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Of Poultry and Petitions
As someone who prefers to eat poultry rather than red meat, I am disconcerted this morning.
In the space of five minutes, two pieces of news crossed my desk. Normally I don't expect to see chicken and turkey industry news twice a month, let alone twice in one day.
The first was a Daily Kos petition aimed at stopping the U.S. Department of Agriculture from privatizing poultry inspections. Rather than having a smallish government group assigned that responsibility, the new regulations would essentially allow the industry to self-police. In the email pitching the petition, the Daily Kos guys pointed out that in the mid-90's, an experimental program of this sort was tried with disastrous results.
The inspection category that had the highest error rate was for dressing defects such as feathers, lungs, oil glands, trachea, and bile still on the carcass. The average error rate for this category in the chicken slaughter facilities was 64 percent and 87 percent in turkey slaughter facilities.
The second was a piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof in which he reported on "a pair of new scientific studies suggesting that poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic."
So we can get poisoned by poultry on both ends of the processing: what they're fed and how they're cleaned.
I think I just became a pescatarian.
Study Blames TV But Truth Takes More Thought
File this one under Plain Silly Stats.
A new study finds that for every two hours of television per day, a viewer's risk of an early death rises by 13 percent. The chances of diabetes jumps by 20 percent, and the risk of heart disease increases by 15 percent.
Let's do the math. If you watch TV for four hours a day, your risk of an "early death" (whatever that means) goes up by 26%, right? So if you watch for eight hours a day, your risk goes up 104%? Making you an absolutely sure bet to die "prematurely." Just over six hours a day and, bang, you are magically a diabetic?
To make matters even more ridiculous, this longer report on the study carried on the Reuters wire leaves out the word "prematurely." The implication is that more TV pushes you closer to guaranteed death. Hello! We are all gonna die, folks. Nobody gets out alive! And, by contrast, watching no TV won't make you immortal, either.
Yeah, I know. My use of stats is only somewhat more accurate than these reports. But the point is just that: stats don't prove anything when they're cited to prove an abstract point. We're all going to die. "Premature" death isn't a valid objective measurement. Even the study said the real culprit isn't TV, it's a sedentary lifestyle which "presumably" gives rise to bad eating habits. TV was just a convenient scapegoat for sedentary living. By the same measure, reading too much can do you in.
Gimme a break.
