"I’ll pick the salad over the steak any day, though."

In terms of food safety and risk of pathogens, salad is far, far more dangerous than steak.

At least the steak will not be soared in pesticides designed to kill animals

The pesticides are designed to kill insects, but research shows pesticides and their residual byproducts do accumulate in animals that eat the plants treated with pesticides.

Animals also accumulate things like heavy metals and the drugs they are given.

Plants can be washed of pesticides fairly well and they accumulate these chemicals at much lower rates, but meat can’t be washed of what has accumulated in it.

Overall the health outcomes of consuming plants appear to be better than those of consuming meat.

That isn’t true, though. I might be more likely to get sick, but I’m less likely to die if I do.

It is true, and you are both more likely to get sick and more likely to die from fresh vegetables than from steak.

The primary contaminant in steak is E. coli. You are more likely to consume E. coli from a salad than from a steak.

The data doesn't back this up in any country I can find.

A quick google search yields a few results, each pointing to the same conclusion:

https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution/attribution-...

> Meat and poultry, a combination of four animal food categories, Beef, Game, Pork, and Poultry, accounted for fewer illnesses, but for 29% of deaths.

Poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%); many of those were caused by Listeria and Salmonella infections. This rate is partly due to three large Listeria outbreaks linked to sliced processed deli turkey meat; the last such large outbreak occurred in 2002.

Produce, on the other hand, accounted for 27% of deaths. However, it's important to distinguish here that produce accounts for 27% of all deaths, but animal products accounts for all of the rest. That's 73% of all food borne illness coming from animal products.

You are far more likely to die from food borne illness caused by animal products; especially agricultural animals.

The data does back this up. You're looking at all kinds of meat there and not steak.

Steak is significantly safer than other types of meat, and steak in particular is significantly safer than salad.

As your link notes, chicken is one of the worst offenders

Your data supports my point, not yours.

Right, I didn’t realize you meant steak and steak only. I was inferring meat in general. In that case I agree. It isn’t clear what the numbers are for beef but the fatalities are certainly lower.

I mean it's raw but still in a steak you probably have way more substances and end of foodchain accumulations.

Mercury etc accumulates to the end of the foodchain, sure, but I vaguely remember a study that made the news in Sweden a few years back about limiting your intake of pesticides.

If I remember correctly it was far better to eat organic vegetables/fruit and “normal” meat, than the other way around, and only marginally worse than all organic. The explanation being mammals have kidneys and a liver that we no longer eat (most of us at least).

From this one could guess insects could be worse than steak.

Sorry I don’t have a reference right now, or know if this research was heavily skewed somehow by the meat industry. I would be happy to hear more from someone knowledgeable on the subject.

Cattle are not apex predators.

Oooo SUBSTANCES. THERE MIGHT BE SUBSTANCESSSSSSS....

please stop with the weasel scare words.

Food chain toxin accumulation is a real thing as you go up the food chain.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification

This is actually a serious issue that’s ruining food supplies (particularly in the oceans). Farmed catfish in the USA has been noted for high levels of dioxins. US chicken often contained crazy levels of arsenic until agricultural practices changed to avoid that. Broth made from bones often contains more lead than the daily allowable intake (something like 475% more in the case of broth made with chicken bones, skin, and cartilage present, but still far too much when using just the meat).

We are exposing ourselves to dangerous substances every day due to bioaccumulation in animal foods.

And I would pick pork ribs over those two any day.

Cooking has been our food safety technology for millennia.

Even for milk, pasteurization is a way of cooking it.

I often wonder if our lack of exposure to pathogens and parasites have anything to do with the extreme rise of auto immune diseases.

It's one theory among many. The flip side is that autoimmune diseases are often triggered by pathogens (MS from EBV, diabetes from HEV, and more). Air travel and urbanization help pathogens spread. My understanding is that it's not yet clear which are beneficial and which are harmful, but there's ongoing research.

Maybe both are true, they might be triggered because of lack of exposure over a lifetime and then sudden exposure gets an uncontrolled response. But yeah, I have no idea. The parasite therapy for crohns is interesting.

I think everything is a balance.

If you as a human have been exposed to an extremely "clean" environment, your immune system will not have had the opportunity to get trained and strong. So you might get a severe infection at the first opportunity.

However, the other extreme can be very bad. I wouldn't recommend living in a lush tropical forest without any protection from novel viruses and bacteria spread from all kinds of insects and other vectors. Your body may not be able to take that kind of bio-warfare against it.

So, the million dollar question is: How much should we train our immune system by exposing ourselves to the natural environment and how much should we protect it?

Different people will put themselves on different sides of this spectrum.

The "middle" ground is of of course the best, some self-exposure to natural environment and some self-protection. But it is difficult to quantify this "middle" ground and that is why we have many of these arguments.

You can’t cook away many risks associated with meats, though. There are many problems such as red meat being a probable carcinogen, bio accumulation of fat-soluble chemicals that are harmful to humans, and inflammatory responses which make it hard to justify eating it.

Steak when cooked carries far fewer pathogens than a salad which is not cooked. I do wonder about the comparison between cooked vegetables and cooked meat however.

Steak comes from a sterile place: the inner body of an animal. I don't know of any parasites burrowing their way out of the guts upon temperature changes when cows are killed unlike fish which are loaded with parasites. Thus it's pretty safe to eat steak raw from a pathogen perspective unless handling was botched.

> stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today

The way I see people handle food, I'm not surprised at all. People leave lunch meat out of the fridge for sometimes hours, cut the fungus off things and eat the rest (which is ok sometimes, but often isn't), rinse chicken breast in the sink, use the same tools and cutting boards to handle uncooked and cooked food... And I can keep going.

So many people have no clue how food should be handled, or willfully ignore what they do know.

I completely agree. I worked as a cook when I was younger and so I had a considerable amount of formal and informal training in safe food handling. None of differed from what I learned in my families kitchen, and our never really had food poisoning with the notable exception of my father who ate a bad lobster after being repeatedly warned it had sat out too long (trunk of the car in summer, long story, stubborn man who could not admit he was wrong, and he was so sick he had to go to the hospital).

I think a lot of the time when people say they have "food poisoning" what they really have is digestive distress from eating poorly handled food. There's an incredible lack of awareness around safe food handling (which is really very simple) and most of it stems from laziness or inattention. Even if you only have one cutting board, cut the chicken last, and clean the cutting board correctly, etc. Don't leave a knife on the counter and use it over and over. Wash it with the rest of the dishes. If it was used to cut meat, don't use it again until it is properly sanitized. Don't leave leftovers sitting on the stove or counter for hours, esp. things prone to going off. And so on.

My girlfriend never washed her fruits and veggies. I had to put the kibosh on that, however I am probably not 100% safe with my meat handling strategies, often just rinsing tools before using them on the next substance, justifying it to myself that as long as I cook everything that "meat germs" could have touched before eating, it should be safe, but like, that ain't perfect I'm sure. I also am willing to cook and eat food much older than most people.

Why, for example over say grass fed, organic steak?

Health concerns around animal products are not dramatically reduced between organic and non-organic agriculture.

It's better, but it's still not good. I don't drink organic alcohol, either; it's harmful to your health no matter how you slice it.

because it's salad is a hell lot better in terms of environmental friendliness