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Bring Home the Biotech Bacon
Wired is reporting that researchers may have found the key to "heart friendly bacon." From the article: "Geneticists have mixed DNA from the roundworm C. elegans and pigs to produce swine with significant amounts of omega-3 fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease. Researchers hope they can improve the technique in pork and do the same in chickens and cows. In the process, they also want to better understand human disease."
Still, the pork has way too much fat to be healthy. You can still get trichonosis or tapeworm from infected meat, like regular pork. It's still not kosher or halal either.
And then in 20 years we will discover that this 'adjusted' meat will cause cancer or 'mad-human disease'
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not to sound like some peta activist (i'm carniverous to a fault) but how does it effect the life of the animal? i guess it's kind of like veil where not do you live to be slaughtered, but perhaps also live bad life too.
I doubt regular bacon would disappear overnight or anything, but virtually every time someone comes out and says, "X-inol in corn prevents fin rot," five years later it's common knowledge that X-inol just makes food taste funny. If in twenty years, Omega-3 is still thought to make people healthy, then go adding it to things. For now, odds are you'll just end up with birth defects and adult acne.
You can devote a silly amount of time trying to eat an optimal, low-calorie, lowfat, high-protein, perfectly-whatever sort of diet.
What does that gain you? Is all that time and energy worth it, when, if you get it right, you'll probably just die of something else instead? Sheesh, live a little. Have some bacon once in awhile, have some ice cream for dessert now and then. If you eat too much of something, your body will let you know anyway.
Respect your body's intuition, and get some exercise. There's millions of years of research to back that up.
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Whats the effect on them?
Looking at the poultry industry (pdf warning) I'd say, any effects to the Pig's wellbeing (good or bad) will be irrelevant to the agribusiness owners & the vast majority of consumers.
Quite sad - I have no problem with people eating meat, but knowingly choosing to eat something that's the end result of a life of torture is shocking.
My pics.
You certainly don't need to worry about eating the wrong fats, as I can't think of one plant that we eat that is bad for you.
Define bad. Where do you think sugar comes from? I'll give you a hint, it's not from pigs. Avocado's are also fairly fatty. Many fruits eaten to excess can cause diarrhea. Vegetarians, especially women, need to be very careful of what they eat to ensure they get needed vitamins and trace elements commonly found in meat - like iron.
We would certainly be able to feed more people with plant farms, than animal farms.
Meat has far more energy, weight for weight, than fruit and vegetables. Depending on how you farm the animals, you can provide more energy per hectare off animals than off most crops.
Another plus is that we wouldn't ruin our environment with plants farms as we would with pig farms.
No, you'd ruin them with other farms. Growing plants puts a strain on the soil. That's why you have crop rotations - you need to give the soil a chance to regain it's nutrients before you stick some more crops in it to start sucking them out again. If you increased the fruit and veg farming industry to the point where society could function totally without meat, you'd most definately have an impact on the environment. It'd just be a different one.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This remind me of those nice tomatoe which stay red a lot longer. And taste like water. Methink people concentrate too much on "not dying", and not enough on "living".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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Hello folks.
:) So is everybody else. In fact, the only humans who aren't full of shit are the starving millions in the Third World. Do you want to cleanse yourself? Stop eating for about a week. OK? No, I thought not.
I really can't let this one go by.
"Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal."
No. When humans are confined without the means to stay clean (think gaol) they too sleep in shit. Does that make humans filthy animals? Clearly not. Equally clearly, when pigs live out in the wild they shun excrement just like you and I do.
"I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty."
No. A dog is merely doing what other animals do with a food which is difficult to digest: they re-digest it. Cattle do the same; but they don't have to shit it out first because they have multiple stomachs. It's called 'cud'. Do you drink milk? Do you eat butter and cheese?
If freshly dropped shit was harmful, you'd be ill already, wouldn't you? Please remember that your own, personal, filthy shit just came out of the middle of your nicely-clean-on-the-outside body. You and I are both literally full of shit.
Special thought for the day just for you: "I am glad and grateful to be full of shit."
Thanks for your time.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
I'm surprised that someone can be so wrong. Meat takes very roughly ten times the energy to produce than vegetables. Livestock have to eat plants to survive. Mostly, they are fed low-cost-high-yield plants like maize, soy, and castor bean, and various animal wastes, but livestock still require a great deal of land. You think livestock feed on air or something?
By going to a fully vegetarian society, though there would still be an environmental impact, the impact would certainly be much less.
And nevermind the fact that the whole idea that Omega-3 fatty acids reduce the risk of heart attack has always been a poor assumption based on poor science, the result of going on a, well, fishing expedition, for a correlation and stopping when they found one in the fat, with no particular justification for the fat being where the relevant correlation was to be found in the first place.
And, repeat after me: Correlation is not causation.
The most obvious difference to me between Greek and Inuit cultures (the high fat, low heart disease reason for the fishing expedition) and "ours" is that theirs is poor, but low stress with a bit of a fatalistic, what will be will be, view of life and death.
Skip the salmon and the Frankenstein's pork. Just mellow out dude.
And maybe get a little aerobic exercise a few times a week.
Of course nobody can get a headline out of that, or take out a patent on it to make a financial killing. . .
Oh, wait, nevermind. Excuse me, I have to go call my lawyer and patent a method for "MellowCise (tm)".
KFG
I'll second what's been said already in reply to this comment.
A couple facts:
The pigs wouldn't exist save for being produced to be eaten by you and me.
Think about the last time you were beaten/sick/etc. Did you eat well? Did you gain weight? Producers know that treating an animal as humanely as possible results in a better product and a larger profit.
For further information, you might inspect the National Pork Board's website for information about the Pork Quality Assurance program: http://www.pork.org/Producers/PQA/PQA.aspx
Another point: As a scientist, if the concerns for animal testing have been met, I see nothing but good information coming from such experimentation. People may be concerned about 'mutant' animals and their effects on humans who consume them, but without experimentation, we'll never find out.
JGG