Yet another foodscare :-(

[Joanbunting Profile]

I think one of the scariest food stories last week concerned the bought in sandwiches and salads which kieed three and made others very poorly indeed. If hospital patients can't be assured safe food then there is something very wrong indeed..

[jeral Profile]

It's perhaps too early to comment on the listeria thing without knowing how it came to be in the causative sandwiches.

On bacon/cured meats, if it's that bad, why is it allowed for sale at all by the FSA? If it is allowed, why not serve it in hospitals? There is nitrate-free bacon now (as said) and quite a surprising variety of passable I'm told fake meat now, e.g. "duck" is now, but fake of any sort is also double the price.

If bacon were to be banned in hospitals, I imagine people would be only too glad to get home, lol. However, given the impetus over the last few years to get people out of hospital beds at lightning speed, bacon could well be banned in hospitals tomorrow. Moi? Cynical?

[Stokey Sue Profile]

For those who are really interested in the red meat / processed meat conundrum, here’s a really interesting (but very in depth) review of the BMJ study

If you only read part, it starts with Catherine Collins excellent, easy, explanation of what the data is and where it comes from

http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-looking-at-red-meat-intake-and-risk-of-death/

[Sakkarin Profile]

In the UK, of 100 women aged 60, about 5 will die in the following eight years, and of 100 men aged 60, about 8 will die. If they had all increased their consumption of processed red meat by seven slices of bacon a week between ages 52 and 60, then about 1 more of the 100 women would die, and less than that (somewhere between 0 and 1) more men would die. So in total somewhere between 1 and 2 extra deaths out of the 200 men and women

Somewhere between 0 and 1 - I'll live with that!

[Stokey Sue Profile]

The thing that struck me was that none of the press hysteria had picked up on the dietary shifts or the age thing

[dennispc Profile]

Thanks Sue, read enough to interest me, I'll go back to it later.

Here's the Guardian's take

https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... scientists

[Sakkarin Profile]

So now we're being advised to go for white eggs to stop the chickens from pecking each other to bits. Brown egg chickens are more aggressive than white egg chickens. Hmm.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/short ... brown-eggs

[scullion Profile]

what a load of chicken ----!
that's such a generalisation. as the writer suggests - it's more likely to be the intensity of stocking than the hens.
there are more docile hens than others that lay brown eggs but i think it's more to do with the fact that one of the leghorn breeds produces the most eggs in commercial farms - which are white.
it's more to do with profit than welfare.
the eggs i buy contain beautiful blue ones along with white and brown.

[Sakkarin Profile]

AAARGH!!!

...the blue colour is caused by insertion of a retrovirus into the chicken genome, which activates a gene involved in the production of blue eggs. The Araucana, a chicken breed from Chile, and Dongxiang and Lushi chickens in China lay blue eggs.

[Renee Profile]

WHAT???... Clarence Court have blue eggs and I have bought them occasionally. I've also bought Araucana blue eggs from Aldi or Lidl. I thought tbe blue colour was because of the breed and not an injection.

[Sakkarin Profile]

Google threw up that snapshot which sounds like there's human intervention, hunting down the actual article it's quoted from gives this, which sounds as if it's a result of natural processes...

http://www.virology.ws/2013/09/11/a-ret ... ells-blue/

[smitch Profile]

I thought the Clarence Court eggs are naturally blue, that is certainly what this website seems to suggest: https://www.legbarsofbroadway.co.uk/index.php/our-hens/cotswold-legbar/

[Stokey Sue Profile]

Yes, that sounds like ordinary selective breeding of a natural trait

After all many bites lay blue eggs, robins for example lay sky blue eggs