Report Finds PFAS Chemicals In One-Third of Fast Food Packaging (cnn.com) 122
dryriver quotes CNN:
Most of the time, when you order fast food, you know exactly what you're getting: an inexpensive meal that tastes great but is probably loaded with fat, cholesterol and sodium. But it turns out that the packaging your food comes in could also have a negative impact on your health, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters. The report found fluorinated chemicals in one-third of the fast food packaging researchers tested.
These chemicals are favored for their grease-repellent properties. Along with their use in the fast food industry, fluorinated chemicals -- sometimes called PFASs -- are used "to give water-repellant, stain-resistant, and non-stick properties to consumer products such as furniture, carpets, outdoor gear, clothing, cosmetics (and) cookware," according to a news release that accompanied the report. "The most studied of these substances (PFOSs and PFOAs) has been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, elevated cholesterol, decreased fertility, thyroid problems and changes in hormone functioning, as well as adverse developmental effects and decreased immune response in children."
The chemicals can migrate into your food, says one of the study's authors, who suggests removing it from the packaging as quickly as possible. (You might also request your french fries in a paper cup, which are free from "chemicals of concern".) But they also suggest pressuring fast food chains to remove the chemicals from their packaging, and the president of the Foodservice Packaging Institute acknowledges that after the study concluded in 2015, fluorochemical-free packaging was introduced.
These chemicals are favored for their grease-repellent properties. Along with their use in the fast food industry, fluorinated chemicals -- sometimes called PFASs -- are used "to give water-repellant, stain-resistant, and non-stick properties to consumer products such as furniture, carpets, outdoor gear, clothing, cosmetics (and) cookware," according to a news release that accompanied the report. "The most studied of these substances (PFOSs and PFOAs) has been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, elevated cholesterol, decreased fertility, thyroid problems and changes in hormone functioning, as well as adverse developmental effects and decreased immune response in children."
The chemicals can migrate into your food, says one of the study's authors, who suggests removing it from the packaging as quickly as possible. (You might also request your french fries in a paper cup, which are free from "chemicals of concern".) But they also suggest pressuring fast food chains to remove the chemicals from their packaging, and the president of the Foodservice Packaging Institute acknowledges that after the study concluded in 2015, fluorochemical-free packaging was introduced.
What are the known risks (Score:5, Insightful)
The most studied of these substances has been linked....
As usual, the key information to know the extent of the potential problem is missing. So, we know that there is a study out there that shows a possible link between one of these substances and health problems.
How much exposure required to show a link? What is the elevation in risk for common intake from packaging? How much of the studied substance is actually in use vs other substances?
There hardly appears to be enough information to make any recommendations.
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That sounds like a pretty standard "Ban X Now" hit piece. Strong on potential effect light on detail.
You are exactly right in asking those questions. Any of them can make this a 'so what' issue but then there is no news item painting fast food in a negative light
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EHP Article [slashdot.org]
tl;dr
health data was collected from community residents in 2005 and 2006 and from a follow-up medical survey of these participants between 2008 and 2011. They also included data from 4,391 DuPont workers. For each worker and resident, the authors estimated lifetime cumulative PFOA serum levels based on factors including drinking water source, tap water consumption, and any employment at the DuPont plant.
Of 32,507 individuals in the current study, 2,507 had primary cancers of 21 different types th
Re:What are the known risks (Score:4, Insightful)
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...and is distracting from watching the Patriots lose.
Ahem. Distracting you from the greatest comeback in NFL history.
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Of course not. From TFA:
"These are long-chain PFASs that have largely been phased out, in favor of shorter-chain compounds that are thought to have shorter half-lives in the human body, but these shortened forms have not yet been thoroughly studied."
Maybe the shorter chain compounds have similar effects and maybe they leave the body faster. Or maybe not. We don't know.
The logical thing would be to demand a study of the compounds that are in use, but good luck getting that with budgets being cut and infor
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It sounds like they're describing ScotchGard, a surface treatment whose key ingredient was PFOS.
As far as your other questions, measuring direct contact of one burger wrapper with one person's blood levels isn't how these studies are typically done. There are too many variables: how long was the food in contact with the wrapper, how much surface area of the wrapper actually came in contact with how much surface area of the food, what kind of food, how many liquids from the food soaked into the paper and w
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As far as your other questions, measuring direct contact of one burger wrapper with one person's blood levels isn't how these studies are typically done.
