add to that, I only buy raised or grown in the USA. We never buy food from Mexico, China (or Asian countries) or for that matter any third world country.
Chipotle hires many bad workers who are either underhanded or don’t know what they are doing.
I dig my own clams from waters that are tested regularly. Those are the only clams I will ever eat raw. Even here, the clams they sell in the grocery stores are often several weeks old, often as many as 6 weeks out of the water. That’s freakin gross.
To put it more simply...
....I only eat foods produced in the USA
My grocery store does a good job providing local market and USA produced fresh foods
HOWEVER their frozen foods display are loaded with vegetables grown in Mexico or fish from China
I don’t eat anything undercooked, esp eggs
I’m in full agreement with their list, especially uncooked meat of any sort. When I put a fork into a steak I do not want to see it wiggle or hear it beller.
Most folks aren’t smart enough to realize organic = feces.
Give me clean, safe, chemical fertilizers.
His “expertise” is problematic.
To start with, when there are problems with eggs or dairy products, it is almost always because the animals involved are being kept in very unsanitary circumstances. This tends to happen in mass scale agribusiness, far less in smaller farms.
Here is a surprise: pasteurization *does not* sterilize milk. In only reduces how many bacteria are living in the milk. This is why milk still spoils in sealed containers in the refrigerator. Milk that has been sterilized by pasteurization tastes awful.
Milk that has been almost completely sterilized using “high-temperature short-time” (HTST or HST), (160F to 165F), for about 15 to 30 seconds, isn’t as chemically altered (though I think it still tastes cruddy), and has an *un-refrigerated* shelf life of perhaps 6 months. It is mostly used for whipping cream.
Raw milk, produced exclusively on small farms that go to extremes to avoid being shut down by government, is incredibly delicious. It is worth trying, though thereafter pasteurized milk will taste like chalky water.
Both the bacteriophobe government agencies and the dairy industries hate and fear raw milk producers, and are determined to shut them down for good, even if it takes the government registration of all farm animals to do so.
The flip side of all of this is that bacterial infections are almost always “numbers games”. That is, except for children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems or who have recently taken antibiotics, most people can tolerate a given amount of pathogenic bacteria. Their immune system and intestinal flora will suppress it.
If you consume more than that amount, you will become sick by degrees. That is, somewhat more than the infectious dose and you will get queasy. A lot more and your immune system’s response will make you ill. This is food poisoning.
Most food poisoning from beef comes with contaminated hamburger that has been undercooked. Chicken is a lot easier because it is naturally much more septic, and the bacteria lives under the skin and in the fat.
Eating raw seafood, aka sushi, is something you shouldn’t eat, because the odds are substantial that it will make you quite ill, sooner or later.