Interesting that the link got split at the new line.
If you click on the second half of the link, it will work.
The part of the article I was referring to was this:
" It turns out that arsenic has routinely been fed to poultry (and sometimes hogs) because it reduces infections "
It appears that you only remembered the second half of that sentence:
" and makes flesh an appetizing shade of pink. "
:-)
My comments reflect my general disdain for this kind of journalism.
It is what caused the maker of 'pink slime' to go out of business, laying off 300
employees, because some group picked a nasty sounding name for their product.
The conclusion the article suggested, that we all eat expensive organic foods
instead, as if we could grow enough food for 6.8 billion people that way, is as bad
as any suggestion Marie Antoinette made about what the poor should eat.
We could write an equally factual article about the cyanide we found in organic
apricots and apples, stating that "We were kind of floored," and
"It's unbelievable what we found." despite the fact that it is quite easily
believable. Other comments are equally stupid:
"We haven't found anything that is an immediate health concern," Nachman added. "But it makes me question how comfortable we are feeding a number of these things to animals that we're eating. It bewilders me."
because the chemicals in it passed through animals instead of through fertilizer plants?
Chemical tests are very sensitive. Farmers in China are apparently feeding Prozac to
chickens. A 30 day supply of fluoxetine would cost more than the chicken. Did they
re-test at a different lab to make sure there was no contamination? Did they retest
different chickens to see if that one chicken happened to eat the pill the farmer
dropped by accident?
They say that trace amounts of acetaminophen were also found. Should I worry?
Millions of people dose themselves with amounts thousands of times higher on a
daily basis. Benadryl was also found. They say it reduces anxiety in chickens, and
apparently in doses small enough that it is cost-effective to feed to chickens that
wholesale for 59 cents a pound (USDA data). Don't you want your chickens to be
happy? Are you some kind of sadist? :-)
The USDA data also show that organic chickens sell for $2.48 per pound. Why would
a farmer feed chickens expensive pharmaceuticals if not doing so would raise the
price they could get for the chicken four-fold? Because few consumers are willing to
pay four times the price for a chicken that has no 'immediate health' benefits.
The part the article only mentions much later, almost as an afterthought, is more
important. Analyzing feather-meal can test for banned antibiotics. Government
inspectors should do this routinely, because there are good reasons for not allowing
antibiotics to be used in chicken farming. There are laws against it, but apparently
they are not being perfectly enforced. If this testing is cheap (it is), it should be used
so that scofflaws are caught and the practice is eliminated.
-----
Get a free science project every week! "http://scitoys.com/newsletter.html"On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz787@gmail.com> wrote:
Your link doesn't work, it shows up as "http://goog_921276603/"
The article didn't specifically mention it helped the chickens, rather
that it made them /look/ healthy
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Simon Quellen Field <sfield@scitoys.com> wrote:
> Have you measured the arsenic levels in your blood?
> If you don't have high enough levels, perhaps you are not eating enough
> chicken. If the levels are higher than optimal, there are standard methods
> for fixing that. But even heavy metals gradually leave your body over time.
> We are, as the original article said, talking about levels that are so low
> that
> they have no medical effects on humans, but apparently have beneficial
> effect on chickens. You may have to eat your weight in chickens to get the
> same benefits.
>
> -----
> Get a free science project every week! "http://scitoys.com/newsletter.html"
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Jordan Miller <jrdnmlr@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> does arsenic undergo biologic accumulation like I thought mercury
>> does? if so, this tends to accumulate more in species toward the top
>> of the food chain (e.g. humans) at higher and therefore more dangerous
>> concentrations.
>>
>> jordan
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 23, 2012, at 11:45 PM, Nathan McCorkle <nmz787@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Simon Quellen Field
>> > <sfield@scitoys.com> wrote:
>> >> OK, so the levels of arsenic in the chicken were not enough to cause
>> >> any
>> >> health concerns, but were enough to reduce infections in the chickens.
>> >>
>> >> It sounds like we should all start adding small amounts of arsenic to
>> >> our
>> >> diets,
>> >> unless we get enough of it in our chicken.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Going on that:
>> >
>> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis#2004_Taiwan_cobalt-contaminated_steel
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Nathan McCorkle
>> > Rochester Institute of Technology
>> > College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics
>> >
>> > --
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>> >
>>
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>
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