From all the blogs about various pesticides, pollution, feed issues, animal cruelty, we might as well just go back to sustenance farming and grow/raise our own... oh wait we can't do that because fracking and industrial soil pollution! You can't trust your back yard! /rolls eyes
So much of online "health advice" is a series of micro-optimizations at best.
This article made it very clear that it was just what she does based on what she has encountered, not health advice. Also, a large part of her concern had nothing to do with pollution. It was that different types of seafood require different cooking methods to be healthy to eat. This is well known, and with so much seafood being mislabeled isn't a vague issue.
She also has language like this: "If, like my friends and family, you choose to continue to eat seafood, I would urge you to at least start asking questions."
So "asking questions" is the "least" you can do, she may have a veneer of politeness but her opinion on what people should do is clear.
Further evidence is the flow of her arguments. She starts off talking about the mislabeling of fish, but then says "Let’s say you buy your seafood from a store that correctly labels its fish, or from a fisherman you trust. Maybe you even catch it yourself. But no matter how careful you are..." and then dives into the microplastics.
So even if you are able to bypass her argument about mislabeling, which is filled with a lot of maybes in and of itself, in her opinion you still shouldn't eat fish because plastic.
Yeah, this is the health advice equivalent of "no offense, but... insert offensive thing"
Sounds convenient but IMHO somewhat beside "the point" of all these pontifications: your rule of thumb we as a species had already figured out for 100s of millenia+. That's why we don't eat grass and are told to be cautious around unknown wild berries or mushrooms. All these ponderations like OP OTOH are about "insidious, long-term-unnoticable-until-too-late health scares". An ongoing search for insights comparable in spirit to past "long-term damage" findings about lead or how some trichinosis parasites have an incubation period of ~30 years.
It is until it isn't; most of the time when I deal with "normal people", they seem to expect getting sick from "bad" food almost immediately, and are confused why I haven't died of cancer already because I'm using artificial sweeteners with my tea. My rule of thumb applies primarily to that kind of situations.
Not denying the importance of long-term considerations, but given the amount of nonsense media publish (c.f. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-...), I just ignore the topic altogether until some entity like WHO or FDA starts making noises.
The problem is that if the background noise is loud enough, you can't identify causes. Do you get cancers because of one of the things you're exposed to? A combination? All of them? Is one the real culprit while the others are not? We live in a soup of thousands of poorly studied compounds, and as a result it's very hard or impossible to even study the problem in a human population.
So, maybe it is shaving years off our lives, or causing something we are aware of, but we're not aware of a causal link.
Especially considering that the effects might take a really long time to be actually measurable.
Sure, older generations might get pretty old right now, but these generations also grew up in a vastly different world compared to generations being born right now. At this rate, I can easily fathom a future where people have never seen a somewhat clean beach, like in The Expanse.
With this kind of stuff tetraethyllead always comes to my mind. Even at its introduction, there had been warnings about the dangers, lead poisoning was something that was already established as something bad. That still didn't stop us from using TEL in all kinds of gasoline for decades. It took us, again, decades to phase this stuff out but the damage is already done and large swaths of land will remain heavily lead-polluted for decades to come.
Finally... people only seem to find science believable when it comes to them in CSI form, unless they're actually scientists, in which case it's precisely the opposite. I've tried to explain to people that good science takes time, especially with something as varied as human beings and mortality. Most people can't be bothered, are ideologically opposed, or can't really understand. Plenty of the people who would agree with you and I about this would be nodding and saying, "Yep, that's why I don't vaccinate my kids!" smh There is this tiny sliver aware of the potential risks, between two vast gulfs of ignorance. Worse, plenty within that tiny slice have ideologies which don't allow for giving a rat's ass about this issue, or have some personal gain in mind.
It's hard not to conclude that should future historians be in a position to study us, they'll be chuckling and shaking their heads in the same we do studying the Victorians.
Colorectal cancers in young people have increased 40% in just 16 years. Melanoma rates in young people have increased 250% in four decades.
Colorectal cancers would increase because detection has increased. It became fairly popular to get a probe done at a certain age. I seriously can't give these sorts of numbers credit, just like having a percieved increase in autism after including more folks in it and having better screening and awareness.
Why do some people insist on rationalizing these trends away?
However, I stand by my general stance. Many cancers simply wouldn't show up in a population with a much shorter life expectancy. I'm not about to say it isn't partially environment or lifestyle (other things do cause cancer), just that we notice because of our life span and ability to detect these. I get this from articles like the one listed at the end, which states: The main reason cancer risk overall is rising is because of our increasing lifespan. And the researchers behind these new statistics reckon that about two-thirds of the increase is due to longevity. Colon cancer seems to be an outlier, and there are a couple of these. Cervical cancer is caused by a very common virus and often affects younger women, just to give another example.
