 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. Welcome to chapter 19. So we've got two chapters left. This one on consumer concerns about foods and water, and then we'll look at global nutrition and hunger and malnutrition to end out the course. Alright, so obviously we'll be talking about foodborne illness and water quality, lots of important things to unpack here. You know, where you live is going to play a big role in what types of concerns you should have. But I'm going to add a lot of things in here that I would cover primarily in microbiology about food safety. So I'll go into a little more detail in a couple sections here in this chapter than I typically might. Alright, let's go ahead and dive in. So the ice breaker. When shopping, do you tend to gravitate towards fruits and vegetables that are organic even if they look slightly less appealing or those that have been treated with chemicals because they look better? Why would you choose one over the other? So you have this idea of pretty fruit and vegetables versus ugly fruit and vegetables. This is obviously for you to think about, but a lot of people will choose the prettier stuff. But the reason that your apples might look prettier is because they've been covered in chemicals and waxes and different things. So you have to decide if what's most important is how physically attractive your apple is or how nutritionally dense it is now. And organic isn't magic, so organic, if you buy organic, then you decrease your exposure to pesticides. And I personally think that's not a bad idea because the link between pesticides and cancer, there's a lot of interesting information there. But I don't know how big of a deal it is. But personally, as a gardener, I know that I don't really care how attractive the carrots and different things that come out of our garden are. I know because they were grown in healthy soil that they are nutrient dense. And that's the key. Something that's grown organic that isn't grown in healthy soil isn't going to be any more nutrient dense. Plants, some healthy plants produce more vitamins, but they need healthy soil to become healthy plants. So I don't really think there's anything magic about it. But generally, personally, I am going to be considering organic more often than not. And I'll give you some more tips there too. But of course, then you've got the cost issue. So if you're on a budget, what do you choose to buy organic and what don't you? It really depends. So one thing I'd recommend you look into, a website from the environmental working group called ewg.org has what's called, what do they call it? They have the dirty dozen. So every year they put out a list of the 12 things. If instead of buying all your produce organic, they have the dirty dozen and I believe they have the clean 15, the number might change year to year. But the dirty dozen is if you buy these 12 things organic, you'll reduce your exposure to pesticides by 80% because some foods, like a coconut, you're not eating the outside of a coconut, things like that. So where things are grown, how they're grown, whether or not you normally eat the outsides or not, all these things would impact how much pesticide you might be exposed to. So if you're not worried about it, I totally understand. You can have a completely nutrient dense diet and never buy anything that's organic. But we know that organics are becoming more and more common. I believe we're in the neighborhood of $40 billion a year is now being spent on organic stuff and it's one of the most rapidly growing, if not the most rapidly growing part of our food budget. It doesn't mean that organics are super common yet, but the increase is there. So there's an idea where maybe you can kind of split the difference and you decide to go, I buy these 12 things organic and but the things that are on the clean 15 list are on neither list than I don't buy organic and there's lots of reasons to choose what you buy. If you buy things because of taste or cost, those are all acceptable things. But if you're looking to minimize pesticide exposure, then organic may be the way to go. But from a nutrient density standpoint, I really can't promise you that they're more nutritious. That's why I feel really good about having a garden because I know that the soil in my backyard and we amend it and we add things to it. And so I know the soil we're using hasn't been used for generations and generations like the crop land you see around here. So chances are, there are more nutrients in the soil. And we have our soil tested. Your state extension offices will test your soil for a real small fee. So we know that the soil we're using is good. And to me, that's another vote for gardening on top of whether you choose organic or not at the store. But yeah, check out that dirty dozen list. It's pretty cool. Okay, learning objectives for this chapter. Describe how foodborne illnesses can be prevented. We'll talk a lot about minimizing contamination and controlling temperatures. Explain how to minimize nutrient losses in the kitchen. Explain how environmental contaminants get into foods and how people can protect themselves against contamination. We talked about that quite a bit when we covered the minerals, because many of the contaminants were exposed to can be minerals. But there are tons of other pesticide byproducts and those kind of things that we have to confront. Identify natural toxicants and determine whether they are hazardous. I was just going to say like this is why we were talking yesterday at the house here about why you're supposed to cook your potatoes. If you don't cook your potatoes, there are some compounds there that need to be neutralized, like the lectins that are in potatoes and solanine and different things. So now you'd need to probably eat 20 pounds of raw potatoes to get sick. But still, those are examples of maybe natural toxicants. Debate the risks and benefits of using pesticides because there are benefits. People talk about the risks and the negatives of pesticide exposure, but they also improve yields and keep costs down, etc. List common food additives, their purposes and examples, and discuss consumer concerns about water. So we have a lot to cover here. So let's dive in. Nutrition and infectious diseases. So the food and drug administration, they focus on potential hazards of food. Think about things like contamination, unsafe packaging, etc. This differs from toxicity and they set the standards to protect consumers. So we'll be looking at things like a food additive, how quote unquote dangerous can a food additive be, but it's still classified as safe. Well, we'll look at those things like generally recognized as safe. The CDC estimates 48 million cases of foodborne illness each year in the United States. I don't even know. I don't even know. Like that number's fair, but sometimes you see estimates that are closer to 75 million and then other estimates are much higher. And the big issue here is that I think about how many times you've had food poisoning, but you never went to the doctor. You never went to the hospital. So you were never on any list. So they're trying to estimate how many people get sick when the huge majority of people that get food poisoning are never diagnosed and never treated. So you have some loose stools. You have maybe some vomiting and diarrhea for a day. You move on. So I think this number could be much, much higher, but that's the number you should know that the CDC estimates 48 million cases of foodborne illness each year. That's in the U.S. alone. Estimated 128,000 may need hospitalization and estimated 3,000 die each year. And in the past, foodborne illness would have been much more fatal. And it still is in many parts of the world. The main issue that so few die now is because we can control the symptoms. My sister had salmonellosis one time and she had extreme amounts of vomiting and diarrhea, but they gave her medication to slow her vows down. They gave her leaders of fluid. These are the reasons she survived. The salmonellosis wasn't any less dangerous than it would have been in the past, but they could help her through the process by keeping her hydrated, et cetera, et cetera. So who's at the highest risk? Very young, pregnant women, the very old, sick, malnourished, and those with a weakened immune system are most vulnerable. And all the people on that list have a weakened immune system. So the youngest young, when you're really young, your immune system isn't developed yet. When you're really old, your immune system doesn't work very well. I mean, aging is really an immunosuppressive disorder. When you're pregnant, your immune system is suppressed and that's because you have a foreign invader living inside of you and it's half you, half someone else. So the immune system has to be suppressed to some extent during pregnancy. And then if you're already sick with underlying conditions, you're malnourished, you're starving, those are all things that would impact the immune system as well. So really, when you get foodborne illness, the strength of your immune system is generally what determines if you live or die, just like with other infectious diseases. Another interesting example, though, I mentioned salmonella earlier. Some studies have shown that another really important deal is, when was the last time you had antibiotics? So if a room full of people all got a salmonella infection, the people that had the antibiotics the most recently were at the highest risk of dying and that's because your microbiome, the microbes inside your gut, one of their jobs is to control the population of invaders or to keep them out. So if you've recently taken antibiotics, then you've wiped out these good bacteria so there's more room for the bad ones like salmonella to take hold. So another interesting thing to consider there. Okay, a few more stats. So I wrote down a couple here, the salmonella is the one that leads to the most hospitalizations, I mentioned that. The most common food toxin, so the most common food toxin is from staff. So Staphylococcus aureus which can release a toxin called the Staphylococcal enterotoxin and that infects up to a million up to a million people a year. So all right, there's a few other things to know there. So food safety in the marketplace. So it's the transmission of foodborne illness is the key. So changes in the transmission of foodborne illness, errors in the commercial setting affect many more people than in the past. So it used to be you prepared almost all your food at home. So if your food was already contaminated, then that's how you got sick or if you contaminated it. But now you've got to think of all the other people that are coming into contact with your food and potentially transmitting disease. So mistakes with contamination. So a sick person working in a kitchen, whether that's in a kitchen in a hospital or at a restaurant where you're at, that person transmitting the disease to you is really the most common place we see mistakes now. So the best ways to prevent errors in the commercial setting are to make sure that people know how to properly handle their food. They're washing their hands. They're preventing cross-contamination as much as possible. It