Re: [DIYbio] New York Times - Arsenic in Our Chicken?

How about feeding them selenium?

It is more toxic.

But a related question is whether you also won't allow the chickens to have aspirin,

acetaminophen, fluoxetine, or diphenhydramine. Those were all lumped in with

arsenic as terrible things to be feeding chickens, presumably because people who

eat the chickens might get an unspecified dose.

There is often an assumption that if something is a poison, then no amount of it

should be allowed in food. For some reason, the people who make this error the most

also make exceptions for atropine, scopolamine, ethanol, sodium chloride, selenium,

radioactive potassium, hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen peroxide, phosphorus, salicylates

and many other toxins commonly found in organically grown produce and other products.

If any of the molecules in food were listed on the label by their names, they would be

feared as 'chemicals' by those people. Which kills more people, arsenic in chickens, or

fructose in half the items in the supermarket? Robert Lustig would tell you that anyone

who fed fructose to chickens or people is asinine. But you ate some today (and some arsenic).

For every molecule, there is an optimal dose. If you get too much, it is harmful, and if

you don't get enough it is harmful. Aspirin, ethanol, radioactivity, sunlight, and many

more such things are beneficial in the right dose, and eliminating them comes with

peril. We even find that parasites and pathogenic bacteria are necessary to prevent

autoimmune disorders, since we have evolved with them, and they keep our immune

systems in check.

Someone on the list complained about the ammonia used to disinfect the defatted meat

additive now relabeled 'pink slime'. As if any of it remained after processing, and as if

your own body didn't produce far more of it every day than you would eat if your entire

diet was hamburger meat. This was a product that took waste cuttings from the meat

processing, removed the fat that people were afraid of, was disinfected with a safe

volatile disinfectant to make sure no deadly organisms were in it, and added to ground

beef to raise the protein levels, reduce the fat, reduce the cost to consumers, and save

a lot more cattle from being slaughtered by increasing the efficient use of the food from

each one. People die from ground meat that has not been disinfected, and some really

good methods for disinfecting meat, such as x-rays, electron beams, or gamma rays are

ruled out by this same silly fear because it is 'radiation', and any amount of that is an

asinine thing to use on food.

Don't fear your food.

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On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 11:03 PM, Dan Wright <djwrister@gmail.com> wrote:

Anyway I look at it, feeding chicken or people arsenic is asinine.

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