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Why Processed Foods?
A major study has been published linking processed foods of all kinds to cancer. This being the case, why would anyone ever eat processed foods?
It has been a long time, almost 100 years, since people had to worry all the time about the food they ate being spoiled or contaminated. In those times this problem was just a given. Babies dying from being fed raw cow’s milk, people dying of food poisoning, spoiled meat, or any number of other things, was just a feature of life. At one point, it is estimated, 30 percent of the people in London were suffering from one form of gastrointestinal disease or another and almost all of this from bad food. People died from this all the time.
But with many years of progress in public health and food hygiene all that has receded into the past, so much so that people have forgotten about it and take food that won’t kill you, not from a small risk of cancer, but from the high risk of an immediate, painful, and dangerous poisoning or infection, for granted.
How was this forgotten revolution achieved? Mainly through improvements in food preparation and packaging. In other words, in superior food processing.
I recall one scene from the movie Apocalypse Now in which a sailor recalls coming into the Navy wanting to be trained as a cook. There he was introduced to Navy cooking — all the meat, “all this beautiful, marbled meat,” as he put it, was boiled. He couldn’t believe it. The outrage! And so he left cook school and ended up in a patrol boat in Vietnam.
Why on earth did the Navy boil the meat? In short, it was one proven and economic way that they could be sure the meat wouldn’t kill the men. Military logistics can be difficult. Keeping the meat from spoiling at the end of a long supply chain is hard. Who knows how long it was left on the wharf in the sun in Da Nang? It’s best to prepare the meat so that it can be eaten safely, and that means boiling it. During the Civil War, they’d habitually boil meat for hours trying to avoid food poisoning. The taste was pretty horrible, but that way the meat wouldn’t kill people.
As it turns out it was simple things like that, thorough cooking and sterile packaging in cans or jars, that kept the food safe to eat. Food additives were found that kept bacteria from growing and poisons from forming, and this not only kept the food safe but extended its shelf life and made it possible to send food long distances without refrigeration, providing canned salmon to the people of the interior or cheese to soldiers fighting in the Pacific in WWII. But there are drawbacks, of course. Canned salmon can’t compare to fresh, and the cheese, well, we call it “American Cheese” now.
But people have forgotten all that if they ever knew. So they don’t see the need or the true purpose of all this food processing. They don’t think it’s necessary. And so they get rid of it or avoid it thinking that it means that they will have healthier food. And, sure enough, food has started killing people again.
Several small children were killed by their fruit juice when the processor decided that pasteurization or other simple measures to keep bacteria out of the juice changed the flavor of the juice. Following these deaths, the company agreed to pasteurize the juice, which means they heat-treat it now. (In my opinion, they should have hanged the CEO, who should have known better.)
And there have been other cases of this sort of thing, all of them completely unnecessary.
Foods grown or prepared “organically” often don’t have the protections to avoid food poisoning that other modern processed foods do. Vendors of organic foods will usually try to compensate by liberal use of refrigeration of things like fish and meat, but continuous refrigeration from factory to the home isn’t always carried out successfully even today. Even the brief period of time that food is left in the car on the trip from the store to home can be deadly. Some of this is just ignorance — people just don’t realize how critically important it is to be careful about these things if you are going to go au naturale with the food, but they are not used to looking upon every meal as potentially being their last.
Published in Science & Technology
I don’t even know what “processed foods” means. I have a food processor. Should I stop using it?
It means, simply, pre-cooked and/or pre-prepared. Pasteurized. Canned. Pickled. Preserved. Cured. Fermented. Aged. Seasoned. Dried. Baked. Etc. i.e. Anything that isn’t purchased raw.
Do you drink coffee? Did you roast the beans yourself? If not, then it’s “processed food”.
Do you like peanut butter and jam sandwiches? Did you roast and mash the peanuts yourself? Did you make the jam from raw ingredients? Did you bake the bread yourself, using wheat and oil and salt and yeast and sugar that you prepared yourself? Did you churn the butter from non-pasteurized milk? No? Processed food, all of it.
Right. So this study essentially says “Food causes cancer.”
Somebody should do something about that! Laws! Regulations! Warning Labels! Taxes!
Sigh.
Remember the 60s when chemicals were considered good?
By the way, my grandfather referred to whipped topping as “chemicals.” Which did not keep him from applying it generously to pie or ice cream. He lived to 96. Chemicals probably helped preserve him.
The #1 cause of cancer is old age.
I have heard it argued that, over a certain age, 100% of humans die with cancer. They don’t necessarily die of cancer, but they do die with cancer.
