29 ms·

Keep things in perspective though. That article mentions 3,000 people per year die from food poisoning, and leafy vegetables are the cause of 1/4 of that, or 7

• pkaye 8y ago
  Or just cook your leafy vegetables so both risks are reduced.
  • DanAndersen 8y ago
    I remember living in China for an extended period of time and never seeing raw vegetables as part of a meal; locals I spoke with found the very concept unsanitary. It's unfortunate that some are advocating just abandoning chapters of our local cuisine as being no longer viable in our era. I'd rather we more strongly enforce regulations so we can hold onto our salads.
    • Symbiote 8y ago
      China has a long history of using human waste as fertilizer on fields, so only eating cooked vegetables was good hygiene. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/features/2008/the_big_necessity/in_one_end_and_out_the_burner.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/...
      • greglindahl 8y ago
        It's more fair that many, many places have done the same thing. When I was in Ghana for a summer in 1987, I was warned that "night soil" was often used in vegetable fields, and I should watch out for my tender American digestive system not being able to deal with the uncooked results. No slight against Ghana in particular, that's typical for countries at Ghana's level of development.
        • sooper 8y ago
          I don't think it is a slight against Ghana. They may well be ahead of the curve on something we may all have to move back to, i.e. "Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming"[1]. [1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/09/recycling-animal-and-human-dung-is-the-key-to-sustainable-farming.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/09/recycling-animal-and-...
          • greglindahl 8y ago
            I'm all for sustainable farming, and poop is a manageable risk on fields where you cook what's grown there. But you don't treat vegetable fields with raw poop, which is what I was referring to... especially vegetables designed to be eaten uncooked.
  • gregable 8y ago
    Honestly, whatever form of cooking gets you to eat them is probably the best preparation. Some nutrients in some vegetables are diminished by cooking (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2009.01091.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-3841... for example). Some are also enhanced. For example: lycopene from tomatoes. Overall, it seemed to me that cooking often harms nutrition more than it helps.
    • verbify 8y ago
      This isn't my area, but I've heard that cooking is part of digestion. I know evolutionary biology isn't as intuitive as people always assume, but theoretically this fits within my model - digestion burns precious calories (at least in a world with too many calories), breaking down the food using fire somewhat allows for the body to spend less calories on breaking it down itself. So our ancestors who used fire to cook had an advantage because they could spend less calories on digestion. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans can control fire between 700,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago. There's also a hypothesis that the nutritional changes allowed through cooking increased our brain size - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans#The_cooking_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human.... But fundamentally, I wonder if we cook too much. Some compounds are very fragile, and cooking would harm nutrition (as you said). As I said, not my field, but I try to stick to a lot of leafy greens as is recommended by health services, and the occasional cooked proteins.
      • goldenkey 8y ago
        The hydrochloric acid in the stomach is pretty strong, about 1.5 ph. Cooking is mild for most compounds compared to dissolution in strong acid. I don't think we cook too much. Like you said, it is mostly just predigestion.
        • echlebek 8y ago
          Cooked food provides more energy than raw food. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calori...
• gregable 8y ago
  This type of article also triggers confirmation bias. "I found an article that said eating salads is sometimes bad for me." + "I ignored the body of research that says that eating salads is almost always great for me.".
• toasterlovin 8y ago
  Just keep in mind that epidemiology is fundamentally not able to tell you anything about positive causation. In this case, individuals who eat more that 5 servings of fruits and vegetables probably also exhibit a whole host of behaviors that contribute to this outcome. Essentially, they are not a representative sample of the population at large, but rather a sub-group who is "healthful" in a whole bunch of ways.
  • gregable 8y ago
    I fully concede this (and jacobolus's) point. I'm not a health researcher either, so don't take my word for any of this. Building a double-blind clinical trial regarding changing people's diets over their lifetime and observing cardiovascular mortality is very hard. Some clinical studies do exist, but they are usually looking over shorter terms and at heart disease risk factors rather than mortality. These show similar results: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16368299 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16368299 - Systolic blood pressure decreased from 144 (SE +/- 1.1) to 134 mm Hg (SE +/- 2, P < .001), and diastolic blood pressure decreased from 87.4 (SE +/- 1.2) to 83.4 mm Hg (SE +/- 1.2, P < .05) from tomato extract. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26328470 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26328470 - In the subgroup of hypertensives, quercetin (onion skin extract) decreased 24 h systolic BP by -3·6 mmHg (P=0·022) when compared with placebo (mean treatment difference, -3·9 mmHg; P=0·049). Many of the epidemiological studies also adjust for many of the features that you might look for. For example https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/1/130/619054 https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/1/130/619054 adjusts for "age, randomized treatment, body mass index (BMI), smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, history of diabetes, history of hypertension, history of high cholesterol, and use of multivitamins" and comes to the same conclusion.
