Honestly, I suspect this kind of thing happens as a result of a diet devoid of microbial life and non-denatured proteins.
I used to get not full on sick, but pretty sick after eating raw or partially raw meat. You may think it's crazy, but I just continued doing it and eventually stopped getting diarrhea and cramps.
David Blaine (I think) talked about a similar effect from when he practiced swallowing live frogs. He got sick initially (not gag reflex but something akin to food poisoning) but quickly built up a tolerance.
Maybe these guys did get sick in some way that is beyond a reasonable risk tolerance. I don't know. I just think Americans in particular are weird about their food and simultaneously germophobic so they end up eating a certain kind of diet. Getting sick when eating food that isn't totally cooked may not necessarily mean danger but that the body isn't acclimated to the particular food.
Do you want shorter average lifespans? This is how you get them. By ignoring advances in things like food safety.
> I used to get not full on sick, but pretty sick after eating raw or partially raw meat. You may think it's crazy, but I just continued doing it and eventually stopped getting diarrhea and cramps.
This kills some people.
Health advice isn't about you, it's about everyone. See also: wearing a mask during a pandemic.
On the contrary; it's comparable, it's just not identical. The point is that public health recommendations are made to serve the greater good, not serve the preferences of an individual. Please wash your hands.
Regarding the policy aspects: when a substance is potentially harmful then we already have frameworks to regulate sale and possession, as used for things like radioactives and poisons. If an activity is harmful but only to the individual, then education and normalization of behaviour offers the best possible public health outcome, such as the wearing of bicycle helmets (everyone should wear a helmet, but criminalising noncompliance is the worst possible means to achieve it). Only when an activity is harmful to others (such as smoking, or not wearing a facemask during a pandemic) should criminalisation be considered, in my view. In general, exposing younger citizens to hazardous substances (like people feeding their kids raw milk) shouldn't need specific treatment since it's already covered by child endangerment laws and duty of care towards minors, although I suppose carve-outs can be considered when some echobubble loses their collective minds.
By such a policy position, the legislature in the original story did half the job, in my opinion; the sale and possession of raw milk should be regulated like a poison, and the consumption of it strongly deterred through education of the risks. The stunt of drinking it was the height of idiocy, but stupidity is hardly in short supply amongst legislators.
As someone who grew up on a dairy farm, who worked on a farm, and who has friends and family operating their own farms, I'd like to point out that this is backwards. Farmers know that bacteria can make them sick or even kill them. It's the city-slickers who have never been truly ill who think that they're harmless.
Auto-immune diseases and allergies are nowhere even slightly near as big a problem as dysentery and other food borne illnesses used to be. There are far more people who died of TB from contaminated milk alone than people dieing of allergies.
It's true that other aspects of improved care have also reduced the risk from food borne illnesses - antibiotics, clean water, IV rehydration and others.
That’s definitely true for me at least for chili peppers. In fact I think my reaction has worsened over time even after decreasing exposure to them. Such a pity—makes food taste so good.
Another example is Fijian 'kava' (a root that is crushed and dried into a powder, then filtered into water and consumed as a drink). It has a reverse tolerance: those who consume it more frequently typically get more affected by it, and those who've had little before may not feel any effect.
Similarly, I grew up spending most of the year in California but summers in southern Mexico, and the first week or two of every summer was an acclimation period of intestinal distress. (This is despite never drinking unboiled tap water. There are just different microbes floating around in the environment.)
On the other hand, some of the pathogens you can get from raw milk (or insufficiently treated water) can be extremely unpleasant/dangerous and there’s no sure guarantee you’ll get used to them.
100% agreed. If I have been eating junk food for a week or so and even have so much as a kombucha I’ll have major stomach issues. We certainly adapt to high pro-biotic diets, and it would be interesting to learn about the mechanism for such a phenomenon.
Steak tartare and carpaccio are two raw beef dishes that I love that are common in France and Italy, respectively. There are many others.
