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And now, without further ado, here's the latest 'Report, as written for January 20, 2008:
The Thrust Report - March/April 2008
FDA approves cloned meat
Well, it's official: American meat eaters, you'll eat cloned meat and like it, thank you very much. The FDA has finally given its approval to allowing meat and milk from cloned animals into the food supply (with the odd exception of newborn cattle and all sheep - wasn't Dolly the first celebrity cloned animal?) The safety consensus is pretty much the same as the one we wrote about two years ago: meat from a cloned animal is as safe as meat from a non-cloned animal. And since it's "just as good," cloned meat won't be labeled any differently at all. Consumers will have no idea if, on a genetic level, they really are eating the same thing every night.
For the sake of meat eaters, let's hope that things have changed since five years ago, when we wrote that "Cloning to create new animals will almost always create an abnormal creature." Memo to our vegetarian readers: I think you've got a fun set of questions to ask your burger-eating friends at the next lunch break. Be sure to let them know that they're more than welcome on "our side!" We've even streamlined the signup process so there's no forms to fill out or anything!
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300330
Vick sentenced, Pickton convicted
Two legal items of note since we last talked: disgraced professional football player and convicted dogfighter Michael Vick was sentenced to 23 months in prison for his role in an illegal dogfighting ring. He was up for something like 5 years in prison, so 23 months might look like he got off easy, but apparently prosecutors were originally hoping for 12 to 18, so yay judgey! The $100 million he lost in salary and endorsements has to sting a little as well... In other news, pig farmer Robert Pickton has transitioned from alleged serial killer to convicted serial killer. He's been found guilty of six charges of second degree murder, and prosecutors are still working on 20 more. Pickton killed the women and hid the bodies on his pig farm, using the pigs and a rendering plant to dispose of the bodies. Of note in the story's lead: "...bodies were butchered like animals in [Pickton's] farm's slaughterhouse." Somehow butchering an animal like an animal still sounds barbaric, but maybe it's just after reading about the exploits of Vick and Pickton.
If you're seeking closure in Vick's story, I can't think of a better story to end the tale (well, I can, but it's not suitable for younger readers): the last of Michael Vick's dogs have a new home under the care of Best Friends Animal Society in Utah. If possible, the dogs will be rehabilitated so they can be adopted out, but if not, they'll enjoy their stay at the USA's largest no-kill animal sanctuary. This completes the relocation process, where 47 dogs in total were moved to eight rescue organizations across the country. Here's hoping that some of the settlement money from the case is going towards the organizations who stepped up to deal with Michael Vick's messes.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300294
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300317
Chimpanzees outperform university students in memory tests
Not only might chimpanzees be smarter than a fifth grader, they managed to outperform university students in memory tests. Personally, I think the primates get an advantage not because they're so smart, but because humans are so incredibly dumb. Think about it: we do all this work to prove that primates are as close to being human as possible, and then we celebrate by conducting painful experiments on them. Chimpanzee researcher Dr. Lisa Parr says that "they are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to inform us about our evolutionary heritage." Sadly, research practices to date have told me all I want to know, unless someone wants to step up and make advances in compassion while they're building up the science.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300286
Happy Meals anger some
Sometimes it's hard to believe that, back during the McLibel trial, the idea that McDonald's advertising targeted children was actually contested in court (the official legal verdict, not surprisingly, was that they do.) Flash forward to today, and we've got some parents' group upset that their children are receiving school report cards with attached coupons for free Happy Meals as a reward for getting good grades (and there's nothing like a greasy, salty meal habit to help brain function!) Of course, one wonders where the parents' outrage was for the past ten years when the report card covers were printed by Pizza Hut. Oh, speaking of Pizza Hut, I think they've made a new record by inventing a pizza that weighs 3.1 pounds and contains 580 calories and 36 grams of fat - per slice.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300291
Inhaling pig brains may lead to nerve damage
A mysterious illness has been hitting slaughterhouse workers lately - specifically, the ones who have been using air compressors to blast pig brains out of skulls. The disease is called, well, reallylongnameitis, so let's go with the acronym CIDP, and it normally affects one or two out of every 100,000 Americans. 11 slaughterhouse workers from one plant in Minnesota fell ill in an 8 month period. The plant did not employ over a million workers, so the numbers are unusual. The working theory is that the air compressors caused tiny particles of brain to get airborne, which then got into the workers, who were not wearing any mouth or nose filters. Hmm, a disease that transfers to humans through brain tissue. How novel. The air compressor practice has been stopped, which will hopefully stop the disease from spreading, but pig brains are still being sold for human consumption (the market is admittedly rather small.) It's not known if it's only certain pig brains that cause the problem (or if it's pig brains at all), but you might want to stick this story on your fridge for when some "new" food safety scare comes up 10 years or so from now.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300292
Pomegranate juice is like speed bumps for cancer
Pomegranate juice has been shown to significantly slow the growth of prostate cancer. Now, lest anyone think I've gotten too "pro-plant" and not enough "anti-meat," let me point out that high cholesterol diet can speed up prostate cancer growth, and cholesterol comes from animal products. There. Anyway, drinking eight ounces of pomegranate juice a day can slow the growth of cancer from an average doubling time of 15 months to an average of 54 months. The study was funded by a company that makes pomegranate juice, so if that bugs you, why not just eat more pomegranate? I learned a trick where you cut the things up in a bowl of water so the spray doesn't stain everything you own, and I've been enjoying pomegranates for breakfast without the mess.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300293
Red meat is as bad as you've heard
Red meat raises your risks of many kinds of cancer. We're talking esophageal, colorectal, liver, and lung cancer. The official term for this kind of thing is "cancers in multiple sites," like cancer is some kind of real estate deal. That got me to this revelation, which I just thought was funny: Red meat is the Donald Trump of cancer. What does that even mean? I guess if you're into real estate, Donald Trump is someone who knows his stuff. If you want to do well in real estate, he'd be a good guy to hang around with. If you want a lot of cancer, well, I guess you should hang around red meat.
