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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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Good for us... Not so good for the pig or the rabbit.
Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don't eat pork.
Vincent: Are you Jewish?
Jules: Nah, I ain't Jewish, I just don't dig on swine, that's all.
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense enough to disregard its own faeces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.
Jules: I don't eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty. But, a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we'd have to be talkin' about one charmin' motherfuckin' pig. I mean he'd have to be ten times more charmin' than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I'm sayin'?
As they say in the marketing rulebook: Timing is everything
We get bacon with worms?
I think someone didn't run this by marketing.
There is truth in humor.
> omega-3 fatty acids -- the kind believed to stave off heart disease.
8 599,00.html
Er...no it's not:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,173
This may not be so great. This recent story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4838086.stm/ casts doubts on the benefits of omega-3.
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.
Preliminary studies show they still mostly die of having their heads lopped off and getting shoved into meat grinders.
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.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I'm afraid of this shit. I love bacon and eggs every now and then, and the same shit could happen with this as with corn - you can't buy non-GM corn flakes anymore unless you shop at an "organic" store and pay twice the price. Leave bacon alone, I say. Or at least clearly mark the non-GM variety so that I'd know which one to buy.
Now all we need to do is biologically engineer boneless chickens for those tasty "boneless" chicken wings :-)
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.
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/
visit randi.org
Far too much is made of these improvements, if they are in fact improvements.
My grandfather lived to be 92, and died 2 days after playing and dancing to fiddle at a wedding. After having 2 wives and 15 children it is not hard to see why he had a large farm. Being monetarily poor, everything was used and everything made from the farm and without chemicals or bio agents. He was a mixed farmer raising cattle, pigs, chickens and wheat.
Well, to the point. None of the food, including eggs fried in suet every day, or the grease from the cattle or pig lard in bread, pastries or what amounts to steak-fried chicken ever hurt him. By modern days standards he should have died at 22 of a massive heart attack due to cholesterol alone.
But one truth appears to be the chemicals, the bio "enhancements" and engineering of foods is what is killing many of us. Growth hormones get passed on through the food chain and tell our bodies to "put it on". Radiation sterilizes but also kills proteins we need and thus we eat more. Nitrate preservatives... The pesticide residues in steady feed but minute ("government accepted levels") linger and pass regularly down the food chain to humans. Who knows, your cow might have been grazed down wind of a chemical processing plant or drank water downstream from another city or chemical use agro farm with god knows what in it.
It isn't just in livestock like chickens, pork and cattle. Seafood caught after rivers carry out taconite, lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury and a host of other impurities. The shrimp from Thailand to the Cod of the shores of Newfoundland all have similar issues.
When it comes to tinkering about the food chain, we might want to concern ourselves about a species like the Leopard Frog that is sensitive to mans pollution and bio agents. There used to be lots of them, but haven't seen one for 20 years and I have looked. Never saw tumors in fish until the last 5 years either.
Finding clean food is increasing becoming a problem. The problem is there are few places to grow clean food.
You know, no matter how rational of an argument you have, adding multiple question marks or exclamation points always takes credability points away in most people's books.
Because of how the Internet works the only way we can tell how you mean stuff is how you write it -- caps is generally regarded as shouting, and 1337 conveys a stereotype, as does aimspeek. Similarly, using multiple punctuation marks leads to other stereotypes.
I saw a rule of thumb for exclamation points once -- you should only use as many in a week as you have thumbs.
DYWYPI?
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