used to be the leading cause of foodborne illness was in the home, but now we eat out so much more that the leading cause is these mistakes that are made in the commercial setting. So industry controls. So you've got to realize that food safety is being dealt with at every step in the process from the farm all the way to your fork. Hazard analysis, critical control points are HA, CCP system. And this is trying to monitor these types of things and monitors important foods as well. Consumer awareness. You have state and local health regulations. You know a lot of places like not where I live, but a lot of places they actually give restaurants grades and or you can look up online and see how risky it is to eat at a certain place. Guidelines are for cleanliness and safe preparation of food. Sell by dates, use by dates, best before dates, expire on dates. These are all things designed to protect you. You know, I'm not going to say that I've never, I haven't eaten anything once it's reached that best before date, but you know when they say that to use it or freeze it by a certain time, there's some wiggle room in there, but yeah, you're better off following those guidelines to the T. All right, improper food handling can occur anywhere on the line from the manufacturer to the consumer. So like I said before, from the farm to the fork and you see that here. So how do we keep our food safe? We have a massive food system now, right? It used to be that your grandparents or great grandparents, they grew most of their own food and you know, they just tried to sustain themselves on their own farm, these types of things. Just not the case anymore. So you've got, our food has become this massive industrial, agricultural complex and food safety, it doesn't just matter what you do. What you do is very important and the thing you can control the most, but it's very important that your food was safe when it got to you as well. So at the farm, workers must use safe methods of growing, harvesting, sorting, packing and storing food to minimize contamination hazards. Notice minimize, not eliminate. This is still a very common source of contamination. Flooding and runoff and these types of things can lead to your produce being covered with fecal material, for example. So fecal material is still really a leading cause of foodborne illness. But the problem is, and you notice that a lot of your food recalls are greens, right? There's, I mean, it's a kind of, it's cantaloupe, it's tomatoes, it's peanuts, it's, man, there's so many of them. They're spinach, different types of lettuce. You have constantly, you're hearing about these food recalls and many of them are produce. And the reason for that is because they've been contaminated, usually with fecal material, but you don't cook them, right? So, you know, if you have contaminated meat, you cook it to the appropriate temperature, it greatly reduces the risk. The food you don't cook is the food you have to be the most careful with. All right, then processing. Processors must follow FDA guidelines concerning contamination, cleanliness and education and training of workers and must monitor for safety at critical control points, so the places where contamination is most likely to happen. Now here, it could be contamination with foodborne illnesses from bacteria, etc., but it also can be things like metal shavings. You see a decent number of food recalls come from those types of things. Something went wrong with a machine or, like I mentioned, metal shavings working their way into meat and those types of things. Transportation. Containers and vehicles transporting food must be clean. Cold food must be kept cold at all times. So it doesn't matter how good of a job you do refrigerating your food. If the cold chain wasn't maintained and it wasn't kept cold on the way to you as well. This is really important in the dairy industry. You got these huge tankers carrying milk that either is going to be bottled or turned into cheese or yogurt. Those tanks have to be kept very, very clean because any contamination there would lead to serious issues. And a lot of times that contamination happens, let's say with milk, after it's been pasteurized. So you properly pasteurize dairy to reduce infectious disease risk, but then you transport it in a container where it gets contaminated. That can be a serious problem. And that's why we consume raw dairy. I've mentioned it before, but which there is an increase in infectious disease risk when you do that. But there are still more cases of people getting infectious diseases or foodborne illness from pasteurized dairy in the United States than raw dairy because and usually it has to do issues with transportation. Now that's unfair to say that because only around 7% of Americans ever consume any raw dairy. So even if the numbers are higher, remember that a huge majority of people are using pasteurized dairy. So I will gladly admit that pasteurized dairy carries less infectious disease risk than raw. All right. Retail. Employees in grocery stores and restaurants must follow the FDA's food code on how to prevent foodborne illnesses. Establishments must pass local health inspections and train staff and sanitation. So these are all really important things. Whether it's the grocery store keeping your food at the appropriate temperature or not contaminating it or it's the people preparing your food in a restaurant, et cetera. All right. And then at the table, I always like to say farm to fork because it sounds better. But at the table, consumers must learn and use sound principles of food safety as taught in this chapter. Be mindful that foodborne illness is a real possibility and take steps to prevent it. So what you do with the food before it reaches your table and then when it reaches your table, all important. Washing your hands, using clean dishes, all things will cover. Okay. So food safety in the kitchen where you really, you can really start to take care of your food. And thankfully there are methods that even if your food has been contaminated, hopefully you can minimize the risk or eliminate the risk by proper food safety in your own kitchen. Control what you can control, as they say. All right. So clean. Wash hands and surfaces, countertops, cutting boards, sponges and utensils before and after each type of food preparation. It's like in the lab. I teach in a microbiology lab and we clean and disinfect before we do anything, after we do anything, and then anytime there are spills. So I treat my kitchen the same way that I would treat our lab. I like to use products that have hydrogen peroxide in them, but there's plenty of good cleaning products. Yeah. Cleaning things before you get started, before you get any of your food out is a really good idea. And then cleaning afterwards is really important too. Think about, you've got chicken. You're going to be working with raw chicken. Cleaning your surfaces before is really important, but cleaning them after is especially important because you don't want to be leaving Campylobacter or Salmonella around your, in your home. One quick thing to mention there when we talk about washing and rinsing and cleaning things, you are not supposed to rinse chicken. Lots and lots of people do that. They buy the chicken, they take it out of the package, they rinse it in the sink, and then they bread it or fry it, whatever they're going to do to it. Don't do that because that actually, multiple studies have shown that rinsing your chicken spreads those organisms onto your sink and your faucet and the table. Back splash all these areas. Leave those microbes. Leave the microbes from your chicken and your fish and these kinds of things. Leave them on the meat because you're going to cook the meat and that will kill those microbes. Don't splatter them onto your sponge or splatter them onto the surface where you can be contaminated. So that's a little helpful tip for you. So clean them. We said separate. Keep raw eggs, meat, poultry, and seafood separate from other foods. The reason being, you're going to cook these things. So if these things are contaminated, it's okay as long as I'm not saying to risk it, but it's more okay because if you cook them to the appropriate temperature, you will have killed those microbes. If these foods come into contact with the foods you're not going to cook like your salad, that's when you get into deep, deep trouble. So keep raw eggs, meat, poultry, and seafood, the things that carry most of the contamination. Keep them away from other foods and that's because the idea of cross-contamination. Chicken guts going down your drain, chicken guts being on a chicken that's being cooked to the appropriate temperature, they're okay. Chicken guts on your counter where you're going to touch the counter and then touch your face or chicken guts on your salad that isn't being cooked. That's a whole different story. So preventing cross-contamination is important. So how do we do that? I use separate parts of the kitchen. We use separate cutting boards. So we have a cutting board for these foods that we clean up real good. And then we have a cutting board for things that aren't going to be cooked. So our salads or chopping up fruit, those kind of things are going to occur on a different cutting board in a different part of the kitchen than where we're preparing the chicken or fish, those types of things. Also preventing cross-contamination, you can wear gloves. My wife likes to use gloves. She hates raw meat. So she'll put on gloves to prevent contamination if she's working with chicken or raw beef. What else? Paper towels. I'm all for the environment, but I'm a big fan of paper towels in the kitchen. Reusable things like sponges, like towels, they can be contaminated very, very easily. So if you want to use them, be very careful that you're not contaminating them. I saw a study once where they put video cameras in people's kitchens and didn't tell them what they were looking for or else they lied to them. But they didn't tell them what they actually were doing was looking for mistakes in the kitchen. And they found just videos of people maybe wiping up chicken guts with a towel and then using the same towel on their kid's face a few minutes later. That's a really bad idea. So we have towels for drying things once we clean them and for drying off surfaces and those kinds of things, but it's all about paper towels in our kitchen. So you dispose of the paper towels so they can't become a source of cross-contamination. So another tip for you. Cook food at the proper temperatures. We'll talk about the danger zone and temperature, but it's very important to keep food below this danger zone temperature range before you prepare it. Get it above the danger zone and cook it to the proper temperature and then get it back cooled again as quickly as you can, which is the last point. Refrigerate promptly. So we'll look there. I have a picture coming up with the danger zone and I'll give you some more information there. All right. So go ahead and pause and try to answer these questions to match these. All right. Proper internal temperature to kill microbes. Use cooking your food. Soap and warm water is used to clean. You don't cook with soap. Place in the