    • toasterlovin 8y ago
      > Building a double-blind clinical trial regarding changing people's diets over their lifetime and observing cardiovascular mortality is very hard. But it is the only diet research that can actually generate knowledge. The studies you cite are nice and all, but the first two are for studies that measured outcomes after 6-8 weeks. If you assume an average lifespan of 70 years, the longest study represented ~1/450th of a human lifespan. And, as you mention, they only measure what we think are valid indicators, not actual outcomes! And the third study may control for all of the things you mention, but it doesn't control for the other foods the study participants ate! Really the only piece of information that you need to know regarding red meat is that public health messaging for the last 50 years has been that people should limit red meat intake. And it was successful. According to this[0], red meat consumption has decreased from 133lbs per person in 1965 to 107lbs per person in 2016. But it is during this exact same time period that the obesity epidemic came into existence. So, perhaps red meat is marginally bad for you, but it is almost certainly not cause of all of the various afflictions that we think are caused in some way by our diets. [0]: https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/statistics/per-capita-consumption-of-poultry-and-livestock-1965-to-estimated-2012-in-pounds/ https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st...
• Spooky23 8y ago
  That’s an apples to oranges comparison. You don’t avoid concern about increasing food borne pathogens in lettuce because of heart disease. The issue is the economic and regulatory environment that is making contaminated lettuce a thing. If it’s like E. coli problems in meat, the primary contributor is poor production, handling and packaging process.
• jacobolus 8y ago
  > 20 percent lower risk [...] 20% of 610,000 = 122,000/year Your general point is reasonable enough, but this arithmetic per se is not really supportable. (a) There is no breakdown there of the number of people who ate > 5 vs. < 3 servings of vegetables (either among the general population or among heart disease sufferers), and (b) the risk number is about developing heart disease at all, not deaths (without even mentioning (c) these are cohort studies showing correlations, not proving causal relationships). It is possible that e.g. serious heart-disease cases likely to cause death result from causes unrelated to vegetable consumption, while many non-vegetable-eaters develop minor heart disease cases which they would not have if they had eaten vegetables, but which still do not result in death. Likewise, it is likely that of the 610,000 deaths, many (most?) of them were of people eating > 3 servings of vegetables per day.
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that we eat fewer leafy greens. I, however, definitely think that there could be a lot of improvements to the way that we farm them.
  • greglindahl 8y ago
    The issue isn't suggestions, it's how consumers behave when told that leafy greens killed some people.
    • Fomite 8y ago
      On the other hand, educating customers that food poisoning isn't just for meat is how you get people to wash their lettuce and stop drinking raw milk.
      • greglindahl 8y ago
        I'm all for evidence-based recommendations. Does washing lettuce work for this kind of outbreak?
        • Fomite 8y ago
          Would depend on the pathogen in question, how its on the lettuce (and indeed what kind of lettuce), etc. In this particular outbreak, it looks like the CDC's stance is "not really". But there's a lot of ambient food poisoning that can be prevented by washing lettuce, especially in reducing cross-contamination (the lettuce wasn't contaminated, then got exposed during the cooking prep process, etc.)
          • greglindahl 8y ago
            I'd be surprised that washing lettuce prevents the second, but I'm open to evidence that it does.
  • abecedarius 8y ago
• contoraria 8y ago
  The thing with leafy greens is, they rot faster, they need to be reasonably fresh. I know because last week I had to clean up a brown puddle of ooze coming out of a stored grocery bag. The salad was rotten within a week while the fruit still looked good. Carrots are similarly short lived, in my experience. And there's a whole thing to say about frigerator hygiene - they are not sterile just because of lower temperatures, while they are hard to clean unless turned off, because water won't dry, whereas they are hard to turn off, when they are always filled. I'm being pedantic, I know.
• nwah1 8y ago
  Also, since E Coli comes from animal waste, if people ate more vegetables and less animals, we'd see less E Coli.