I wasn't suggesting it is. But they certainly can study the amount of these chemicals that migrates into the food under typical circumstances. And yes, since the levels are likely so low its difficult to measure, that should be taken into account before jumping to the 'ban' gun as you suggest. We certainly don't ban everything that has potential health risks.
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And yes, since the levels are likely so low its difficult to measure, that should be taken into account before jumping to the 'ban' gun as you suggest. We certainly don't ban everything that has potential health risks.
The problem with the chemicals in question is that they are known to accumulate in the environment, and there is increasing evidence that their presence in drinking water, etc. can cause serious problems. And the studies that had been used to create previous recommended drinking water standards were basically knowingly corrupted by DuPont, a primary manufacturer. You may want to look up the cases against DuPont and Rob Bilott, the primary attorney who has litigated these cases (who actually used to work a
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Can you provide hard evidence of this? How do you know fast food chains are not wrapping their burgers in carpet? Have you ever tasted fast food?
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"Just remove the shitty food from your diet as quick as possible."
So, "shitty food" means different things to different people. YMMV, but I happen to like the taste of some fast food, and choose to continue stimulating my pleasure center. No, not that one. At 58 yrs old, with no major health issues, I'd much rather enjoy my food than eat tofu and rice cakes, because at this point, I've probably only got another ten to twenty years, and why the fuck should I have to put up with eating food that tastes lik
And? (Score:5, Informative)
What's inside the plastic wrapping is going to kill you quicker than whatever the wrapping is made of.
Or, otherwise, we'd pretty much all be dead by now.
Sure, start phasing it out, like thousands of things before it, but it's not an end-of-the-world, evil-fast-food-chain, profiteering-bastards kind of story at all.
Hell, I remember when McDonald's burgers came in a polystyrene box. They changed that and it's now a card-thing with shiny outside. I'm sure those things were always marked as "food-safe" or they'd have been in court a million times by now because of it.
But our idea of food-safe changes as knowledge increases. I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up going back to polystyrene boxes at some point, we're bound to find out that something older and abandoned actually wasn't all that bad or we can now make it without it being bad.
But the tone of the summary/story is quite heavily in the "OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" section. When actually the story is more like "Huh, there's a tiny chance this could very slightly statistically be worse for you that paper. Oh well, let's change that, but it's not worth panicking and trying to do that overnight. Let's just phase it out for something slightly better."
Hell, they banned fish and chip shops in the UK from using newspaper for wrapping the food in, which they always did in my father's day, because of the ink in the paper being not ideal to wrap a greasy load of fried fish and potato into. But try and point to someone who died or was taken ill as a result and you'd be hard pressed to come up with anything at all.
And then, ironically, they all started using polystyrene and plastics, which we're now telling them are bad for the environment and they should go back to paper, and recycled paper at that...
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
"But try and point to someone who died or was taken ill as a result and you'd be hard pressed to come up with anything at all."
What matters are statistics. Point to someone who died from a chemical spill, hard to do. Point to a community with elevated cancer rates, not so hard.
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By the same token, that's also how you can tell whether your town's witches are actively casting their cancer spells.
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What's inside the plastic wrapping is going to kill you quicker than whatever the wrapping is made of.
Fair point. But when I first read about this topic, and looked up what these chemicals are & what they're used for, 1st thought was: "What the F#$K are these chemicals doing near our food in the first place? And even more, in food packaging?". I simply don't understand.
It seems compounds like this could be an ingredient in cleaning agents. Okay, as a producer you may have issues with washing the reminder of cleaning agents such that traces remain & get in the food processed. But if that
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Dihydrogen monoxide is the most prevalent chemical in most cleaning agents. So what?
Re:And? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's inside the plastic wrapping is going to kill you quicker than whatever the wrapping is made of.
The most studied of these substances (PFOSs and PFOAs) has been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, elevated cholesterol, decreased fertility, thyroid problems and changes in hormone functioning, as well as adverse developmental effects and decreased immune response in children.
When there is an obesity epidemic, its worth considering what role the packaging may be playing in messing with hormones and thyroid function, both of which can lead to weight gain.