refrigerator or freezer promptly. That's chill. Raw eggs, meat, poultry from other food. You separate. Keep them separate from the greens, etc. Washing hands and surfaces is clean and cross-contamination is keeping things separate. All right. So here we see the danger zone. So safe handling of meat and poultry. So these, you see here that between 40 and 140 degrees is called the danger zone. Do not keep foods between 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 140 degrees Fahrenheit for more than two hours or for more than one hour when the air temperature is greater than 90 degrees. So like if you're outside at a family reunion or something like that. So two hours in your refrigerator, one hour if the air temperature is really warm. So why? This danger zone is where the microbes that cause food boredom, unless it's where they grow the best and where some of them produce toxins. So let me give you an example of why the toxins are so important. Let's say that you made a casserole and took it to a family reunion. So when you cooked it, you cooked it to the appropriate temperature. So like, let's say stuffing. So you see stuffing there, 165 degrees. So you cooked this food, this stuffing to 165 degrees because you know there were some concerns. And then you took it to this family reunion and it sits outside for four hours, right? I've had plenty of family reunions. I've seen the food sitting around. It sits outside for four hours. So during that time it's in the danger zone where microbes are growing and toxins are being produced. So the next thing, then you take it home for leftovers. The next day, you say, okay, I mean this sat out for a while. It's probably still good, but I better make sure I cook it appropriately. So you see reheated leftovers also 165 degrees. So you cook it using a meat thermometer or whatever. You cook it, you know that it's reached 165 and you eat it and you get sick. And that's because both times you cooked it, you cooked it to the appropriate temperature. So you did kill the bacteria. But the problem is while that food was sitting in the danger zone, toxins are being produced and 165 degrees, not hot enough to kill, to destroy those toxins. So basically you could be one of those million people a year, sorry my context coming up, that gets exposed to Staphylococcal and pterotoxin and you get sick. So that's why it's super important to keep food out of the danger zone because even if you do the right thing, so both days you cook the food correctly, but it was mishandled and left sitting out too long and that's when it became dangerous. All right. So keeping food cold, so you see their refrigeration temperature starts at 40 degrees and drops 0 degrees freezer temperatures. So you freeze your food and then thawing it. The key with thawing it is to make sure that food doesn't get in the danger zone while it's being thawed. So by far the safest way to thaw things that were frozen is in the refrigerator because that way it goes from freezer temperature, but it stays down here in the refrigerator temperature the whole time it's thawing. So that takes a long time though. So if you're going to hurry, some people will do leaving things sitting out, but see the problem with that is, you leave food sitting out at room temperature, part of the food is already thawed and in the danger zone while other parts are frozen. Same thing with, I remember the big old turkeys getting thrown in the kitchen sink. So you put them in water, well that's okay if the water's cold and you constantly change the water because you let it sit there all day where you're at work, the water warms up, you've got part of that turkey is still frozen, but other parts are in the danger zone. So that's why thawing in the refrigerator is the safest method. As far as a microwave for thawing goes, there's kind of some debate about this, but the issue with microwaves is that they heat so unevenly. So microwave radiation is used to excite water molecules and basically the food warms itself as the water gets excited and gives off heat, but it heats really unevenly. So if you thaw or cook food in the microwave, you will probably have some areas in the danger zone while other areas are not. Whether it's when you're thawing, maybe most of it is still cold, but there are pockets that have gotten too warm, or when you're cooking it, most of it reaches the appropriate temperature, but there are pockets that didn't. We all know this, right? You put a hot pocket in the microwave and you take one bite and it's got a nice chunk in it and the next bite feels like the surface of the sun, it's so hot. So the weakness with microwaves is how they heat unevenly. I would say if you're going to use the microwave for thawing, it's safest if you do it right before you use it and you immediately get it cooking, but you decide there. So just notice that this idea of the danger zone is to keep food below the danger zone before you cook it. Cook it to the appropriate temperature. So you see like well-done meats, 170 degrees. I don't do well done meats, but 165 for poultry, casseroles, and leftovers, 160 for ground meats, and then whole cuts of meat is 145. So why is ground beef a higher temperature than a steak, which is basically the same thing, right? Ground chuck, a chuck roast, or chuck eye steak can be ground up into ground beef. That's because when you have a whole piece of meat, like a steak, as long as the outside gets hot enough, you kill off all the microbes because that's where they are. They're on the outside of the flesh. Ground beef, the outside becomes the inside. So you have to cook ground meat much more thoroughly and that's why a steak is safe at 145 degrees, but ground beef isn't safe until you get to 160. All right, then you keep hot foods, keep it above, keep it at 140 or above, like maybe you're sitting at a buffet or something. The food has to stay above there, and even then it still shouldn't be out for more than a couple hours. That number has kind of dropped when I first started teaching. It was stuff was safe for four hours. Now it's down to two or less. And then, but then the key is to, so we talked about the last point, said, wait, where did it say it, to refrigerate it, right? Get it, get it refrigerated quickly. I was a couple slides ago, but so you cooked it to the appropriate temperature, you ate it, now you've got to get it down through the danger zone to the safe refrigerator temperature. So the key things here are, number one, let it sit for a little bit. You don't want to put things in the refrigerator when they're too hot and that's because they will warm up the refrigerator, right? You put a big container of something that's piping hot, it will actually warm up the food around it and could potentially cause problems. So let the temperature come down a bit. You can keep it out for two hours. I don't know about you, but we don't eat supper for two hours. So we prepare our food, prepare our plates, we eat our supper. By the time we're eating our supper, we will divvy up the leftovers and by then they should be cool enough to put away, if not wait a few extra minutes. So yeah, and then the other thing is to use small containers. So if you, we used to, when I was a kid, I remember we had big, we used big containers for leftovers and it's not a good idea. My parents did these things called smokers at the Legion where they would have oyster stew and chili feeds and these kind of things and they'd bring, I remember they'd go on a Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday morning I'd wake up and go to the refrigerator. There'd be a gallon ice cream container of chili, let's say, and it was still warm, right? It had been in there for hours and it was still warm. So the container size matters a tremendous amount. So you take them. So what we do with our leftovers is we put them into single-serve containers, right? That way you put six small containers in your refrigerator instead of one big one and not only will it cool faster and be safer, but it's already ready. You know, in the weekends we make a lot of food and we repair them and put them in containers. You grab the container and you go to work, right? So I think it's a win-win. So divvy up your leftovers before you put them away. Small containers do matter. Like one study found they were looking at a specific organism called bacillus subtilis, but they looked at a two-inch versus a four-inch container of rice. So with a two-inch container of rice within a couple of hours, that temperature in the refrigerator, that rice temperature had dropped below the danger zone. A four-inch container eight hours later was still in the danger zone. So we were talking about huge differences. So use thermometers. Cook your food at the appropriate temperature. Thought correctly. Cook it correctly. Don't leave it out too long and get it cooled as rapidly as possible on the way back down. That's how you keep your food safe. And then we talked about all the ways to prevent cross-contamination as well. All right. Safe handling of seafood. Analysts associated with undercooked or raw seafood. Things like listeria. There can be parasitic infections from seafood as well. Raw oysters can lead to lots of issues. Again, I'm not saying I've had plenty of raw oysters and nothing went wrong, but you're talking all about probabilities, right? So a raw oyster is going to be more likely to cause food burn on us than a cooked one. Water pollution can lead to serious issues. So if your seafood's been living in an area where you have the red tides, for example, then they can pass those toxins on to you. Other precautions has odors. So yeah, you should not be eating seafood that stinks. You might think seafood all stinks, but you know what I mean. That stinks like it's gone bad or turned. That'd be the case with anything really. All right. Food safety while traveling. So you've heard this idea of travelers' diarrhea. You have some studies show almost a 50% chance of having travelers' diarrhea depending on where you go and how long you're gone. So traveling to other countries or risk of contracting food burn on us is high, and that's because not only do they not have, like you see here, different cleanliness standards for food and water. So the food and water may not be as clean to begin with, but it's also contaminated with different microbes than you're used to. It's kind of like when I was a kid, we had well water, and if someone would come to our home and consume a bunch of well water they weren't used to, they might not feel good just because there sometimes can be some contamination there. But we were used to that. Just like my stepson goes to India, and there's a lot of diarrhea there, but the people that he's with are so used to what they're exposed to on a daily basis that if it was going to make them ill, it already did or it already would have. So he had to take precautions that people that lived there don't. So it's almost like whatever biological region you're in, your body kind of gets used to that, and if you stray outside of that, you're way more likely to get sick. All right. Every region's microbes are different, so I just mentioned that. No chance to develop immunity. So if you drink the water, if