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why-are-c...
https://www.davidwolfe.com/fukushima-radiation-tumors-fish-s...
https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-fukushima-causing-bloody-t...
EDIT: Apparently some people were triggered by my original comment.
http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/surprise-youre-eating-fuk...
However it links to a CBS article (that is available) this one mentions 10 times higher than usual radiation in Tuna caught off the West Coast (but its still supposed to be edible).
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-bluefin-tuna-crossed...
I am not convinced. Reminds me of how the Chernobyl accident was being downplayed in an IAEA report.
The source link was the to one of the original blog posts David Wolfe paraphrased the content and lifted the imagery from. The source link was crap and the arguments were lies that are easily debunked.
>However it links to a CBS article (that is available) this one mentions 10 times higher than usual radiation in Tuna caught off the West Coast (but its still supposed to be edible).
Yeah, detection in Tuna is concerning and needs to be considered. I wanted numbers so I found https://swfsc.noaa.gov/textblock.aspx?Division=FRD&id=20593 and a breakdown of how those numbers related to reality: http://abitofperspective.com/?cat=3 We are many orders of magnitude away from even a simple medical procedure. Even assuming you can afford to eat 75lbs or so of contaminated Bluefin tuna caught near Japan.
Mercury content (in any long lived fish) poses a more realistic concern. We already recommend tuna not be eaten frequently for these and sustainability reasons. But your source article was claiming that radiation was found in salmon and causing tumors there, which is a lie.
(Thankfully mercury levels have been declining as we move away from coal power generation: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tunas-declining-m... )
>I am not convinced. Reminds me of how the Chernobyl accident was being downplayed in an IAEA report.
Don't go throwing a red herring in here. What happened there was wrong but you can't make that argument without data. It's just as wrong as misinforming the public and causing a panic.
If you feel offended by me calling your source liar, come prepared to defend them or learn to accept new data and change your position. I responded so future readers of this thread won't be mislead into believing something that isn't true.
Somehow we have got to the point where the'recommended daily quota' of fruit and veg is something insane like 10 a day (I can't find gov.uk stats but a lot of newspaper articles etc).
Is it so hard to understand "put shit in and you become shit"? Why does anyone need to be told?
Is it so hard to understand that you should eat good quality and varied foods? That you don't need to swear off kebabs forever but don't do them every day? That putting more in than you use makes you bigger and putting less in smaller?
And all you got from that is "Is it so hard to understand"?
Yes, yes it is.
You remember all the talk about BPA plastic being bad for you and an endocrine disruptor? Do you really think people should just "know" that fact before science verifies?
And being skinny does not mean being healthy. That's just one metric.
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.
The thing is, the world is really diverse. In some countries like Japan they eat A LOT of fish, but I'd say it's mainly fish and not seashells. In Valencia (Spain) and nearby towns for example there's a lot of mussels and we also eat many small fried whole fish, which I can see how they probably have a larger chance of containing plastic than a piece of fish meat.
And that is Spain and Japan, developed countries. There are lots of places where people cannot choose what to eat. And she is not even saying NOT to eat fish, she just says she doesn't eat, the reasons ("with a substance we still don’t really understand") and a possible solution:
- There are steps we can take on the community level to make seafood safer. We can demand stricter and more specific labeling guidelines from federal food agencies and fish distributors.
- the only ways to mitigate the problem are to reduce our reliance on single-use items and avoid products wrapped in excessive packaging.
You don't know yet what is gonna kill you. You might get a stroke tomorrow caused in some part by doing those things. That is essentially why living healthy is a thing, and why the number one cause of human death in the world is bad eating habits and not old-age.
Should I avoid nice things to get an extra 10 years when I'm 70? Not this cat, but I don't judge anyone for feeling different.
Said another way: if food is your measure of happiness in life, you should branch out and try something other than eating, and even then, food is not good because there is meat in it. A good dish is a good dish in any case, and there are thousands of good dishes containing no animal products what so ever.
It sounds dark, but I would genuinely rather die suddenly while enjoying my life to its fullest instead of clinging on and trying to extend it at the detriment of my fun (puffs cigarette and swigs from a bottle)
;) ;)
5 years back, I loved BBQ rips, steak, cows milk and cows cheese, and thought I couldn't live without it. Today I still love the taste of those things, but I have stopped consuming them and have found alternatives that I like just as much or better with the added benefit that they don't kill me, which adds to me liking them even better.
