What happens when you irradiate meat? Ever seen the Incredible Hulk? For years, I was undecided about irradiated meat. Having grown up in the age of the atomic bomb - and lived my adult life through 30 years of the Cold War - I suppose (like many Americans) I have a reflexive aversion to all things radiation. Also, I've seen the sometimes-harmful effects that often follow radiation therapy for cancer and other diseases. But being of a soundly clinical mind and empirically scientific constitution, I reserved judgment about the irradiation of meat products until sufficient evidence was in. After all, the claims and promises of the pro-radiation crowd were like a siren song to anyone worried about health: "No germs! Hmmm-mmm. No Germs! OOO-aaaa. Safer, safer!
Dooby-do-wop… And in all fairness to irradiation, it does radically reduce the amount of bacteria, parasites, and fungi present in meat - by as much as 99%, in fact. However, the amount of gamma-zapping it takes to accomplish this lofty goal also fries away the bulk of the nutritional value from these foods, especially affecting such vital nutrients as vitamins A, B1 and B2, and C. As if this weren't enough, a recent survey showed a distinct difference in taste between irradiated and non-irradiated table-fare - even among those with a less-than-discerning palette. One such test reported some especially vivid culinary adjectives, like "burned," "electrical," and "singed hair." Yum! I doubt you'd beat a track to any steak house for which those words appeared in a magazine's review… Bottom line: Steer clear of anything besides cooking, seasoning, or marinating that can transform a piece of meat enough to change its taste. Besides, if irradiation can't get rid of ALL the germs (believe me, it can't), you'll still have to follow all the same handling and cooking precautions as "normal" meat to be truly safe… And if you're going to do that, you might as well have all the taste and vital nutrition that pure, fatty, unadulterated meat can give you. ************************* Waterlogged - as in "logged" in the coroners' notebook… Last year, a female runner in the Boston marathon dropped dead in mid-race. The cause? Not a coronary. Not heatstroke. Not a beating from Tonya Harding's kinfolk (hey - you never know nowadays, right?). Rather, she died of hyponatremic encephalopathy - extreme water intoxication. This was an extreme case of what is popularly known as "heat exhaustion." What that means is that during the course of the race, she drank so much liquid (in this case, a popular "sports drink") that the amount of salt in her blood was diluted away to dangerous levels, causing her brain to swell up, which killed her. What's my point in telling you this? That drowning isn't the only way that too much water can kill you. Now, I'm not under the impression that a large number of my readers are marathoners - or that many of you even exercise to the point where this could conceivably happen to you. But this incident does serve to expose some of the mainstream's 8-glass-a-day "water madness" for what it is… Pure hogwash. Keeping my head above water,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
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