you go like my stepdaughter went to Costa Rica for her honeymoon, if they drank the water in Costa Rica, it's the first time they were exposed to that, which means they were probably microbes there their immune system hadn't seen, and that would cause some travelers diarrhea. People living there had been exposed with so much that they had developed a level of immunity that my step daughter and her husband couldn't have. Precautions while traveling, boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it. That's very true. Drink bottled water or boil the water. Things should be cooked. The hard part is you want to try all the food from the area, but if you're dealing with raw seafood or fruits and vegetables, you've got to take extra precautions because like it says, they're peeling them, peeling things, cooking things. A big one to remember is ice. People will know, oh, if I go to Mexico, I don't drink the water, but don't use ice cubes, which is frozen water, right? So put some ice in your beer or these types of things. So you are generally better off taking these precautions. Bottled water, bottles of drinks, those kinds of things. Boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it. I like that. All right, advances in food safety. So what are some of the ways that we keep our food safer now than ever before? Things like irradiation. So unless you always buy organic spices, for example, your spices have been irradiated. So irradiation sterilizes some foods, controls insects, extends shelf life, and delays ripening of some fruit. Irradiation is used in the European Union a lot more in the United States and everything seems to be good there. So that's one example. Also your packaging can be irradiated or sterilized. They can use hydrogen peroxide steams or irradiation. So the packaging your food goes into has probably been sterilized as well, so which to reduce contamination. Ultra high temperature treatments. So things like, it used to be, pasteurization was like a stove top pasteurization that took 30 minutes. Now there's ultra high temperature, ultra low time pasteurization. So now you can get things that have been ultra pasteurized. So that's a good thing. You can use pressure. There's all sorts of control methods that can be used nowadays. Approved for use by numerous health agencies worldwide. So overall it is considered that things like irradiation and ultra high temperature that they have been deemed safe. Consumers do have concern about radiation though, and that's totally fine. And one of the reasons to buy organic, because things that are organic can't be irradiated. So that's up to you. If you see what's called the radura, it looks like a green flower. That can be a symbol on a label that something's been irradiated and you often will hear the term electronic pasteurization. So if you see those things, it means that your food's been irradiated. So yeah, personally I think that if there is any risk, it's the reward of decreasing food-borne illnesses is greater. But not saying I go out of my way to look for things that are irradiated, but so far it seems like it's okay. All right, so those are some things you can do. I mentioned you can use really high pressure as well. There's lots of ways to ultra high pressure. That's called pascalization after pascal, rather than pasteurization. I've seen that used like with your pre-cooked meat. You can go to the store and you can buy the chunks of chicken that have already been cooked that you just toss on a salad. Sometimes they use high pressure for those sometimes. Juices as well. I think that fruit juices would be an example of where you might see that happen. So lots and lots of ways. We have ways to keep our food safe that our ancestors certainly never did. Prior to refrigeration, fermentation was basically the only food preservation method that we had. All right, nutritional adequacy of foods and diets, nutrient information and losses. So we're talking about like the losses of nutrients. So this is kind of a new term. We talk about whole foods versus processed foods, but now we have this idea of ultra processed foods. So it appeals to consumer demands for convenience and flavor. So when you process foods, you do extend their shelf life. A lot of times they're already prepared. If you buy food that's in a box or a bag and you throw it in the microwave and it's ready in a couple of minutes, that food's been processed. Really, I like the term ultra processed because cooking meat is processing it. Turning cabbage in a sauerkraut is processing it. Basically, all food has been processed to some extent. Ultra processed is when it's been basically manufactured. So they usually, they taste pretty good, relatively inexpensive, easy to make, like you see their cost, convenience, flavor. They have long shelf lives. That's the plus side. The downside though is that they usually, they lose a lot of nutrition. I've shown you this in earlier chapters, how processed foods generally have way less potassium and way less magnesium and way more sodium, for example, than their whole food counterparts. And then you've got food additives, which we'll cover as well. So nutrition labeling, you see the FDA is responsible for most food labels. The USDA, they're responsible for labeling when it comes to things like meats. My plate, we've talked about that. That comes from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. So learning to store and cook, this would be, again, if you're going to rely on more whole foods, that they can't just be stored easily. And my life's just flipped off, I think. Or else did I blink along? I don't know what's happened there, sorry. But if you're consuming whole foods, then yeah, you have to do, you know, we do a lot of food prep on the weekends and things like that. You've got to learn how to cook your food and store your food. But generally it is more nutrient dense. All right. Pause this and see if you can answer these questions. Advances in food production mean many foods are ultra processed, appealing to consumers' demands for convenience and flavor. The FDA develops nutrition labeling regulations. The USDA helps consumers with healthy eating patterns. My plate helps put the guidelines into practice. All right. Learning how to store and cook vegetables helps reduce nutrient losses. So there, you know, there's, we can talk about that some more, but basically the longer produce has been stored, the more nutrients it's going to lose, especially like vitamins and minerals and stuff, vitamins especially. So, you know, having your own garden is great because then you can, you can cut, we literally cut lettuce off the plant and eat it immediately. So there's no nutrient losses there. So the longer that produce has been off the vine or whatever, if it's been, you know, if it's traveled 3,000 miles to get to you and it's been on boats and trucks and set in the store for a week, then it's going to be some nutrient losses. So the fresher the better. And then with cooking methods, you know, some methods are, you know, lightly sauteing something will leave more nutrients than other cooking methods, for example. The nutrient content in frozen vegetables is similar compared to fresh. I should kind of like that. So that, so we always think of fresh as best, but if food's going to be sitting around for a long time, when you freeze it, there are some nutrient losses that come with the freezing process. But then it stabilizes. Whereas, so if you're like, Hey, if I should I buy fresh broccoli and let it sit for a week and eat it, or should I buy frozen broccoli and let it sit in the freezer for a week and eat it, you can make an argument that after that week, the frozen broccoli is better. So I'm not a snob when it comes to produce. I think frozen vegetables, they're priced good and they usually have a lot of nutritional value as well. Nothing wrong with fresh. I love the garden in the farmer's market and go into the store for fresh produce, but I don't demonize frozen vegetables at all. Now canned vegetables, I would say frozen is always better than canned and fresh is probably always better than canned. There are some nutrient losses, but then you've got the high sodium content, et cetera. And then cans, if you're looking at exposure, like we're talking about in this chapter, most cans are aligned. They have plastic liners inside of them that are aligned with BPA, which is a compound that people probably don't want exposed to more than they need to. Microwaving and steaming causes decreased nutrient losses compared with boiling or pressure cooking. So I completely agree with that. Steaming is really nice too. I like to steam vegetables and then I will use the water that I use to steam the vegetables. You can pour that into soups and stews or you can just drink it because whatever nutrients were leached into the water, you can get by drinking that water. So I can be weird sometimes, but I absolutely will drink the water. Once it's cooled down, of course, I'll drink the water or throw it in a soup or stew that I've used to steam vegetables. And microwaving is a pretty good way to maintain most nutritional value of your produce. Environmental contaminants. The harmfulness of environmental contaminants depends on its persistence, things that linger in the body. So are things biodegradable or not? So what is the half-life of a compound? If there's something in the environment but it breaks down really easily, then you don't have to worry about it as much, but there are some things that don't break down at all and they will linger in your body or the environment for, well, not your body, but for thousands of years. And then this idea of bioaccumulation, I'll show you that on the next slide. I think it's the next slide of what bioaccumulation means, but basically contaminants are going to get, you're going to get higher and higher amounts of contaminants the higher you are up on a food chain. So if you think about it, well, actually, let me see it this slide. I'll show it. Yeah, I'll show it when we get here. So you see little things, medium-sized things, big things. So I'll explain the idea of bioaccumulation on the next slide. Examples of contamination. So you have mercury like methylmercury. There are different types of mercury and methylmercury is the toxic one. There's ethylmercury and stuff, but methylmercury. Here was an example in 1953, super high levels in Minamata, Japan, but mercury is then basically all seafood. The question is how to minimize the amount you're exposed to. PCBs and PBBs. These are like flame retardants and things like that. So they've been found there everywhere. They're in your body. I can guarantee that. Michigan, 1973, Taiwan, 1979. Interactive effects of mercury and PCBs. So they both damage brain function. I've mentioned this is probably the third video now, and if you're in my class, I'll share the video, but I go to YouTube and type in little things matter. There's a video I just love. I'm going to hate it, but I love it. How well they did from an organization in Canada that talks about PCBs and mercury and lead are all talked about there. And now each of them, as they accumulate in our body, they impact IQ, they impact learning, development, et