You shouldn't ignore the fact that the number one cause of humans deaths (cardiovascular disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer) is directly tied to eating meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil. Especially dairy. Dairy is arguably the worst of the culprits, but the others are not healthy either, not by any measure. Less bad does not make good. Not in any big or small amount. And yes, you might not get sick from eating them if you eat less of them, but that doesn't make them healthy, and since they also are the single biggest cause of climate change (because of the way they are produced), and that consuming those things when we don't need to at all is ethically corrupt, there is really no good reason to do so.
So i believe the number one killers are all mostly lifestyle related and can't be attributed to some specific type of food so easily.
Again, you can be healthier than others eating those things, but if you were in that case, not eating it would make you much healthier than your previous self. And not forgetting that as little as the amount of dairy in three glasses of milk a day increases you chance notably of getting prostate cancer, colon cancer, cardiovascular disease and heart disease. A big portion of yoghurt often have more than that. Exercising doesn't decrease those chances by much if at all.
All the claims that dairy (milk) is healthy that I'm aware of and that is still well regarded (peer reviewed and hasn't later been debunked), is research that says stuff like "you need this much protein, you need this much calcium, you need this much that and that", and then they conclude with stuff like "and if consume this much dairy, you get all those things", but that is focusing on the good stuff in a vacuum and completely neglecting all the bad stuff that is in dairy, and that you already get all the good stuff if you simply eat any proper diet, but some diets, like a plant-based one, avoids the bad stuff.
Saturated fat, which is the reason people gets type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and heart disease. I don't believe I need to link you any sources for that, since it's common knowledge and agreed about. In dairy, the amount of saturated fat is really high. It's why oil (when taken out of it's natural package like olive oil is taken out of it's natural package: the olive) is also bad for you. It's 100% saturated fat instead of in the natural package where for every gram of oil you were also getting some fibers, some carbs and so on.
Cholesterol. Same with saturated fat, although it's less bad. But the thing is that humans need to consume no cholesterol what so ever, so for every mg of cholesterol you consume, you simply add to your overall amount of ldl (also called bad) cholesterol, which has the same effect as saturated fat. All the cholesterol we need (hdl cholesterol) is something we produce our self.
As little as the amount of dairy in three glasses of milk a day (which many get by drinking one glass, putting some on their cereal and then eating a lot of cheese too) is also found to increase ones chances of prostate and colon cancer.
And the thing about dairy is that it is a complete scam. We learn as children that we should consume milk to build strong bones and get protein, but it's just not true. If you eat enough (varied) food (as in a completely normal proper diet), you will never be deficient in neither calcium nor protein. And studies show that you can't just consume more calcium to get stronger bones, it doesn't work like that, so drinking more milk to get even stronger bones is also completely fallacy. The dairy industry want us to believe milk is the raw power of nature, but in fact the only milk humans should consume is the milk our mothers produce, and when we are done we that, we don't need to consume milk anymore, especially not bovine milk. Cows milk is liquid growth food for a calf, that's it. There is nothing good in milk that you can't get from a better source, but there is a whole lot of bad stuff.
If you are interested, I suggest these two[1] sources[2]. Those sites are obviously biased towards plant-based diets, but with good reason and they cite all their facts to scientific sources that you can check out with a simple google search using the number of the research paper, so you can check what they are saying out for yourself. I've never found it to be wrong.
If you are even more interested and like to watch documentaries, you should check out Cowspiracy[3] and What The Health[4]. They are great, and all facts used are available on their respective websites with links to the sources and explanations and so on.
[1]: https://nutritionfacts.org/?fwp_search=dairy&fwp_content_typ...
[2]: http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/vegdiets/health-concerns-ab...
You make it sound like eating dairy is always unhealthy, similar to smoking. But I doubt that's the case and I don't know of any evidence supporting that.
And yes, antibiotics and other drugs is also a problem for meat products. I'm also against producing and consuming those, if you were wondering.
As you said yourself: Not all alternatives are better. Some of them are even worse. You'll have to take a closer look to what's inside, that's why I don't like the generalization "Dairy is bad!".
You're going to have to argue with the multitude of people who have had success beyond "losing weight" on low carb diets.
The days of calling low carb a "fad" are waning.
Their success is feeling great, not preventing sickness. They are gonna get them too, at some point, probably, but they might feel great until then. You can feel great on almost any diet, but only few helps preventing these diet-related sicknesses.
> The days of calling low carb a "fad" are waning.
Low carb is gonna come around and bite people in the ass. High carb is so important for a good balanced health (science agrees about that), and has no negatives except if you also want to eat 2000cals of eggs, meat and cheese a day, in which case you are gonna get fat, and then cutting out the boring carbs is the choice people are choosing, instead of cutting out the eggs, meat and cheese, a choice which is gonna give them diabetes type 2, cardiovascular disease, heart disease and cancer in the long while.