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When there is an obesity epidemic, you should start to seriously question the policies of the last 2-3 generations worth of government bodies who decided they could make people better. Like the war on fats.
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Cancer rates doubled during the industrial revolution, much more than could be accounted for by increases in lifespan that happened for some classes around the same time. One wonders (okay, I wonder) what they would be like today without all this probably-carcinogenic (and known-carcinogenic) plastic involved.
Obviously, in some cases we really depend on plastics, and I'm not suggesting it should all go away. In [most] other cases, glass is a lot better, and we should use it instead of plastic.
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And life expectancy - and overall deaths - nearly halved in most developed countries at the same time.
Cancer is what happens to you when nothing else kills you - it's quite literally a lottery on every cell replication as to whether it mutates badly or not. And over time, you WILL get and die of cancer if nothing else does.
Blaming increasing lifespan, which means more people die of cancer, on the presence or invention of plastic is actually good evidence FOR plastic. Such as - how do you sterilise or clea
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Life expectancy DOUBLED and overall deaths HALVED. Sorry, I mis-edited that line.
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under someone's theory that my water main pressure might drop (it never did)
Congratulations on being the only person ever who's gone 45 years without having to shut off the water to your house for a plumbing repair.
Calculated risks (Score:1)
Inform me of the risks.
Let me choose to patronize restaurants that give me safer-to-eat food or food in packaging that is less likely to leak grease or mayo through the wrapper.
If enough people demand safe-to-eat food, the other packaging will disappear.
If enough people demand water-and-grease-repellant packaging, the other kind will disappear.
In general, the market decide.
I'm willing to budge and go "nanny state" when it comes to food marketed towards minors and food that is sold in "captive/concession-con
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If they're giving you your food in a wrapper, it's not a restaurant.
Re:Calculated risks (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's eliminate airline regulations. If enough people die, then they'll stop flying or the planes will be made safer. It'll a be a bit late for the dead people, but then Ayn Rand followers can wax poetical on the magic of the markets.
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Yeah, because making sensible, balanced choices is absolutely impossible. If a bureau has 1000 regulators, the only possible choices are increasing it to 2000 or going down to zero. No way could you eliminate 1% of the regulations and go to 990 regulators. Because ... um, Ayn Rand or Somalia or business leaders all being comic book supervillains or some other strawman. This stuff is super insightful. Kudos.
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The problem is that people will assume that if it's used in the fast food industry, it isn't something that will give your kids cancer by the time they're 50. They also won't know that the grease proof wrapper is an endocrine disrupter. You can bet when asking which wrapping you want the cashier won't ask "would you like to super-size your prostate?".
Breaking News: Toxic food served in toxic wrappers (Score:2)
simple: eat less packaging ! (Score:5, Funny)
For my part, I'll gradually reduce the packaging material I eat. By the end of March of this year I hope to maintain a 20% reduction. Assuming no serious withdrawal symptoms, I may cut consumption of packaging material in half by the end of the year. Wish me luck!
So what? (Score:2)
As we move into the era of 'less regulation', what difference does it make, nothing will be done about it.
You say you're worried about your health? (Score:2)
If you're eating at fast food restaurants you're not worried about your health, so this is truly a non-story.
Tastes great ? (Score:2)
One must have severely damaged taste-buds to consider that fast food tastes even remotely '0K'. ...
If you are used drinking water, eating fresh, lightly seasoned, food (home made, or from a good restaurant),
then fast-food tastes like mouth-burning salty/acidic sponge (or sole, depending on the "meal").
Of course, if one is used to fast-food and sodas then water and proper food is probably taste-less : after all, one gets used to pain.
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What is this "lightly seasoned" bullcrap? I have a colleague who refuses to use any salt in his cooking, and you can tell simply by looking at him, how miserable his food tastes.
Season your food so it tastes right, the seasonings have no health impact*, so go hog wild. Making otherwise bland food taste palatable is good. Fat carries a lot of flavor, but is also high in calories. Remove the fat, and you remove a lot of taste, but you can compensate for this by using spices. As a side effect, really spicy foo
testicular cancer (Score:1)
Wait, which packages now, exactly? (Score:1)
All the fast food chains around here had already switched to paper years ago... where is this actually still a problem? Which types of packages/materials are actually still being used that even require a non-stick coating, and which actual restaurant chains are still using them?
