Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve wondered about this for a few years so this is extremely gratifying to read. I’ll have to go in deeper later to really understand the implications of each parasite, but my main takeaway is that my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.

I wouldn’t have taken a chance based on that assumption, and cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens, but still. I figured it would be safer.

I’d need to read a lot more to draw some kind of comparison between insects and animal agriculture (both seem to carry plenty of baggage), but it’s great to see research like this so it’s possible to begin doing so.

View on HN

>my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.

Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.

A disgust of eating insects is not universal in all cultures.

Its instinctual, not cultural. I'm going to guess you're referring to hunter-gatherer societies that frequently have to overcome famine and eat bugs out of desperation.

There will always be some cultures that are different from the norm. 100% uniformity in human culture is very rare.

But look across the globe: I would posit that a large percentage of humans have a taboo against insect consumption.

If there are any counter examples that you can state from the world one must analyze how numerically large that community is within that country and the world.

In other words, don't count the number of cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption, count the population of the cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption.

I don't think taboos are in anyway useful in determining health implications. For example, are dogs or horses in any way materially worse than cows or sheep for people to eat? Why are the French happy to eat frogs and snails?

I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.

Human societies have developed over the years with trial and error. Taboos against a food can have a positive correlation with negative health outcomes when consuming that food.

So just because there is a taboo against a food group does not mean that it will definitely be bad for you. There is just a positive probability that it could be.

Taboos can also arise out of fashion and economics, irrational beliefs and moral considerations of a particular culture.

So when we see a Taboo, it is often good to analyze: could this taboo have arisen due to health issues (here pork is a good example because of the danger of tapeworm infection) ? Or could the Taboo have arisen out of cultural reasons e.g dogs/horses are beloved in many cultures so a taboo may have evolved that we shouldn't kill them.

> I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.

TL;DR: Sometimes it due to cultural norms and sometimes its due to negative health outcomes that get noticed due to trial and error over generations.

That’s more ethics than disgust. If you synthesised a dog/horse steak. I’d, try it. If you synthesised a bug, I still wouldn’t want it.

Dogs and horses are not ruminants, therefore they are more likely to carry parasites that are harmful to humans. Cows and sheep are both ruminants. So yes, there is a difference beyond cultural preferences. Or I should say, cultural preferences are not just arbitrary.

Pigs and chickens are also not ruminants and are eaten almost as widely as cows and sheep.

Not by me (I grew up on a farm), but you do you.

Yes, it was overcome in places where abject famine made it a necessity for survival.

A lot of cultures also have much higher rates of parasitical infestation because they are too poor (or have been historically) to avoid it.

My gut reaction to the smell of pork, bacon or any meat derived from pig is disgust.

That doesn't mean this feeling is some kind of natural primal intuition, it just means I didn't grow up eating it.

Actually, pork meat can be really dangerous!! That's also another reason why some religions ban it's consumption.

Nowadays, we learned enough to overcome the dangers of pork but that's a result of modern society.

Anything to do with eating any meat can be dangerous.

We don't know why religions banned certain meat. Anthropologists etc give us post facto rationalisations, and, to my mind, even the holy books might be retrospective excuses.

There are two main reasons why religious books of law ban certain behaviors:

- to encode social and higienic rules as understood at the time

- to signal heressy, prohibiting a common practice carried out by heretics (double points if it is a practice central to those heretical beliefs).

For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled.

So certain. I guess you were there...

We have lots of written history that validates his generalization and zero reason to believe that peoples who's records did not survive would have done those same things for different reasons.

> For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled

Is pork any more prone to spoilage, or spoilage-related health risks, than other meats?

My understanding is that the health risks from pork relate mainly to the transmission of disease and parasites in undercooked pork, not spoilage.

Re:spoilage Even if there's nothing specific to pork, the size of the animal may present that challenge. it's harder to time the slaughter and butchery if a larger animal. If you've been raising an animal for a year, you're going to want to eat all the meat. So you need to save it for celebrations, or barter, or eat meat that's been sitting around. Pigs are pretty big, assuming all domesticated animals have increased in size roughly equally.

But the kosher prohibition isn't "don't eat meat slaughtered a week ago", which would be easy, it's about cloven hooves.

The other hypothesis I've seen put out there is that viruses tend to have an easy time jumping from (living) pigs to humans. We think of the flu as relatively minor now but without clean water it would be a big deal.

fwiw, turning on your spellchecker would enhance your comments greatly.

Thanks for the advice. I try to have it enabled in all edit tools and browsers, but some will not allow it in two languages at the same time, and setting it in mobile to a language other than the main OS language is not trivial. And I haven't found how to enable spell check on Firefox mobile.

Chicken is less dangerous than pork.

I am not going to get involved in a religious argument, but I didn't mention it was the only reason, I said it was one of the reasons.

This simply isn’t true. From a health as well as safety standpoint, chicken correlates with worth health outcomes and definitely leads to more illnesses.

Relative to pork? Source.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6710a1.htm

The salmonella you get from undercooked chicken is less dangerous than the parasites in under cooked pork.

The difference is that almost all chicken is contaminated while very little pork is.