But American food practices are so awful that it is impossible to eat raw meat here, mostly: some places are careful. That's why cows are pumped full of antibacterials: because they are given growth hormones until their udders rip, and are constantly infected.
This doesn't happen in parts of the world where animals are raised and slaughtered in non-high-density, full-speed-ahead industrial production.
The main reason America needs so many food laws is because they try to scale everything up so that people can eat steaks every day for pennies. I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Americans gotta have it all, and you can raise animals ethically, safely, and without drugs with that kind of entitlement. That's why food tastes so much better in provincial parts of Europe, it's not a myth.
(Disclaimer: I roll the dice on steak tartar every once in a while)
While American food standards are definitely worse, it’s a mistake to say that in Europe raw meat is safe. Even in the most rustic of environments there are loads of ways for your raw meat to get messed up. So you’re needing to trust a lot of stuff and are rolling the dice a bit each time.
Of course everything is a dice roll, but turns out cooking meat solves a lot of problems.
I kept under-cooking burger patties to the point where they were still raw in the middle and thought "f** it" and ate them anyway. Then I moved on to eating straight raw meat for the novelty of it. I'm not sure that I'd eat raw pork, but supposedly today's regulations have mostly eliminated the possibility of trichinosis. Otherwise, I've found raw meat to be way less hazardous than I was lead to believe. I don't advocate for it, and I at least like a good sear on my steak. My risk tolerance is much less than that of many people, for better or for worse.
The CDC recommends ground beef cooked to 160F, which is well above “rare” temperature (around 130F). So, you’re going against the food safety guidelines. I’d say that introduces risk (though hard to quantify exactly).
Good luck quantifying real world risks. What’s the risk of getting sick from a rare burger? Well, it’s the probability of a bad bacteria being present, then it not being killed by the cooking, and then actually taking root in your body.. good luck getting a number
In Germany, eating Mettbrötchen is rather popular in certain regions, and somewhat popular in the rest. As far as I know, that also applies to some neighboring nations.
A Mettbrötchen is basically minced raw pork with some salt, pepper and other spices, with onions on top or worked inside the meat. You put that on a baked roll (or sometimes other bread). There is also Mettwurst (sausage), although that's often at least smoked. Rarely the mett you'd eat raw is a mix of raw pork and raw beef. Mett may only be sold on the same day it was prepared, but it's rather popular so you will find it in basically every supermarket (especially the ones with in-house butchers), or you can buy ready to eat Mettbrötchen/Mettbrote (rolls/bread) in basically every full service bakery and some self-service ones.
I am not really fond of that to the point I would prepare that for myself, but have occasionally indulged when offered.
Bonus picture: Mettigel (mett hedgehog), which is for various popculture reasons a popular way to decorate the mett (before you put some of it on a roll/bread)
One would think so, but it turns out, not really — the big concern in sushi fish is usually parasitic worms (like anisakiasis), which are live multicellular organisms that don’t survive freezing.
In chicken, beef, and pork, the concern is typically bacteria (like salmonella, and e. coli) or parasite cysts (like trichinosis), which are not killed by freezing.
Steak is the classic option in American cuisine, but in Germany (and some other countries), raw mince is a sandwich topping that you can buy from the butcher (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett). Obviously you've got to eat it fresh, but it's not all that bad.
Steak is most often prepared rare or medium-rare. Rare means raw in the middle, as that portion has not been altered by heat, hence the disclaimer on restaurant menus about undercooked foods.
I used to get not full on sick, but pretty sick after eating raw or partially raw meat. You may think it's crazy, but I just continued doing it and eventually stopped getting diarrhea and cramps.
David Blaine (I think) talked about a similar effect from when he practiced swallowing live frogs. He got sick initially (not gag reflex but something akin to food poisoning) but quickly built up a tolerance.
Maybe these guys did get sick in some way that is beyond a reasonable risk tolerance. I don't know. I just think Americans in particular are weird about their food and simultaneously germophobic so they end up eating a certain kind of diet. Getting sick when eating food that isn't totally cooked may not necessarily mean danger but that the body isn't acclimated to the particular food.