Eating Healthy Food Could Be Bad For You???

The title of this post is an oxymoron – how can eating healthy food be bad for you?  It’s not actually the food itself that is bad for you, but the diseases it attracts.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report listing 10 foods that can cause outbreaks related to E.coli, Norovirus or Salmonella.

CSPI identified 363 outbreaks linked to iceberg lettuce, romaine, spinach, and other leafy greens, variously contaminated with E. coli, Norovirus, or Salmonella, and causing 13,568 cases of illness. Manure, contaminated irrigation water, or poor handling practices are all possible culprits in those outbreaks. The FDA does not currently require farms and processors to have written food safety plans, nor does it provide specific safety standards for even the largest growers to meet.

The foods that they identified are:

Eggs were linked 352 outbreaks and 11,163 illnesses; tuna to 268 outbreaks and 2,341 cases of illness, and oysters—despite their limited consumption—to 132 outbreaks causing 3,409 illnesses. Outbreaks involving potatoes don’t seem to make headlines, but nevertheless they are linked to 108 outbreaks and 3,659 cases of illness. Cheese, ice cream, tomatoes, sprouts, and berries round out the top 10 list. The data come from CSPI’s Outbreak Alert! Database, which includes outbreaks from 1990 to 2006, using data collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources.

When it comes to food, proper handling is essential especially when it comes to any type of meat or fish.  However it doesn’t end there – for example, reheating rice can cause food poisoning.  Here is what the UK Food Standards Agency had to say about the risks of reheating rice:

It’s true that you could get food poisoning from eating reheated rice. But it’s not actually the reheating that’s the problem – it’s the way the rice has been stored before reheating.

Uncooked rice can contain spores of Bacillus cereus, bacteria that can cause food poisoning. When the rice is cooked, the spores can survive. Then, if the rice is left standing at room temperature, the spores will germinate into bacteria. These bacteria will multiply and may produce toxins (poisons) that cause vomiting or diarrhoea. Reheating the rice won’t get rid of these toxins.

So, the longer cooked rice is left at room temperature, the more likely it is that bacteria, or the toxins they produce, could stop the rice being safe to eat.

It’s best to serve rice when it has just been cooked. If that isn’t possible, cool the rice as quickly as possible (ideally within one hour) and keep it in the fridge for no more than one day until reheating.

Remember that when you reheat any food, you should always check that it’s steaming hot all the way through, and avoid reheating more than once.

Here are a few more sites relted to the safe cooking, reheating and cooling of cooked rice:

• http://www.nzfsa.govt.nz/consumers/food-safety-topics/foodborne-illnesses/safe-cooling-of-cooked-rice/index.htm
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17275116

The solution is proper food handling and common sense.  When it comes to certain items, such as Tuna (or any meat/fish for that matter) you don’t want to eat it if it’s been sitting uncooled for any period of time — that’s just asking for trouble.

If you want more information on proper safe food handling procedure visit this site – http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/Safe_Food_Handling_Fact_Sheets/index.asp and you can download and read several fact sheets.

Here is to your health!

Mohamed

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