People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.
Consuming saturated fat, hormones and cholesterol is literally bad for you. It affects your body in a negative way without any benefit in contrast to alternatives aka bad for you.
> The number one cause of humans' deaths is directly tied to drinking water as well. Just because people eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy and oil and then die does not make those things bad.
You could say that, and just because I worded something poorly doesn't change the facts that those particular things in meat, dairy and so on is never good for you.
> People die from eating fatty food fried in poor quality oil every day of their lives, yes. That doesn't mean that oil is bad for you, it doesn't mean that fat is bad for you, it doesn't mean that you're at risk of heart attack if you have something that's fried every now and again.
There is no health-benefit to consuming refined oil instead of getting oil in their natural package, but there are lots of health concerns, so yeah it's bad.
Fat is not bad for you, but saturated fat is bad for you when it's put into a package where it has too much of it compared to what else is in the package, which is the case for dairy, meat and so on.
By your logic, smoking is not bad for you either as long as you only smoke a little.
> Of course we have to eat things in moderation, but the idea that because overconsuming something is bad for you then any amount of it must be a little bit bad for you? That's bunk. That's just not true. Dairy is not bad for you, oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
It is bad for you because you can get the same good stuff there is in it from other sources that doesn't have the bad stuff. What you are proposing is, that if you eat a little bit of something that is bad for you, it's not bad. But that is a complete fallacy. It's always bad for you. Will it have a negative effect on you in the long run? Not if you don't overdo it, but that doesn't change the fact that it is bad for you.
The only time that dairy, meat and so on is good for you is in the absence of alternative food so you would starve if you didn't consume it.
> oil is not bad for you, sugar is not bad for you.
Refined oil and refined sugar is always bad for you. It has no positives, only negatives. It's bad.
> And there is, emphatically, absolutely nothing wrong with drinking cows milk.
There sure is. For a cow to give milk, it has to be pregnant and it then has to give birth to a calf. But for you to drink the milk instead of the calf, the calf has to be taken away and be put on some other nutrition that is not it's natural nutrition (cows milk - yeah, that is what it is, growth food for a baby cow, not human food), or it has to be killed. The process is very traumatic for both the cow and the calf, and they will often be stressed and moan for weeks, except in the case of the calf that is often killed not many days old. For the cow to constantly give milk instead of only when it becomes pregnant naturally, it has to be raped by a human on a schedule so it never stops giving milk, and when the cow reaches 4-6 old, the cow is in so bad state it can't keep on producing the required amount of milk, so it is sent to a slaughterhouse and horribly killed and slaughtered. A cow will live to 20-26 years old in nature. There is nothing empathic about people thinking that cows milk is their right, even if it is killed in the most pain-free and lives with the least amount of suffering possible for it to be a dairy cow, which unfortunately is not true for more 1/10.000.000 dairy cows.
> I'm not going to give up eating meta, fish, eggs, dairy and oil just because you think that the effect of food on your health is linearly proportional to how much of it you consume.
I'm not thinking these things. Science is. The only reason it's still part of a normal diet in the way it is, is because of powerful lobbying done by the dairy, meat, egg and fishing industry, and because just like you (and me 5 years back) I couldn't contain the thought of not consuming these things, so I'd gladly ignore the problems with them. So do a lot of doctors and scientists and so on.
You just did not answer the OP's question at all. Sure, animal cruelty is an important issue but its NOT the one you were debating with the OP.
Firstly, even though milesrout wrote `emphatically`, I believe he meant `ethically` since that is what I wrote which he answered to.
Secondly, and I'm not a native English speaker so I might be wrong, empathically, my comment is still valid. What we do to dairy cows can only be described as a product of a complete lack of empathy for the cows, nothing less.
In that case, that slew of words simply demonstrates why there is also something, emphatically, wrong with drinking milk ethically and not only personal health wise, which is what we have been discussing.
It demonstrates that milk is bad in not only one aspect but two, and if we then account for how it is contributing to climate change as well, it is now bad in three aspects and, well, the dairy industry is looking very much like the devil, and people that consume dairy looks like stupid sheep and not modern, intelligent humans.
Take it or leave it.
* The claim that cows have to be 'raped' to give milk is absurd. Milking cows is not rape. If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
* The claim that 'in nature' cows do something is also wrong: cows do not exist without humans and have never existed without humans. Cows are domesticated animals. They are biologically and physiologically distinct from any 'natural' animal, if such a thing really exists (everything everywhere has been affected by human activity). That's how artificial selection works.