Caveat: I have no citation to back up the claim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oDAkmfoAgA
Is the effect in the paper 10-20 times more likely to get cancer from processed food consumption? Because if it is lower than that I would not take it too seriously. Food studies are notorious for having mild, barely significant effects being blown out of proportion by news reporters. My scientific advice is this. If you read in a news paper about some study saying a food you like to eat is bad for you ignore it, because it is probably wrong. Either the journalist is sensationalizing the finding or the finding itself is incomplete or flawed in some other way. If you wait 10 years someone will probably print a study finding the exact opposite. Just go about your day eating normally.
Sounds very plausible. Many if not most cancers are benign so its not like you would know you had it or care. But, the modern understanding of cancer is that it results for defect accrue during cell replication. More time means more opportunities to acquire requisite defects.
My wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer three (wow, it’s been three) years ago. Her doctor told her that a lot of people die with thyroid cancer, having never been diagnosed, same with prostrate cancer. She was scheduled to have it removed, but then the date got bumped. She thought, if they’re not in a hurry, how serious can it be. She found another doctor who is okay with leaving her thyroid in and monitoring it at six month intervals. People freak out when she tells them she has cancer and still has her thyroid. They hear cancer and think the worst.
Food causes cancer. I can prove it. People who don’t eat don’t get cancer.
There you go.
At first I didn’t know where you were going with this. In someways the food is less safe than 100 years ago because of the assumption that it is safe and the scale of a problem if there is one. Also the word processed means many things. I made processed Pasteurized American cheese and all that meant is that I cooked cheddar cheese to 168 degrees, added some emulsifiers ( form of salt) and regular salt , water and packaged it. As for a food cancer link who knows. We die without water in five or six days but we also drown in it in two minutes.
That’s just a dosing issue…
Caution!!! Living a long time can be deadly!!!
Salt kills, you monster.
Eating enough food to die of cancer is also a dosing issue.
I believe the number one dietary cause of health problems in America is worrying about what we eat ;>)
Dihydrogen monoxide:
Is is the major component of acid rain.
Contributes to the “greenhouse effect”.
Is fatal if inhaled.
Contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
Accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
May cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:
As an industrial solvent and coolant.
In nuclear power plants.
In the production of Styrofoam.
As a fire retardant.
In many forms of cruel animal research.
In the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
As an additive in certain “junk-foods” and other food products.
Is there a link to the study anywhere? I’d like to read it.
Alternatively, if you have an author’s name, the journal, and a publication date, I can probably dig it up.
And if you’re drowning, a placement issue.
There’s a lot of sloppiness in how these things are reported. Last night on the local news they were talking about heart disease in women. The reporter said that 1/3 of American women die of heart disease every year. I looked at my wife and said, “Wow, in three years all American women will have died of heart disease. There won’t be any left at all.” I’m sure what they meant was that 1/3 of American women who die in a given year will die of heart disease, but that’s not how they phrased it.
Sometimes very good.
In the UK, there was a study awhile back that found that organic food was six times more likely to be recalled than foods with all those sweet sweet chemicals in them.
Chemicals: Keith Richards
Jefferson Airplane: “Eat Starch Mom”
lmao
“You say nothing’s right but natural things
Ah, you fool
Poison oak is a natural plant
Why don’t you put some in your food
Natural food
I don’t care if there’s chemicals in it
As long as my lettuce is crisp
Preservatives might just be preserving you
I think that’s something you missed“
Having suffered from Brucellosis back in 1997 when I spent 10 weeks studying Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico [apparently from street tacos my gf’s family got for dinner one night], I have a greater appreciation for the pasteurization of the milk used to make cheese. When all the muscles in your back & neck start to spasm and then lock up, it’s a concern.
One antibiotic shot in the butt and two oral antibiotics, and it still took over a week to get anywhere back to normal. Without antibiotics….misery followed by early, if not immediate, death?
The hygiene guards are down because of their previous successes. STDs have gone through similar cycles….miracle cures led to “The Jerk’s” “And, if you catch it, see a doctor and get rid of it…” But, docs couldn’t do much with the viral diseases, could they?
The circle of Liberal life: They complain about food-born this or that. 10, 20, 30 years later, they complain about just the opposite. Global cooling, now its global warming. Coffee is bad, coffee is good. Red wine good, then it’s bad. Empowering kids to choose their lunch, now force feed them kelp salad. Full circle. This is why we need to shut liberals up or at least stop listening to their wining.
Just remember an organic farm in Germany killed more people than died of radiation from the Fukushima Disaster.
Link here for the Organic farm details.
Link here for Fukushima radiation deaths.
My daughter had thyroid cancer at twenty-five. After they removed her thyroid, they said it is eminently curable and neither spreads nor returns. She is fine, Baruch Hashem, and had her last three sons after the surgery.