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And what, you gurgled that for us here because there is no such creature as a surviving Vegan, I guess?
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And what, you gurgled that for us here because there is no such creature as a surviving Vegan, I guess?
While you can certainly survive as a vegan, it's really not ideal. Animal protein carries 100% of essential aminos and a number of essential micronutrients, and in order to replace them you have to go out of your way with different food sources that are otherwise (without modern technology) mutually out of reach of any given geographic area.
Furthermore, the diet has to be micromanaged in order to work, similar to a diabetes diet or a renal diet.
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> Humans can't survive without meat.
I assume you trolling, since that is clearly not true.
Re: Fast food (Score:1)
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" The vegans I know all seem to have emotional problems as well."
I'd like to suggest that many had those problems prior to becoming vegans, and made that change because being a vegan makes you a special snowflake, drawing attention to yourself at every shared meal. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying ALL vegans.
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Nah pretty much all vegans...
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Q: How do you know you're talking to a vegan?
A: Don't worry, he'll/she'll tell you
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/golfclap
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The USDA food pyramid was based on the food used to fatten livestock.
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There are 3 other sides to a pyramid. You do realize those are all vegetables, right?
Um, no. Just flat out, no.
https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/site... [usda.gov]
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The USDA food pyramid has grains at the bottom (and widest) portion of the pyramid
No it doesn't [wikipedia.org]. The pyramid with horizontal slices is obsolete, and was replaced with VERTICAL slices. Of course, vertical slices don't even fit the metaphor of a pyramid, and are thus meaningless, but THAT IS THE INTENT. The USDA was fed up with trying to please so many interest groups (farmers, food manufacturers, nutritionists, etc) that they just threw up their hands and went with something pointless, meaningless, and content free.
The vertical "pyramid" diagram has now been replaced with the MyPlate [wikipedia.org]
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Re: Fast food (Score:1)
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That is possibly the most terrible-looking site since the Time Cube dude.
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There's nothing wrong with grains but there's everything wrong with the highly processed stuff that the American consumer usually buys.
Humans can easily survive without meat. You can easily get proper amino acid intake from vegetable sources alone although you have to balance them. With just a little bit of dairy or fish it's trivial (and a lot healthier than meat.)
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It is far more likely they continued beyond the age of 5. There were no primary schools in pre-history, and no formula or bottled baby foods. And no prudes (probably).
Re:Fast food (Score:5, Interesting)
You're confusing fast food with meat.
Meat isn't bad for you, in any way shape or form. There are no conclusive, unchallenged papers saying so.
In fact, very nearly the opposite:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
CONCLUSIONS:
United Kingdom-based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation.
60,310 people studied. That's a LOT.
But don't confuse "meat-eating" with "fast-food junky". And don't think that a vegan or vegetarian diet does ANYTHING for you. It doesn't. It's just the same, but you can't eat meat. If you're used to eating meat, that can make you miserable.
And if you go too strict, you can do more damage to your body and have to take an artificial supplement to restore what's missing from your diet (i.e. the stuff normally found in meat!).
And what you think wild-caught salmon is going to do differently to you than a farmed salmon, we can argue about until the cows come home but basically the stats say the same again: It makes NO difference.
Rather than try to argue on the basis of "this sounds good, and I think I'm helping", find some proper, serious, researched literature and narrow down what you're recommending.
Is it a) meat or lack of it, b) fish instead of meat, c) "free-range" fish over farmed fish, d) vegetarian over meat-eating, e) anything over fast-food?
Because confusing the issue in ONE SENTENCE between five different things, and getting most of those wrong in terms of actual science, is not the way to convince people.
You might as well tell me to only use organic pencils as they "draw better".
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BUT -- The first GMO animal to be sold into the human food chain is salmon, so buyer beware.
Why buyer beware? Every single time somebody tries to challenge GMO, it has always been empirically proven to not only be safe, but beneficial both in terms of environment and nutrition. Anything claiming the contrary has always been proven to be junk science.
It's on the market *now*, and it's a genetic cross between a sockeye salmon and a Brazilian jumbo tapeworm larvae. Disgusting, right??