cetera. And they do have, I guess you'd say, like it says, interactive and more of like a synergistic effect. So if you're exposed to lead, you'll see, you look at a population of people that are all exposed to lead, you'll see the IQ drops some. If they're exposed to PCBs on top of that, IQ drops further. If they're exposed to mercury, IQ drops further. So it's not like they all have the same effects. So getting exposed to three of them is no worse than getting exposed to one. They have an additive effect on top of each other. And then of course, if you're malnourished on top of that, it makes it even worse. All right. So this idea of bioaccumulation, I like to call it biological magnification. So you'll see here that the higher up on a food chain an organism is, the more toxic chemicals it's being exposed to. So you've got here, so let's read them and go through it. Plants and plankton at the bottom of the food chain become contaminated with toxic chemicals like mercury, which is these little red dots. But each individual organism doesn't have a lot of mercury in them. But then you have the small fish that eat these little, so you have several tons of producer organisms like plant and animal plankton. But then you have small fish that are going to eat those and notice that they're going to eat hundreds or thousands and thousands of these. So they're going to acquire all those toxins that they consumed. So basically each level up, you've got the toxins that you eat plus the toxins that they ate and the toxins that they ate, etc. That's the idea of biological magnification or bioaccumulation. So here at level two, contaminants become more concentrated in small fish that eat the plants and plankton because they're all being exposed to it from the water. It's where it's coming from. So everyone in this system is being exposed to the water, but they're also the higher you go, the more they're being exposed to it from the food they eat. So at level two, a few tons of plankton eating fish such as bluegill, perch, steam, stream trout, and smelt, then you go to number three. Contaminants become further concentrated in larger fish that eat the small fish from the lower part of the food chain. So at level three, you have 100 pounds of fish eating fish such as lake trout, walleye, and bass, then number four. If none of the chemicals are lost along the way, which something like mercury or PCBs or they won't break down, people ultimately receive all of the toxic chemicals that were present in the original plants and plankton. So you get the toxins you ate plus the toxins they ate that they ate that they ate, and that's how that's why you get the accumulation at the top. So for example, and you'll see this more in later slides, if you're going to eat like a little anchovy, right? It's a small fish hasn't lived very long an anchovy is not going to have a lot of mercury in it. But if you ate something like a swordfish or shark, they're going to have eaten, eaten large fish that ate medium size fish that ate small fish that ate those anchovies, right? So they're going to be much higher levels of these types of toxins. So I'd recommend eating a lot more sardines than I would shark, for example. All right. Okay, give me just a second here. Okay, sorry about that. So now we're talking about arsenic, which is another contaminant that can be found. So we mentioned mercury and PCBs and how they how they move through the aquatic ecosystems, especially arsenic is a naturally occurring in the water, air, and soil so it can be everywhere. Arsenic-based pesticides were commonly used in the United States until 1970. So this is something that arsenic-based compounds have been around forever, that one of the first antimicrobial drugs ever ever produced was called salversam, which was an arsenic-based compound. It's been used like you see here as pesticides. So organic foods may still contain arsenic just because it's everywhere. Apple juice and rice are routinely tested because they're the ones that have been found to have the highest levels. I think your polished rice especially. The FDA is confident that low levels are safe and the FDA will take action if there's 10 parts per billion or greater is found. So the reality is you are going to be exposed to some of these things. I mean, even if you're eating a super, super healthy diet. Consumer guidelines. FDA regulates the presence of contaminants in food. So part of it is you have to trust that the food that's reached your fork has been properly tested and has minimal contamination, not none. Mercury poisoning, so from fish and other seafood, fish recommendations, other toxins found in fish. So fish are absolutely worth eating, just so you know. When you're consuming so fish, so my general recommendations are you eat the smaller ones. Like I said, I've never had swordfish or shark and never plan on it. I like wild caught salmon for example. So like a wild caught sockeye salmon will be a really good example of a fish that has a lower mercury level. So they're really healthy fats, etc. So I like wild caught over farmed rays just because farmed raised fish usually are exposed to more contaminants in the area and from their food. So there's going to be a larger bio accumulation there. So I do generally recommend wild caught over farmed fresh or farmed raised when possible. Smaller fish, so to me a sardine would be the perfect thing to eat. A tin of sardines has 800 milligrams of the healthy omega-3 fats, your fish oils, small fish, short life, etc. So just if you do consume a lot of fish, I would look at the different websites and try to find ways to, Environmental Working Group has a section where you can look into that and make sure you're consuming the smartest fish possible. Now, so if you consume fish on a regular basis, you are going to have more PCBs in your diet for example and you're going to have more mercury in your diet. So you could look at that as a strike against it, but people that consume fish basically you will have a slightly, slightly, slightly increased risk of let's say cancer because you're being exposed to these PCBs, but you will have a very significant decreased risk in heart disease because of the healthy fats, etc. So I've never seen a study that is recommended that you don't consume fish on a regular basis because there is a little bit of a con, but the pros far outweigh it. So I can see there are potential harm versus benefits from nutrients. So I would, I err on the side of saying that yes, you should be smart about the fish you consume and consume the fish that has the most nutrients with the least mercury and PCBs for example. So like a wild caught sockeye salmon being a good one or a wild caught sardine. So eat the right fish in the right amounts and to me the benefits outweigh the risks for sure. All right, discussion question one. Discuss mercury levels and seafood and why it's important to minimize your consumption of mercury. So that mean mercury is extremely neurotoxic. Mercury damages the developing brain. Pregnant women, lactating women and children are the most vulnerable to mercury toxicity, so that there will be times when you'd want to be smarter about your consumption. Let's say like Sotuna, you know the government recommends you know puts limits on how much tuna maybe you should consume and if you're pregnant that number goes down and if you're a baby or you're a kid that number goes down. So at-risk populations but they never recommend none. It's just they decrease the safe allowable amount. Small younger fish tend to have lower mercury levels like the anchovies or sardines I mentioned. Large fish have the highest concentration of mercury due to bioaccumulation. Tile fish, swordfish, king mackerel and shark tend to have the highest mercury level. So I mentioned some of those. Natural toxins found in food. Any substance can be toxic when consumed in excess including water, right? Water can kill you. Chemical structure and quantity consumed different types of natural toxins we'll talk about. So goitrogens they because of their impact on iodine absorption etc. Goitrogens can have an impact on the thyroid gland. So I mean now there's lots and lots of really healthy foods that have goitrogens in them like like broccoli and stuff. So I wouldn't recommend not consuming them but I wouldn't recommend like there was a case report of a lady who developed who basically died but she developed a severe thyroid problem because she was consuming five pounds of raw cabbage a day. So I wouldn't I wouldn't overdo it and if I had hypothyroidism I would be even smarter about looking for foods that have goitrogens and minimizing them but again I think the benefits generally tend out way the risks as long as you're consuming an appropriate amount. Cyanogens will cover them coming up and then solanine I mentioned earlier that's the reason that you can't eat raw potatoes but again last I checked you have to eat 20 pounds of raw potatoes to get to reach a toxic level but still follow those kind of recommendations. All right let's look at where we would find these. So match these pause for a second if you need to. So lima beans and fruit seeds like the apricot pit have cyanogens in them we'll go through them by type and then you notice the other one says cyanogens. Lay trial seed, false the report is it can't secure also cyanogens I've seen that before. Goitrogens, cabbage, bok choy, turnips, mustard greens, kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli so they're all goitrogens but I'd recommend you eat all of them. They're they're nutrient dense they're cruciferous most of them like yeah absolutely those are good for you but not massive amounts if you have underlying thyroid problems. Bottom one cooking deactivates enzymes that inhibit iodine uptake that's the goitrogens that's why I recommend cooking them right so I said five pounds of raw cabbage a day is what caused that serious problem in that woman at least she's in Russia so if you're concerned about goitrogens you should definitely be cooking these things rather than eating them raw. I would say almost everyone on the list I would cook before I eat it probably not kale but so if you're worried about it and you cook those foods and then solanine is an narcotic-like substance found in potato sprouts and green color under the skin so this but but again you should cook your potatoes. Alright pesticides. Jill my wife works in oncology and we and we we are nervous about this right there there you know there's a beyondcancer.org I believe is a website that we we go to that links to different studies that that link pesticide exposure to to different types of cancer so she's involved in a group that's a kind of a task force that's been looking into that because you do seem to see certain types of cancer seem to be more common in farming communities like the area that we live so I don't I don't I don't know what to do about it you know you again you can try to limit your pesticide exposure by maybe not using things on your own lawn and buying organic but we just live in a world coded with it like our you know we have an organic garden in our backyard but on the other side of the fence there is a field right and it's literally a