The thing of it is, everybody knows this. Red meat has been "bad for you" for a bazillion years. It's like cigarettes, but served with mashed potatoes. They could put Surgeon General's warnings on the stuff, and people will still eat it. At least until they get a powerful enough reason to change, anyway. Health warnings aren't cutting it, clearly, nor, I suspect, are incredibly witty sayings involving businessmen. So what's going to finally get people off of the stuff?
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300296
Milk and egg allergies are getting harder to beat
Wanna know the most common food allergy among children? Nope, not peanuts. It's milk. Wanna know the number two allergy? Nope, still not peanuts. It's eggs. Wanna know two things vegans don't eat? OK, you got this one: dairy and eggs. Moreover, researchers are finding that these allergies are getting more tenacious and harder to outgrow. Milk allergies used to go away after age 3 in around 75 percent of cases, but now it takes until the mid teens to reach that point. (Ironically, giving enough time for lactose intolerance to set in.) Eggs have similar stats. Scientists don't know why food allergies are getting tougher to overcome, but it might just be a sign that humans shouldn't be eating milk or eggs in the first place...
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300302
Another longevity study shows veggie-eaters will be right in the end
Back when I went veg, you know, when you had to worry about all the dinosaurs laughing at you and stuff, there was a stat floating around that said being vegan would add something like seven years to your life. The figure came from a study of Seventh Day Adventists, and I'm not going to cite sources because it doesn't really matter in this context, but I remember there were even coffee mugs available that had the stat written on them.
As you can guess from what statistics are out there today, most people didn't take the bait, and I guess the conclusion was that people would rather eat bacon and die 7 years sooner. But hey, the internet wasn't a big thing back then, so maybe people just didn't get the message. We'll see: a new study has lowered the bar even further: you can get 14 more years than your buddy down the street just by not smoking, drinking moderately, getting some exercise, and eating those pesky five servings of fruits and vegetables. Not surprisingly to you guys, the biggest impact is the food thing, which gave people a 44% chance of surviving to the end of the 11 year study, even if they still ate animals. Sadly, I doubt it's going to make a difference in global eating habits, simply because it hasn't yet, and I'm not at all trying to sound bleak.
News like this always evokes the "quality of life" arguments from people who don't want to make changes. You know what's a great quality of life? Zipping around on one of those stroller/scooters, grossly obese, with an oxygen tank. I'm seeing too many people like that these days. It looks fun and all, but I it'd be more enjoyable think being vibrant and healthy and actually being able to do stuff, not just when I'm old, but when I'm 14 years older than the folks who ate bacon in front of the TV as their primary hobby.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300322
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300324
The biochip could revolutionize product testing
The Science (tm) has come up with an biochip that, if adopted, promises to significantly change the way drugs, cosmetics, and other stuff is tested for safety and viability. Over 70% of drug failures occur due to toxicity, and often what's toxic for an animal isn't the same as for a human and vice versa. Biochips contain actual human cells and could replace a lot of guesswork and approximations with actual information, and they're close to becoming a commercial reality - one company claims to be close to signing a contract with a cosmetics company. Personally, I just want to see how the biochips interact with ketchup. Zing!
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300323
Another gluttony pill in the works
The latest "gluttony pill" professes to let people eat a ton of crap and then block the intake of at least some of the fats. Even if it's just a particular type of fat, and not just a straight percentage, the marketing is going to overpower reality on this one. It's depressing news if you want to live in a culture where people strive to exceed their potential - instead, we get various tricks to allow ourselves to overindulge, possibly trading short term issues for larger problems in the long term. Of course, there's good news buried in the despair. It turns out that this pill is basically a concentrated form of polyphenols, which are found in - surprise! - fruits and vegetables. They block the absorption of oxidized fats in the stomach. Oxidized fats are found in all meats, but they're also found in fried foods, so vegetarians could also benefit from taking the pill, or, and I'm just throwing this out there, from actually eating more fruits and vegetables and less crap.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300328
Stop the protest plan - elephants will not be sold as pets in the UK
The UK government has squashed an initiative to get pet stores selling elephants. "Initiative" might be a strong word; they got a petition with a few hundred signatures on it. I'm pretty sure the organizer was serious, but he was also 12, and when I think back I guess the most important things in my life at that age were probably similarly off the radar to "adult" me. Then again, I'm struck with a sudden urge to spend the weekend building a waterslide in the living room. So anyway, pet stores in the UK won't be selling elephants anytime soon, which means that the elephant mill industry won't be emerging in the outskirts of London, and Michael Vick won't be planning on buying a nondescript warehouse in Cardiff when he gets out of jail. Food trends won't really change, since elephants fall into the same "friends not food now pass me a hamburger" group that puppies are in, and the environment won't take a hit as the "no more plastic bags" group wages war with the "we've got a lot of poop to scoop" camp. In other words, the status quo is safely installed for the time being, and I'll rest on my laurels with my stellar "lengthy writeup about nothing changing" achievement. Or maybe I'll build that waterslide.
http://tastebetter.com/story/1052300327
Start your week the tasty way!
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