CNN Latvian Food Babe & # 39; Spout Pseudoscience on salad outbreak
The urgent warning of the Food and Drug Administration about an E. coli outbreak of romaine salad left many Americans wondering how the problem spread so quickly and what they could do to protect themselves.
Unfortunately, viewers who got into a Sunday CNN segment During the crisis – which contained a blogger who accounts for Food Babe, instead of a researcher or doctor – got the wrong answer.
Anker Ana Cabrera kicked off things by describing self-appointed food researcher Vani Hari as someone who "studied where food comes from quite a lot" before asking how the outbreak occurred. .
"[W] Hate is the worst part of this situation that we do not have a supply chain in place," said Hari. "When romaine is grown and harvested, it has so many different touch points for contamination. You know that Romaine is taken to a factory to be washed. Then another factory starts, put in different bags of salad and then combined with others sort of salad and every time it's cut or washed it touches different machines so there are so many different contaminants that can happen. And if we do not know where the food comes from, we can not really trust it. "
Haris advise? Buy whole salad foods instead of bags or box types to avoid these "polluting points."
"[W] Hen I go out and I buy Roman salad or any kind of salad I avoid the bag and box salad and I really go for the whole salad manager, she said.
Cabrera asked for a clarification: "So you go for your head against the bagged and that's because it's less treated?"
"Absolutely," answered Hari, "and the touch points are definitely smaller. You know, one of the things we have a problem with in this country is that we have things grown in one place and treated in another … [T] HOWEVER, it takes so much time for CDC and other government officials to find out where these pollutants come from and how to contain it without calling more people. "
But it's not really how the spread of the food bar Illness works ̵[ads1]1; and a manager of salad is no safer than a box or bagged version, an FDA spokesman told The Daily Beast this week.
"It is true that there are more pollutants," said the spokesman. "But just because a whole leader of salad goes through smaller steps between consumers and where it grows, it does not necessarily make safer than a bag of minced salad."
This is because E. coli can contaminate salad in the field, making the number of touch points irrelevant in such a case. "To say that the Romaine who went straight to a farmers market from the field is safer than a bag of salad – that's not true," said the spokesman.
Earlier this week, the FDA reached an agreement with major distributors to put labels on romaine salad, so customers wanted to know where their salad came from and helped them avoid anyone from those areas where the eruption was centered.
Hari's head vs. bag of lettuce analysis was not the only thing that peeved bona fide food scientists. She also suggested that antibiotics should blame for the outbreak.
"What's happening is the excessive use of antibiotics that create superb vacuums that can not be treated with antibiotics," she told Cabrera.
But Laura Gieraltowski, who leads the Foodborne Outbreak Response Team on CDC investigating romain contamination, told The Daily Beast that is not true. "This eruption of E. coli does not seem to be resistant to antibiotics," she said via email.
She actually said that antibiotics are not recommended for patients suffering from E. coli O157 infections, "as it may increase the risk of developing a type of kidney failure called hemolytic uremic syndrome."
The FDA spokesman added that "These pathogens have existed for millions of years and are not new superbuges."
"Our goal is to reduce the number of people who are ill at each outbreak," they said to The Daily Beast. "Pathogens have existed sometimes longer than people have been here."
Neither CNN nor Hari responded to requests for comments about her mysterious comments on the air, or why they did not use an authorized expert to explain the outbreak.
But the blogger has drawn criticism lately for her promotions of chemicals in commercial foods. She pushed the Subway to stop including azodicarbonamide (a safe chemical used to maintain the bread's "foaminess") after comparing it with eating a yoga mat and for yellow-5 (a dye additive) removed from Kraft Macaroni and East.
Some researchers have said that Hari's hatred of additives is rooted in antivirals and forevir myths.
"[Azodicarbonamide]" was a completely safe food additive for years until she came together and decided that Subway Bread was essentially a yoga mat, told a researcher Atlantic Ocean in 2015.
Federal investigators believe that Romaine E. coli eruptions began in California and look at six counties, yet the source or sources may remain a mystery.
"Sometimes there are several farms," said the FDA spokeswoman. "We can not wonder whether The source of this E. coli came into the food from cattle or manure. There are a number of ways. It is variable. "
Gieraltowski said that frequent consumption of salads in the American diet is an obstacle to tracing the root of eruptions.
" We are getting better at discovering these outbreaks through interviews and advanced laboratory technology called weekend sequencing, "she told the Daily Beast . "Leafy green outbreaks have been notoriously difficult to solve because people eat green vegetables many times before they get sick so it's difficult to determine which exposure is the one that made them sick."
While there have been several multi- state mature outbreak this year, she said it's too early to tell if there are real increases in outbursts or just better detection.
CDC strengthens state and local health department capacity to cope with outbreaks before they grow up and researchers update actively throughout genom sequencing to give investigators greater assurance that diseases are related to a common source and make it easier to detect outbreaks when they are smaller, she said.