If we compare contaminated meat, okay, maybe pork is more dangerous. If we compare what people actually encounter, pork appears much less dangerous.

pork was dangerous when it was used as a garbage under houses. not when its raised with nowadays norms

No, even modern farm raised pork is dangerous to eat undercooked.

Weirdly chicken is dangerous to eat undercooked or raw, but there aren't as many cultural taboos against it.

Because it's not as dangerous as eating raw pork. Relatively speaking, raw pork is much more dangerous.

The data doesn’t back this up though. More people get sick from chicken.

We are not talking about quantity, we are talking about severity. Plus, you can't use modern data for this because modern stock raising methods mitigate a lot of the dangers from pork.

The parasites from undercooked pork can be very dangerous.

Why wouldn’t we use modern data? We’re not living in the past.

Are you talking about trichinosis? I can see that being more problematic than salmonella in historical contexts, but again, it’s highly treatable today and rarely fatal if it isn’t treated.

Am I missing some other kind of infection?

Edit: Now I see it, you were referring to the past in the parent comment. I’ve confused this thread for another - sorry about that!

Were chickens present in the cultures 2000 years ago when the taboos developed? Honest question.

Yes, they were. Chickens are one of the oldest domesticated species by humans.

Except that might not be the reason why it's forbidden : https://youtu.be/pI0ZUhBvIx4

I'm intrigued that you can recognize fried or minced pork by smell and distinguish it from beef or poultry by smell alone.

I know a lot of people have an aversion to mutton as it can have a very gamey aroma to it, but I wasn't aware people perceive pork as similarly intense.

My wife has a powerful sense of smell, and she vociferously complains about the odor of pork, which smells no different to me than any other meat.

They smell very distinct to me as well. Just as they taste much different, they smell different in similar ways to me.

I think turkey, duck, and chicken are distinct while cooking as well. I’d have a hard time distinguishing gamey meats, though. I couldn’t tell you if it’s venison or moose, for example.

Any pig meat has a very very distinct smell to me.

I can also recognise cooked poultry vs beef by smell (more so when raw, but when cooked I'm sure I can figure it out as well).

I thought most people could.

We have a somewhat similar reaction to eating brains for instance, yet that’s probably one of the safer part or the animals we eat.

I think a lot of the reactions we built over hundreds of generations need to be revised in the world we are in today, and in light of what we know now. One of the interesting one is our reaction to body sizes, and how we still have an instinctive reaction to tall people, when it makes no sense in most of the societies we live in.

Prion transmitted diseases similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease seem to be not that rare in nature. You need to cook the brains extremely well and long to be on the safe side.

Thankfully BSE (Mad Cow Disease) was not as transmissible as feared.

Prions are proteins and need to be denatured to be rendered harmless. Cooking is generally not enough to achieve this. See WHO guidelines for prion sterilization as mentioned in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization.

> both seem to carry plenty of baggage

Salads can literally kill you via the listeria they bring.

The majority of foodborne illness and death in the US is due to animal products. [1]

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution-image.html#f...

Isn’t it also the case that a lot of these contaminations in produce (like leafy greens) are caused by animal manure being used to fertilize the produce?

Without manure being used the risk is diminished by orders of magnitude.

Only little backyard operations use animal manure. No large food chain will carry greens grown in animal manure.

Have you heard of a small movement called organic farming? https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Maybe so, but how does that explain how E. coli outbreaks on lettuce? From what I understand the waste from animal farms run off into waterways that feed the vegetable farms.

Field workers who don't get bathroom breaks.

Rabbits? It's not exactly easy ensure there are no animals across thousands of square miles of farmland.

Looking into this, it's hard to say since there are contamination issues at every point between preharvest and the moment you put it into your mouth: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6899298/

It doesn't seem to rank the causes it lists, but googling it suggests widespread contamination caused by fecal matter runoff from animal ag finding its way into irrigation water.

Here in Canada we have pretty heavy application of manure, primarily in spring and fall. It's part of how we replenish soils at small and large scales.

I suspect we rarely grow greens immediately after applications, but to say only backyard operations use animal manure isn't true.

Evidently this is a common and well-researched practice in the USA as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286297896_Animal_Ma...

From that link it looks like about half of illnesses are from animal products and half is from produce. Deaths from animal products is higher.

The data is also from 2008. Things have likely changed since US households and food prep has been heavily focused on cleanliness around animal products but nowhere near as much focus is on produce. The 'pre-washed' pre-packaged produce is especially risky.

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

Above all I’d love to see better technology and attention for food safety, though. It’s stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today — something I’d thought was far more under control up until my mid 30s. It’s better under many circumstances and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like it has been in the past. However, we could do much, much better than we do now and it would literally save lives.

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

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is also not recommended to feed certain types of salad to small pets like birds because it is loaded with pollutants from farming.

Not if you flash deep fry 'em

> cooking bugs seems like it would eliminate most of these pathogens

I prefer everything I eat to be properly cooked. I even usually avoid raw vegetables. I can't imagine eating a raw bug on purpose unless it was for a lot of money and I could chase it with a shot of hard liquor afterward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com