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Comment by vuln | Hacker News Reader

> It's obvious that at most in our very recent evolutionary history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.

I wonder what effect that’s had on a humans immune system. I’d imagine eating spoiled meat containing bacteria, etc was giving their immune system a run for its money until a tolerance was built.

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The major issue isn’t the bacteria but their byproducts. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism

This is why you can’t render rotten meat safe by simply cooking it. That said, people still age meat. Small birds for will get left for 4-9 days in a cool space before being butchered etc. https://magazine.outdoornebraska.gov/2014/01/hanging-pheasan...

Yep other than a couple notable exceptions like salmonella, this is the norm for food poisoning. It's intoxication from metabolic byproducts, not infection. Remains one of the biggest lay misunderstandings of food safety though.

"Just cook it out" plus "your nose can tell" (it can't, spoilage microbes aren't usually illness microbes) are false beliefs that still get people killed.

Curious about sources for this. I see some indication that botulism toxin can be destroyed by cooking, though the bar is pretty high - needs to be boiled over 5 minutes. So lesser temperature methods such as grilling the meat may not be sufficient, but something like stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.

Here's an example with Staph food poisoning[1]. The bacteria dies when you cook it, but the enterotoxins that Staph generates aren't broken down by heat and remain (section 4). It's good to not consume live Staph, but contaminated food can still cause issues despite cooking.

[1]https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/827965/

I'm not gonna have a peer reviewed journal article for you or anything. I learned this in the food safety class you have to go through before managing a kitchen in a lot of jurisdictions.

> stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.

It won't! Good luck with it though.

Well I get that would make sense in that kind of environment. Best way to not hurt your customers is to never even risk it - why would you?

But my agenda is more selfish. I like to cold-smoke meats for adding to stews, based on the knowledge that stewing in > 85'C [1] water will destroy the botulism toxin. I could just stay away from cold-smoked meats to be safe; but then I would lose out on some of the tastiest food ever :-)

It can be a confusing topic because there are 3 different things to worry about: the active bacteria, the spores, and the toxin. Of the 3, the spores are the most resistant to heat, and according to the WHO link [1] can survive multiple hours in boiling water. However the toxin seems relatively unstable.

I really need to track down their sources though.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/botulism

USDA indicates that boiling for 10 minutes can prevent botulism: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...

Although the boiling doesn't destroy the toxin itself, only the bacterial spores.

> Although the boiling doesn't destroy the toxin itself, only the bacterial spores.

The other way around

Boiling for 10 minutes would be better. Pressure Cooking would be best as it can reach the heat/pressure needed to destroy the botulism spores too.

1) Is this what was referred to in the movie "The Menu" where they were taking the tour in the beginning and talking about the 152 day aging process for meat, but the 153rd day would bring chaos?

2) Why is there such a precise known number for that issue? Don't bacteria grow differently? It just seems odd that 152 days would definitely be ok and 153 days would definitely kill.

It might have been a good thing?

There does seem to be this notion that being "too hygienic" is a negative thing because it doesn't train your immune system.

That's only kind of true. Exposing a healthy person to small amounts of weakened virus tends to build immunity. Exposing the healthy person to large amounts of the virus overwhelms the immune system and may not even lead to a strong viral immunity.

If I had to guess, eating rotten meat is something that indigenous peoples have adapted to over time (and some individuals died along the way to that adaptation) and they are resistant to the specific things in rotten meat that make modern day humans sick. I think it would be wrong to suggest the rotten meat eaters are somehow better off for doing this, or that they have stronger immune systems in general.

Immune systems aren't like a muscle that you can repeatedly train to get stronger and stronger and stronger ad infinitum.

Immunity also comes at a cost. This isn't talked about often. But it's not "Free" for your body to learn and maintain immunity to specific infections.

Especially in the last years, the hygiene hypothesis is not about a lack of immune training against harmful microbes, but a lack of encounter of so called old friends, harmless microbes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114

Just look up the Hadza tribe's gut microbiome.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36238714/ https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654

That's probably as close as you are going to get to truly paleo diets... not paleo-bros that eat only bacon, butter and meats.

I was going to post about "paleo" diets, but you beat me to it.

The Paleo Cafe would get closed down by the Health Department real fast if it actually served paleo foods.

I'm picturing a guy hauling a roadkill deer in, tossing it on a table and yelling "meat's up!" I mean, sure, they didn't have cars back then, but it's better than letting trash-eating deer meat go to waste.

I dimly recall a New Yorker article about people who eat roadkill. They do have their limits though. It has to be fresh roadkill :)

New paleo motto: "Maggots is protein"

I see how easy it would be for me at least to assume they had better immune systems from eating the spoiled meat. If true our modern immune systems are most likely way less effective than theirs at that time.

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