field right so it's probably soybeans this year you know soybeans and corn I'm sure we're exposed to quite a bit from from that I don't know what to do about it all right ensure ensure pesticides ensure crops are viable but leave residues in the environment so that the upside of pesticides is they control the populations of of organisms that are going to destroy our crops so they improve yields keep people from starving to death and you know keep food costs down so there's a lot a lot of value there hazards of pesticides I like this point of a vulnerable population so if you are if you have other underlying health problems just like seemingly everything else if you have underlying health problems then I think the exposure risk is is harder on you than a normal I don't want to say normal a typical person that can maybe detoxify pesticides better than you can so if you're going to be exposed to these things the key is to be healthy and have the nutrients and everything you need to properly detoxify and deal with them which means you know not carrying around too much fat etc etc regulation of pesticides both the EPA or the environmental protection agency and the FDA food and drug administration they both have tolerance regulations just understanding that pesticides are with us but you have to make sure you stay under these threshold limits pesticides from other countries they're obviously different different groups are overseeing that the FAO and the world health organization all right monitoring pesticides the FDA collects and analyzes domestic and imported foods seizes or destroys samples that are in violation which is which is a good thing individual state regulations can differ obviously like California for example has more stringent regulations than than here in South Dakota food in the field food on the plate these things are all all being assessed and monitored the market basket survey this is just again monitoring these kind of pesticides and if you want to minimize your exposure then then go organic especially with that with the what I what we talked earlier from the environmental working group they're they're I forgot the word the dirty dozen sorry I was gonna say daily doesn't then it gets from a TV show or something the dirty dozen where you can remove 80% of your pesticide exposure from your food by buying those 12 foods organic consumer concerns FDA is a monitoring agency that sets standards checks to adequately assess food safety and acts promptly when problems arise minimizing risks factors for ingesting pesticides so we'll look at again buying organic rinsing foods these types of things you know you can peeling things these are always to minimize your exposure pesticide alternatives crop rotation organisms that destroy pests like they're looking at you know like the bt that's that stands for bacillus thuringiensis but the bt corn bt cotton etc planting of non-food crops that would that would also function as pesticides so there are pros and cons to all these things pesticides work really well but if you can do these other things and you can remove the burden of pests without the chemicals then I'm all for that all right minimizing risks when shopping for foods select fruits and vegetables do not have holes select a variety of foods to minimize exposure to anyone pesticide consider buying certified organic foods when shopping for produce most likely be contaminated that's the dirty dozen I mentioned earlier discussion question two describe how organically grown crops are different compared to other crops what's the difference in nutrition between the two and what are the code stickers on produce mean so you can think about that for a moment before you move on organic crops are grown and processed according to the USDA regulations meet poultry eggs and dairy must meet the definition of grazing conditions feed hormones and antibiotics so a lot of times like we buy food from a chemical free farm they're not certified organic though right they haven't done the paperwork they said there was you know 400 pages of paperwork and expensive and all that so some things are going to be chemical free even though they're not certified organic but to be certified organic you have to meet these you have to meet these recommendations like for a food to say it's organic I believe that like has to be 95% organic and if the food is like 70% organic then you can talk about it can talk about I think three ingredients on the front that are organic so there are different rules and regulations there but yeah so to be organic you've got you can't radiate it you can't use antibiotics in most situations the no bovine recombinant you know growth hormone etc nutritional differences between conventional organic foods are small you know I would I would generally say that organics are going to err on being slightly more nutrient dense but I mentioned earlier that's not the main reason because to choose organic might be the main reason to garden where you can control your own soil and make things as nutritious as possible but the main thing with organic would be the you know that hasn't been radiated and pesticide free etc pesticide residue on conventionally grown foods is higher than organic foods organic foods can't they can't spray pesticides on them but they still get exposed from neighboring farms etc the most contaminated foods pose negligible health risks to consumers so it's up to you where you do that information codes on produce stickers that are organic have five digits genetically modified codes start with the number eight and also have five digits conventional produce has forced you can read the code on a little sticker on your banana and you can tell if it's um conventional or organic and you can also tell if it's been genetically modified food additives so this is obviously lots of things here we're just going to talk about the topic at broad regulations governing food additives so the benefits are food safety enhanced nutrient quality preservatives so they're in spoilage additive additives may be intentional or indirect fda regulation they have to be effective at their job detectable and measurable in the final food product if they are or not and if they're safe so the grass list grass stands for generally recognized as safe some items are exempt from fda approval generally so like generally recognized as safe so things like um even like genetically modified foods like genetically modified corn they say is so similar to regular corn that they just they it earned grass status is generally recognized as safe so some examples are salt sugar caffeine and some spices and that that list is constantly going to be evolving and changing the delaney clause basically says that if if if an ingredient in a food has been shown to cause cancer then then you know we have to deal with that so it's called the delaney clause addresses carcinogens or cancer causing substances in foods and drugs um intense debates over the limitations again where you know where do we draw the line we have to allow the line somewhere our food can't be sterile our food can't be completely risk free uh you know basically like a one in a million cancer risk is has to be considered safe and that's basically where where they stand right um negligible risk standard used instead of zero risk policy that's what i mean when i say like a one in a million it's like a one in a million risk is generally considered acceptable of i guess a two in a million risk would not be all right the margin of safety i think i have a little chart coming up here but um um risks must be determined by the research allowance and food a hundred times below unsafe level so if you have a food additive or a compound and you know it's dangerous here at this level you you you you you you remove there's a safety factor kind of a fudge factor there so if the if the if the level in a food is a hundred times below what we know to be the unsafe level then that's going to be considered safe that's that margin of safety um FDA regulations against additive use that disguises faulty products like it used to be you know they would add you could add colors and stuff to like milk some at some at one point milk was so gross they were like adding chalk and things to it just to make it look like milk um there was a time in the past where margarine had to be colored like pink or different colors because um people were being confused by it and they were being sold margarine that was being called butter you know things like that so you can't deceive the customer um you can't use it to disguise a faulty products it can't significantly destroy nutrients so these additives should preserve nutrients not destroy them and then if there is an economical sound process alternative then then you have to use that instead so it's basically when we have to use an additive it's okay as long as it's not disguising a faulty product deceiving the customer destroying nutrients and there's no other alternative all right so what are some intentional food additives first of all the ways in which food goes bad it loses its flavor and attractiveness so so compounds that um keep keep a food's flavor keep its color etc these are going to be used uh here's some some examples are antimicrobial agents so food is contaminated with microbes and there's risk there so these compounds um decrease that risk salt and sugar so they that so salt when you you know salted fish and adding adding salt and sugar to canned goods salt and sugar create a hypertonic environment and it pulls the liquid out of pathogens or out of bacteria microbes sorry so like you have a bacteria it's in that can of peas it's still there but you pull the liquid out of it it's called plasma lysis and it shuts off its metabolism so it preserve so it doesn't kill that bacteria but it can't it won't be growing and reproducing while it's in that can so salt and sugar are great examples you see like I said add salt to your peas add sugar to your fruit etc nitrites nitrites are used primarily you think like nitrites you think of bacon and cured meats because those cured meats can have um clostridium botulinum spores in them and the nitrites what their job is to do is to keep those spores from germinating it also helps with the color so it's um so the pros of nitrites is reduced risk of botulism and food looks better the cons are just the nitrites so this is one of the reasons that cured meats um are are put in a different category in other meats when it comes to a disease risk especially cancer risk because these these nitrites can become these nitrogen based like reactive nitrogen species like called nitrosamines that in your gut so cure you know I would never argue that um that cured meats are as good for you as other kinds of meats and that not at all and part of it is because of these and you can see you've got you can go to the store and you get your nitrate free breakings or those kind of things um they usually have celery salt or different things added to them that have a ton of these nitrites to begin with so I'm not sure if that's making a big difference so yeah I would not base your diet around cured meats that need these but that's why they're there then bacteriophages I love these so