In Defense of Eating Brains | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Eating Brains

atlasobscura.com

12 pointsinteresse21 comments

I thought this was satire when I clicked on it. The more I read it got progressively worse as I realized how long it took to even mention prion disease. This article doesn't really seem reviewed which seems to be a trend I'm noticing in Atlas Obscura articles. Is anyone else thinking this?

Edit: The person who wrote this article has no background at all in Food Safety, nor should they really be talking about this subject so lightly. Honestly, this article is dangerous to even really promote in the way its written. They lightly jester at that idea that a 1% fatality rate is an extremely rare occurrence and suggests that brains should be consumed in higher amounts. At first I thought this was satire but this advice is just genuinely harmful.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by not seeming reviewed?

Reading this article I find it hard to believe an editor is involved in the process at Atlas Obscura. There have been several articles like this posted even ones that are completely fictional accounts on the website. The way this article is written it intentionally downplays real dangers of prion disease in an attempt to defend its consumption. This isn't something a magazine should be doing in the first place. I don't know what the review process there is but it's clear it doesn't seem to exist.

Because prion disease is close to irrelevant, as long as you don't feed the brains back to the animal it's from.

Your confidence clearly demonstrates your expertise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise...

Like from sheep to cow (how we got mad cow disease) or cow to human (why mad cow disease mattered)?

That mattered because we fed the animals their remains.

You seem to know more about the field. Will you share some details of your perspective?

Author has a very hand wavey attitude toward prions.

There are many kinds of prions capable of causing spongiform encephalopathy in humans and likely others which are currently undiscovered. To suggest we continue eating brains because some people "probably have an immunity" is irresponsible. To my knowledge, evidence of immunity to prion disease has not been scientifically established.

Edit: Furthermore, prion diseases can have long incubation periods (years or decades before symptoms manifest), making them extremely difficult to detect in normal clinical settings.

Prions are scary- these bad shapes cause your shapes to be bad. There is no cure or even a way to detect them, except at autopsy.

Otherwise I'd totally be into brains. Good source of omega3s.

Brains, cooked contains 210 calories per 140 g serving. This serving contains 15 g of fat, 16 g of protein and 2.1 g of carbohydrate. The latter is 0 g sugar and 0 g of dietary fiber, the rest is complex carbohydrate. Brains, cooked contains 3.3 g of saturated fat and 4304 mg of cholesterol per serving. If you do not have risk factors for heart disease, you should limit your cholesterol intake to no more than 300 milligrams a day. 1000% your rda of cholesterol in a single serving!

Animal organ meats tend to accumulate pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, synthetic growth hormones and antibiotics, etc. Livestock operations use the cheapest animal feed they can find, turning it into as much animal mass as they can with hormones and antibiotics, and bioaccumulation of toxins becomes an issue.

Eating anything coming out of that pipeline is probably not that great of an idea, but organ meats are the least advisable portion.

I've had scrambled eggs and calf brains before, as a small child. But the brains were canned, and even my great-aunt who cooked them spoke somewhat disparagingly of their flavor as compared with fresh; I remember them as salty and metallic.

I'd like to try fresh at some point, but I doubt even most of the specialty butchers around here would be too likely to carry them.

My takeaways from quickly skimming the article:

- not that many prion diseases among brain eating people surprisingly (but are statistics accurate? what if they develop later?)

- perhaps because our ancestors did it, human DNA has a gene that "protects" from prion diseases somehow. didn't know that could be a thing!

Not a gene per se, though it's no surprise a popular science outlet screws this up; given a working clock, they typically do only slightly better than chance at identifying the time of day.

From the cited paper [1], what actually makes the difference is having your two copies of a specific gene (one from each parent) differ from one another in a few specific, relatively common ways.

[1] https://www.gs.washington.edu/news/article.pdf

Love eating brain and liver. Liver especially is just amazing when fried with some onions.

I remember as a child seeing them in french supermarkets all the time. Not sure from which animals. I dont see them anymore.

I mean isn't the problem that we weren't eating the brains but feeding them back to the livestock allowing prion diseases to spread horizontally and vertically.

If a prion infected livestock is processed and consumed completely by us, we'd still probably have some infections, but far less than the entire population of a country eating infected meat that has been eating prion infected meat all the time.

Disappointing this tells us scientists "established" the harm of dietary cholesterol in the 50s without mentioning that it was a mistake. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had to admit this around 10 years ago.

There could have been a whole article on how the Science establishment was bullied into submission by Ancel Keys...

That could be a good separate submission. But here in this one it would take very few words to avoid spreading a known falsehood as a scientific fact -- plus it'd add to what's interesting in this story. Like, animal brains have a lot of cholesterol for the same reason they're nutritious for us! We have a lot of brain!

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