Beef and dairy contribute to climate change, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if they were priced correctly. If dairy and cattle farmers were required to pay off their externalities - i.e. to clean up after themselves and pay carbon taxes for all the methane - then beef and dairy would be priced such that it was consumed less, but still consumed, which is both healthier and better for the environment.
But the discussion is about human health, and the fact of the matter is that there's nothing wrong with it, for humans, in moderation.
Cows only create milk to feed their young. Cows only have young if they are inseminated. Thus dairy cows are kept in a perpetual cycle of breeding to produce young (which are taken from them early) so they produce milk.
Half the young are male and thus useless; they are killed. Half the young are female and kept to replenish the dairy herds.
As DanBC said, it isn't the milking that is rape. It's the forced impregnation. The milking is exploitation.
It's like saying if you go ahead and fuck a dog or another animal, that's not rape either. It might not be in your country, but in my country, Denmark, it sure is. By law, the animals are treated - in this case - like children since they can't consent to the action. Except in the livestock industry, where the practice is allowed because "we need our milk and meat". Now, even in Denmark, the word rape isn't used about such thing, but it's the same thing really.
It's rather short minded logic on your behalf too. There is nothing wrong, per se, with a cow raping another cow. That's part of nature. Things change though when it's a human that does it to a cow. Since the action is done by the human, who understands the action and the concept of rape, I think it's fair to classify it as rape, again, since the cow can't consent to it.
> If you don't milk them they just about burst - have you seen their udders when they aren't milked?
Yes, it's gross how we have bred these animals to become milk and meat machines. But actually, if you take a dairy cow out of the industry, it doesn't take long before it starts to only produce milk in natural amounts again, that is, only enough to feed it's calf, maybe a little more, but that's it. The reason they constantly produce so much as they do is because of breeding and continued use of different kinds of drugs and steroids to get that reaction. In other words, we are artificially creating the problems they have when not milked, so talking about the milking as something like "humans helping the cows so their udders don't get infected and shit" is a complete fallacy. We are exploiting them, torturing them and killing them, that's what we're doing to them.
> * The claim that 'in nature' cows do something is also wrong: cows do not exist without humans and have never existed without humans. Cows are domesticated animals. They are biologically and physiologically distinct from any 'natural' animal, if such a thing really exists (everything everywhere has been affected by human activity). That's how artificial selection works.
Firstly, there do live cattle freely in nature some places to this day, but yes, dairy cows for one is grossly overbred to produce the best meat and milk with no regard for their health. But a dairy cow do in fact have the capability to live until 20-26 years of age, if not kept as livestock where it's body is destroyed after 4-6 years old.
> Beef and dairy contribute to climate change, yes, but that wouldn't be a problem if they were priced correctly. If dairy and cattle farmers were required to pay off their externalities - i.e. to clean up after themselves and pay carbon taxes for all the methane - then beef and dairy would be priced such that it was consumed less, but still consumed, which is both healthier and better for the environment.
Indeed, if it were priced differently - not subsidised, for one - and the amount of dairy and beef produced were around say 1% of one is produced today, that would mean a lot of the climate, yes, and to peoples health.
> But the discussion is about human health, and the fact of the matter is that there's nothing wrong with it, for humans, in moderation.
Again, that is like saying that smoking is not unhealthy in moderation. That's a complete fallacy. Will it kill you if you only smoke one cigarette a week? Probably not. Is it healthy? Nope, still not healthy and never will be.
I'm guessing you must be pretty young if you see your 70s in those terms. There's a good chance you'll still be healthy enough to have a pretty good quality of life in your 70s.
But what if your past bad eating habits affect your quality of life at 40 or 50?
That's not really related to the article I guess, but I'm curious:
What's the difference between "ox" and "beef"?
I'm intrigued because in French, ox and beef are supposed to be the same thing (both bœuf), and I would probably have written "A lot of restaurants also sell cow or bison instead of beef" since bœuf is supposed to be castrated bull, while most often people actually get sold cow meat.
A lot of restaurants also sell ox or bison instead of beef.
Fresh fish is loaded with omegawhatever and is completely delicious.
Instead of cutting out one thing instead just maintain a balance like a grown up. Eat fruit, nuts, fish, cattle, paper clips, the fear of junior developers etc etc. If you only eat loads of cheap mislabelled fish then the problems warned in this story might come true but who really does that?
I buy whole breams once a month or so and with some greens on the side I consider it a completely healthy (and delicious) meal.
I grew up eating crabs and lobsters weekly and it didn't kill me.
What's the case here?