phages or bacteriophages the word bacteriophage means bacteria eater these are viruses that infect and destroy bacteria so we are now um using viruses that hunt down bacteria in our food so I think I think this is going to become more and more common not only in in our food but also treating human disease uh I think in 2017 was the first time in a generation where there was actually a phage therapy center in the US so I'm really excited about that we talk about these a lot in microbiology so they imagine you get sick with a drug resistant infection a bacterial infection and the doctor says okay you have an infection our treatment plan is going to begin to infect you with the virus but the virus doesn't care about you the virus will hunt down and kill that bacteria that's a bacteria phages do it's called phage therapy but in food uh the first time I saw this being used was bacteria phages were being used in deli meats because um deli meats can have listeria an organism that can can lead to death even uh for most people it's completely manageable but if you are like this is why pregnant women are supposed to avoid deli meats because of listeria contamination so they're using um bacteriophages for listeria and then I believe E. coli as well so you've got um so maybe there was some fecal contamination in your food but the phages were destroying the E. coli before you get sick so E. coli and listeria are the two first places I've seen uh bacteriophages being used all right antioxidants and other food additives designed to you know for flavor color etc um exposure so long list here just again we're just going to go through these but exposure to oxygen so um vitamin c and e are going to be and then sulfites and bha and bht these are going to function as antioxidants are they're going to preserve color preserve flavor with foods that are exposed to oxygen oxygen oxidizes things right cut cut an apple open and watch it turn brown that's what oxygen does to food um look at the meat I used to work in a meat counter uh the you know the meat the meat gets darker when it sits out in the air so oxygen can can quote unquote damage our food these are all things that minimize that um colors you have a lot of plant derived ones like uh what's a big one um I mean some come from you can there's some from beetle shells and plants and seaweeds and allergies all sorts of cool ones but I was just tipping my tongue from getting old but um but they're they're plant derived colors artificial colors uh minimal remain on the approved list just because they found the ones that are safe and we kind of stick with those but um ah it's going to drive me nuts but I can't remember it but there's a it's a seaweed extract it was in a food I eat just a couple weeks ago cannot remember sorry but there are artificial colors can be used and plant derived ones as well some artificial colors and flavors and stuff have been linked to things like hyperactivity so if you if you or someone you love struggles with that you may want to consider avoiding a lot of these artificial colors and flavors nutrients can be added to food all the time you know that's this idea of enriched versus fortified when you add a nutrient back to a food that was lost during process processing it's been enriched when you add a nutrient that was never there it's been fortified right so our salt is fortified with iodine um our grain products are fortified with folate because they're you put them there in levels that didn't exist before flavors you have monosodium glutamate or msg so some people appear to be sensitive to this but others don't I don't I think it's probably been a little overblown uh but um but if you're sensitive to it then I would avoid it there's plenty of msg fruit free foods out there same thing with the sugar alternatives so aspartame saccharin and it says acceptable daily intake so these have been well studied do I think they're the best thing on the planet no um I believe that um the the studies that show that they can become toxic you there because of that that safety factor we talked about earlier you would need to be consuming 250 cans of these a day now drinking a six pack every day for 20 years could that have some risk it could I don't know but um but they're generally the safety profile is is it's acceptable and to me it's it's it's all about the fact that's a sugar alternative so that you have to if someone asks me is Diet Coke safe I would say a couple things number one like should you drink you should drink water but but but if you're going to drink a coke or a Diet Coke what you're basically asking me is let's say I have a 20 ounce bottle bottle of each is a tiny bit of Nutrisweet dangerous more dangerous than 65 grams of sugar and I would say no right so I think that if you're and studies show this studies show that getting people to drink from drinking regular soda to diet soda helps them lose weight helps them control their and maintain their weight loss like um some studies show that getting people to drink diet soda helps them lose weight in a in a dear to their weight loss program better than getting them to drink water so I'm not saying it's safer for even water but I think the the research over the last few years has shown that these can absolutely loosely be part of a diet especially if you need to cut your calories it's a phenomenal place to do so you can just if you can whack out tens of grams of sugar and hundreds of grams of calories a day by making this switch then it's probably worth it now once you've lost the weight and if you want to take your health a step further if you would switch to from this to to drinking tea or water or something I would I would absolutely support that but I would say that um I don't like seeing these demonized there are lots of weight loss gurus and fitness people that demonize these I would say anything that helps you um lose weight because having extra body fat we know is dangerous having aspartame maybe is dangerous I know personally I I attribute um diet sodas to being really helping me with my adherence to my diet my diet is more sustainable when I have them than when I don't because if I'm craving something sweet I'll have a sugar-free gum which has asked some of these things in it right or I'll have a diet soda I like uh Mr. Pib zero is my favorite but um I'll have that and it'll take the edge off and it so it kept me from from falling off on my diet so I'm I'm I'm becoming more and more supportive of these because of what they do and because of what the alternatives are but I would I would always recommend you drink water all right so then there's also additives that that improve texture instability these would be things like lessethin or emulsifiers right they keep foods from getting um too wet uh which can cause spoilage etc etc lots of things go in our food all right um discuss reasons why nutrient additives are used in foods and give examples of additives and what they do to the food which types of additives are commonly found in greens okay correcting deficiencies and restoring nutrient levels after processing are two reasons for nutrient additives those would be again restoring nutrient levels after processing that would be an enriched food um correcting deficiencies would be a fortified food where you at where you add food just to make sure that the person eating it gets it in their diet emulsifiers that i might just mention these help stabilize stabilize mayonnaise or control crystallization in syrups gums thicken foods and help form gels like um auger is one that's used as a thickening agent we use it in the microbiology lab but it's also in your ice creams and stuff too yeast provides leavening bicarbonates and acids control acidity so all good ones emulsifiers though because they uh the they have an effect on lipids they do impact the gut in a way that um has been shown to disrupt the microbiome i'm not saying i avoid them but um your microbiome and gut health would probably be better without emulsifiers than with them all right nutrients can act as antioxidants like vitamins e and c or be used for color like beta carotene so we talked about how we have to stabilize foods that are exposed to oxygen using antioxidants manufacturers sometimes add nutrients to four to five foods the five nutrients added to grains are thiamine riboflavin niacin folate those are all b vitamins and iron which is not a b vitamin it's mineral okay indirect food additives here we have acrylamide this is going to be formed during cooking so acrylamide maybe you've heard of this one forms during high temperature cooking of carbohydrate rich foods containing sugar and the amino acid asparagine uh probable carcinogen quantities and foods are low but you see where you get them uh so fried fried carbs uh or high temperature carbs that also have some protein in them so french fries potato chips cereals and cookies have acrylamide food packaging paper plastic coatings and sealants i mentioned earlier that the plastic coating inside of a uh can like a can um a can of soup or chef boyardy or something usually has bpa unless you specifically see that they they advertise a bpa free lining you have to expect that it's bpa so you might be avoiding plastic bottles because of because of bpa but you forget that that they're you're going to find it inside your canned goods as well same thing with like a can right you switch from a uh plastic bottle of soda to a can of soda i believe that the can of soda would have the bpa lining as well um so active packaging helps cook the food uh the packaging components migrate into the food so you think about like you know if you're um if you have a saran wrap over a food that's being cooked it's touching the food there will be some leaching there um passive packaging simply holds the food as it cooks material still migrated high temperatures use only plastic wraps labeled as microwave safe so you want to make sure if you're going to be heating things up i generally don't recommend heating plastic because um um there are there are compounds that are in plastic that leach into your food so if you take like a bottle of water and you leave it in your car for a week and then drink it there will be more thailates and bpa's and those kind of things in it so um i generally recommend we use glass i we use glass containers that have plastic lids but we don't put the plastic lids in the microwave so i recommend heating up glass uh glass and wood those kind of things over plastic so we use plastic for storage in the refrigerator but if we're going to heat things up they they move into a glass container or onto a plate just you know one one of those things i don't know how big of a deal it is but 20 years from now if we find out that it's a big deal then hey i saved my life i saved my son 20 years of being exposed to these chemicals if we're wrong oh i spent a few extra seconds moving foods out of plastic containers before i heated it up it's you know it's called the precautionary principle i err on the side of caution especially when we're talking about the health of my children so i might you know the downside is i might spend a little bit more time and money on these types of things the upside is i may i may minimize their