I just want to take the opportunity to comment further on the hygiene thing, because it's relevant to public health in a very unexpected way. The author has su

I just want to take the opportunity to comment further on the hygiene thing, because it's relevant to public health in a very unexpected way. The author has such a fixation on hygiene that they arbitrarily elevate it to a special category, above proper refrigeration and storage, beyond all reason and logic. What reason and logic, you may ask? Hygiene's mainly an issue if a food handler is sick or come into contact with a sick person. Whereas improperly stored food will get you ill a very high percentage of the time regardless of the health of the staff. Just do a quick calculation of the odds in your head of which is a more critical issue. But it's super gross, right, and most people can't help but put it at the top of their mental list of "grossness", even above unrefrigerated meat and eggs (that have been previously refrigerated), which are far more likely to make you sick. So how does an irrational fixation with hygiene affect public health? There was a study done that compared poor Russian kids with rich Finnish kids living across the border from one another. It found higher rates of auto-immune diseases, allergies and diabetes in the Finnish kids. Similar genetic profiles and all that. Long story short, the theory is the rich Finnish parents were more obsessed with hygiene and keeping their kids clean, and it actually hurt the development of a normal immune system. Interesting, right? Moral of the story: mere quantity of data is insufficient to draw correct conclusions. One must also adhere to a rigorous scientific methodology that controls for biases. Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Unintended-and-Deadly-Consequences-of-Living-in-the-Industrialized-World-199164051.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Unintended-...