That's a load of shit. The whole idea of "frankenfood" is a myth. Sure, in some lab experiments moving genes between species is done to understand what given genes do, but nobody actually serves food that way. Instead what's used is proteomics to const
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Believe it or not, farmed salmon has a much higher quantity of mercury than wild-caught salmon (and salmon is really not a fish that has a mercury problem in the wild).
Got a citation for that? The only reputable info I can find says the opposite.
http://www.webmd.com/food-reci... [webmd.com]
Re:Fast food (Score:4, Informative)
Meat isn't bad for you, in any way shape or form.
Except there's a strong link between red and smoked meats and increased chance of colorectal cancer [wcrf.org].
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There's also a link between eating red meat and deaths caused by falling from ladders.
In this case it means eating meat causes people to climb ladders.
Re: Fast food (Score:2)
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Yeah, and there's a strong correlation between people who breath, and people who die. Please stop breathing, and save yourself!
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There's also a link between eating red meat and deaths caused by falling from ladders
Yes. It's so important to wash your greasy hands after a meal.
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Except there's a strong link between red and smoked meats and increased chance of colorectal cancer.
There is something poetic about a guy named PoopJuggler having a link handy that shows a correlation between meat and colorectal cancer.
More oddly, I do not recall seeing this name until recently and yet the userid is relatively low.
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And don't think that a vegan or vegetarian diet does ANYTHING for you. It doesn't.
I guess all those dummies that study nutrition [nutrition.org] don't know as much as you.
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There are no conclusive, unchallenged papers saying so.
Why the weasel words? In nutrition research NOTHING is conclusive and unchallenged.
In fact, very nearly the opposite: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
You are cherry-picking the report, and then cherry-picking quotes from the report. This report actually found that veggies live longer, but without enough data to be "conclusive". Many other studies have found a stronger correlation.
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Second: whi
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all of the test subjects in this study were British, while a similar study conducted in the US showed a 12% decrease in mortality among vegetarians.
Not sure if it's related, but meat bought in the USA is far more likely to be pumped full of antibiotics than in the UK. There are other differences in the kinds of meat in different price brackets, so 'eating meat' probably means something quite different on each side of the pond.
So, somehow, British people who eat less meat are more likely to die for unusual reasons.
Being bludgeoned to death for excessive smugness is the leading cause of death among vegans.
Re: Fast food (Score:1)
Graaa, you did the same thing the parent was arguing against. Stupid, pointless, useless one liners without any backing, justification, or facts.
"You shouldn't eat vegetables". See what I did there?
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My Dad always argued that lettuce was fattening. He smoked Cuban cigars and lived to be 93.
OTOH, 75% of statistics can cause you to die young!
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+1 Bravo!
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-1
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My paleo-diet kid can beat up your vegan kid
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I've been vegan for 5 years (since high school) and I've never had a vitamin deficiency of any sort and I don't take any any B vitamin supplements whatsoever.
Your liver can store enough B12 to last years. The fact that you don't have a (noticeable) deficiency after 5 years doesn't mean you're not exhausting your supply.
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What vegetables have the most vitamin B12 ?
Mushrooms. Cremini mushrooms are an especially good source. Tempeh (fermented soybeans) also has B12. Also, many vegan foods are supplemented with B12, such as bread and breakfast cereal.
Re:Fast food (Score:4)
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Seems that veganism isn't a natural lifestyle.
Of course not. The diets of all primitive societies contain meat (mostly from small animals), and eggs. But just because something isn't "natural" doesn't mean it isn't healthy. Smallpox vaccines and indoor plumbing are not "natural" either, but they have vastly extended human lifespans. There is a fair amount of evidence that veggie/vegan diets are healthier than meat rich diets. For people that do eat meat, there is evidence that meat from small animals and fish is healthier than meat from large mamm
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The biggest problem with a pure vegan diet, is that it seems to require importing a significant number part of the diet. This is a significant burden on the environment compared to eating locally-grown/raised food.
Sure, be vegan if you think it helps you sleep better at night. But don't delude yourself into thinking it's better for the environment.
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The biggest problem with a pure vegan diet, is that it seems to require importing a significant number part of the diet.
What? I have never heard anyone claim this before, and it makes no sense. Do you have evidence whatsoever that this is true?
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I live in Denmark. A lot of food recommended by vegan blogs does not grow locally. Best-case, it's imported from southern Europe. Worst-case, it's imported from Asia or something.