exposure something that we find out was a bigger deal than we thought all right i've mentioned bpa before and then just obviously recycling codes that just tell you they tell you what like if you look at a plastic um container you get the little triangle arrows and the number inside of it tells you what kind of compounds are in it okay decaffeinated coffee hormones and antibiotics just throwing a lot of things together here so there is you use a compound called methylene chloride to decaffeinate coffee so some people don't agree with that and don't reckon don't recommend decaffeinated coffee for that reason so again benefits risks i don't know if there's any risk but if you want to consume coffee but need to minimize caffeine consumption then maybe the benefit outweighs the risk i just don't think decaffeinated coffee tastes good okay hormones um incidental additive uses intentional sometimes what remains in the product is not intentional so this would be uh an example there would be bgh which is bovine growth hormone sorry so bovine growth hormone was given to cows to increase their size increase milk production etc but then some of that was getting into the into the food products so uh it needs to be within the range of what naturally occurs in products now i don't know if it's bad but because of how it looks and because consumers do have some power you will see that dairy products um say free of recombinant bovine growth hormone and honestly i think that my personal opinion is because walmart stopped selling it i think walmart has more power than the federal government sometimes when it comes to foods um the government the federal government did not say that bovine growth hormone was bad walmart said we won't sell dairy products that have recombinant bovine growth hormone and voila the world changed so that's just evidence that you have more power than you think because you vote with your wallet you make companies like walmart and mcdonald's think about these things and they're such a huge part of the food system that they have power right so it's interesting don't think you know that that is really where where your power comes from in these kind of issues you vote with your wallet antibiotics um again incidental additive uses intentional or remains in their products not intentional so again giving antibiotics to an animal um causing that to remain in its remain in the food supply um can cause resistance you know this is something to cover way more microbiology but it doesn't matter where resistance occurs right so like for example there's a type of organism that is colostin resistant colostin's a very important antibiotic the resistance developed on pig farms in china and now it's in humans in the united states doesn't matter there's no such thing as a regional issue when it comes to microbes right evolution doesn't care where it happened so um antibiotics in our food supply are a big deal we talk about a lot in this class separate from this video but um antibiotics in the food supply matter because antibiotic resistance develops anywhere that it becomes a problem everywhere all right FDA requirements for metabolism and excretion just to make sure you're not consuming a bunch of antibiotics but the resistance can occur even if you're not exposed to the antibiotics so this is something that we have to be smarter about in my opinion all right consumer concerns about water excuse me sources of drinking water you have surface water is readily contaminated but the contamination is reversible because of cleansing methods like how we disinfect in our water or retreat our water ground water there's lower rates of contamination but it's more permanent if a well has been contaminated basically you have to dig a deeper well dig a new well etc water systems and regulations so we have public water systems like your municipalities they disinfect usually using chlorine to kill bacteria and the environment protection regulation environment protection agency regulates it so real quickly water treatment involves levels of filtration and then and then um some sort of disinfection so generally you have these settling tanks where large things are settled out of the water so it's almost like a filter but only large things get removed then you have what's called a flocculent this chemical that's added that takes medium sized things and causes them to clump together which makes them large so they now settle out so now you've gotten rid of large things and medium sized things then you use filters which are layers of usually like rocks and sand and charcoal charcoal and stuff so you have these filters and that filters out the small things so like your your large your small or medium and your small particulates have been removed now most of them then a little bit is left behind they're going to be the virus and some bacteria they're disinfected using usually chlorine but you can they can use ozone ozone is being used in more than five percent of municipalities now in the United States so usually both chlorine uh ozone if you've used all the chlorine you can but the water still isn't clean enough you can use chloramines which is a combination of chlorine and ammonia usually if you live in a place that does that they send you letters and they warn you not to use your um water for fish tanks so you do all that then your water should be clean then you check your municipality constantly is checking your water and look and look at the safety reports that they send you um water characteristics you have hard versus soft water so if you have a water softener you use that soft they use that salt to soften the water it's just um you use less soap it's better on your clothes better on your skin so there that's i like soft water i prefer it anyways home water treatments you can do all sorts of different things here you have activated carbon filters so you can filter your water um ozoneation i mentioned how ozone kills microbes reverse osmosis that's what we have we have a reverse osmosis system that usually is like it's like culligan um and that removes basically everything from water and then you can also distill your water i used to have one of those when i was a single man and living in charkey so there's lots of ways for you to treat your water uh there are you can put like chlorine filters on your like on your shower heads to remove the chlorine from your water before you bathe with it if you want there's lots of things you can do those are some examples of keeping your water safe so that's how you can control the water coming into your house but i with the average american consumes about 35 gallons of bottled water a year a day i was gonna say a day a year so you gotta know you gotta know about this as well um so fda regulations say that bottled water is either safer nor healthier than tap water so some bottled water has been you know undergone reverse osmosis in some places it's just taken out of the same bodies of water that you're that the area water would be um some blind taste studies of taste uh test studies have shown that people can't tell the difference really we have bottled water generally it's cold people like that they they perceive it as better but it doesn't have to be and then if you have with bottled water you got the issue of the plastic container it was into so if you're worried about that water quality varies so you know look into the water that you're drinking making sure it's safe make sure the containers it's in is safe choose choose your brands wisely and know the source of your water as well all right that's why your label requirements must identify the source and then how it's handled this is something i think about a lot like with the um i was i was at a gas station one time and this van pulls up you know gets all these big containers of water out super super hot right so like i i'm i'm a big fan of not heating up plastic like i mentioned before so if i if i bought a case of bottled water i would want it to be cool when i bought it i would bring it home and keep it cool i wouldn't keep it in the garage right these kind of things but i think about that right it was cool at some point but then it's stared stored in some hot warehouse and carried in some hot van and it's and then when you buy it it might be cool but you have to understand how it's been handled the whole time because that even if you keep your bottled water cold doesn't mean that it hasn't already been in a hot environment that caused some of the leaching of these chemicals so something for you to consider and look into if it matters to you personally okay our last discussion question water has been the news a lot lately from letting the water to potentially harmful effects of bottled water do you prefer tap or bottled water can you taste the difference in water in one area such as campus from another such as a home or water from a well so before you know we'll see what they have to say here but so the thing about the harmful effects of bottled water what they're talking about there again it could be the plastics and stuff but if you have like reverse osmosis water one of the things you have to be concerned about is that fluoride's been removed so they fluoridate our water on purpose but reverse osmosis removes it so and that that's what we do and that's fine because i i've mentioned in several videos that fluoride's primary function is topical so since we don't have fluoridated water since our kids don't drink fluoridated water and we don't either we all use fluoride rinses and fluoridated dental products so we always use toothpaste with fluoride and we use rinses that have fluoride so that's how we counteract that but if you're worried about the plastic bottles and stuff you have to find glass bottles i guess um can you tell the difference now it depends on where you've lived but um yeah i i you know my grandparents lived in a farm that had well water it tasted a lot different than the city water does so i can tell the difference in different places but some people have kind of always had the same kind of water but well water i always joke that well water tastes really good you just got to chew it a little bit all right students often have a strong preference for tap or bottled water you know i drink culligan all the time i don't remember last time oh i have a bottle of water if i need to but culligan is basically the same many recognize the environmental impact of bottled water and some may recognize the differences in the taste of water depending on the source so environmental impact you're primarily dealing with the bottle okay we did it now the lesson is over you should have learned to describe how foodborne illnesses can be prevented i gave you a long list there that should keep you safe explain how to minimize nutrient losses in the kitchen explain how environmental contaminants get into foods and how people can protect themselves against contamination check identify natural toxicants and determine whether they are hazardous debate the risk and benefits of using pesticides list common food additives their purposes and examples and discuss consumer concerns about water so we did it all right one chapter to go um keep working hard and uh have a wonderful day be blessed