CNN Lets 'Food Babe' Spout Pseudoscience on Lettuce Outbreak

[spanone]

The Food and Drug Administration’s urgent warning about a romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak left many Americans wondering how the problem spread so quickly and what they could do to protect themselves.

Unfortunately, viewers who tuned into a Sunday CNN segment on the crisis—which featured a blogger who bills herself as Food Babe, instead of a scientist or doctor—got the wrong answers.

Anchor Ana Cabrera kicked things off by describing self-appointed food investigator Vani Hari as someone who has “studied where our food comes from quite a bit” before asking how the outbreak happened. .

“[W]hat's the worst part of this situation is that we do not have a supply chain check-and-balance in place,” Hari said. “Once your romaine is grown and harvested, it has so many different touch points of contamination possible. You know, that romaine is taken to one factory to get washed. Then another factory to get banged, put into different bags of lettuce and then combined with other kinds of lettuce. And every single time it gets cut or washed it touches different machinery so there's so many different points of contamination that can happen. And if we don't know where our food is coming from, we can't really trust it.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cnn-lets-food-babe-spout-pseudoscience-on-lettuce-outbreak?ref=home

[Cirque du So-What]

1. My lettuce is banged?

Lettuce has a richer social life than incels!

[cwydro]

2. IKR?

I need to see this lettuce banging factory!

Pics or it never happened!

[LSFL]

4. perhaps some prominent signage...

"NO LETTUCE BANGING ALLOWED, YOU PRICKS!"

Ugh...the thought of ecoli being transmitted sexually is discomfitting.

[UniteFightBack]

17. That means you, CARROTS!

[crazycatlady]

6. I thought the only vegetables that could be banged were cucumbers

[aikoaiko]

16. Don't knock it until you try it. Works for all genital variations.

mmmmm buttercrunch

?1350616385

[UniteFightBack]

18. Now that's my kinda lettuce! I'll take a few heads.

[bronxiteforever]

3. Well, all the food scientists went to climate change jobs

Due to the highly lucrative pay available in that field.

[underpants]

5. Lettuce pray

[UniteFightBack]

19. If more good people had Romaine Lettuce...this tragedy could of been averted. nt

[tymorial]

7. Food Babe aka woo peddling idiot

She and all others like her are a menace to science and public health.

[spanone]

9. yep...

Hari’s head vs. bag of lettuce analysis wasn’t the only thing that peeved bona fide food scientists. She also suggested that antibiotics were to blame for the outbreak.

“What's happening is the overuse of antibiotics is creating superbugs that can't be treated with antibiotics,” she told Cabrera.

But Laura Gieraltowski, who leads the Foodborne Outbreak Response team at the CDC that is investigating the romaine contamination, told The Daily Beast that’s not true. “This outbreak strain of E. coli does not appear to be resistant to antibiotics,” she said via email.

In fact, she said, antibiotics are not recommended for patients suffering from E. coli O157 infections, “as it might increase their risk of developing a type of kidney failure called hemolytic uremic syndrome.”

[womanofthehills]

11. Actually, Roundup, which was originally patented as an antiobiotic, is used heavily on most crops

All the glyphosate sprayed on the soil, kills all the good bacteria in the soil and I'm sure this contributes to pathogens. Also, when processed in bags, cross contamination can make the whole problem worse according to WaPo article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/26/why-e-coli-keeps-getting-into-our-lettuce/?utm_term=.59dfdcf9b9b7

[womanofthehills]

10. What specifically did she say that was wrong?

At this point i would trust her more than Trump's FDA. Thump's FDA has been lax in food regulations and in inspections. She is the opposite of a menace to public health as she has forced many fast food companies to get rid of toxic chemicals in their food.


Washington Post article saying the same thing as Food Babe about bagged lettuce

And food safety experts say convenience greens — those handy bags of pre-chopped and pre-washed salads — carry an extra risk because they come in contact with more people and machinery before they arrive on your plate.

Contamination can occur on the farm when birds make frequent flights overhead or low-lying fields flood with contaminated water. E. coli can also be spread by farmworkers who don’t wash their hands or via farm equipment that has manure on it.

Once the greens are picked, they move to a packaging plant, where they’re exposed to more workers and more equipment. Product from multiple farms is often bagged in the same facility, which further increases the odds of cross-contamination.

While packers frequently rinse lettuce with a chlorine wash to kill pathogens, studies have shown those sprays are only partly effective. The same is true of washing fruits and vegetables at home, Tauxe said, because pathogens “cling” to the surface of produce and can even enter the inside of a leaf or fruit after they've been cut open.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/26/why-e-coli-keeps-getting-into-our-lettuce/?utm_term=.59dfdcf9b9b7

[tymorial]

12. Did you trust her over Obama's FDA? She has been at this for a while and the woo is the same.

I am not going to waste my time arguing the validity of pseudoscientific nonsense. It's all rubbish.

[womanofthehills]

15. Under Obama's FDA we had different people and some actual regulations

and we actually had people checking that people were following regulations. Bye bye to all that under Trump. Trump vowed to undo what Obama had done - including food safety.

Since when did eating foods without chemicals become nonsense. When the government doesn't do it's job, maybe the women need to step in.

[tymorial]

20. All food is made up of chemical compounds

Water is a chemical compound. Everything is chemical. The use of chemical as a boogeyman to spread fear is contemptible. So too is the use of "natural" for marketing products. It is exploitation of fear pure and simple. Trumps idiocy has nothing to do with this. These arguments have been going on for years and "food babe" is just another person tapping into this particular brand of fearmongering. I realize nothing I wrote will sway your opinion so I wont bore you with the numerous materials debunking Vani Hari's lunacy. I will however never stop tailing against her and people like her. Woo harms lives. Eom.

[ProudLib72]

8. A hot woman peddling pseudoscientific theories? What will they think of next?

Evidently, they are taking cues from Faux Nooze now. "Can Tomi come on to talk about the lettuce issue?"

[womanofthehills]

13. Except this "hot women" has all the fast food restaurants in a "tizzy" - removing toxic ingredients

Vani Hari sounds the alarm for changing the food industry - (below just 2 of many companies she got to use better ingredients). She is peddling eating fresh food - so you call that pseudoscience?

According to Hari, Chick-fil-A said at the time that it was impossible to go completely antibiotic-free with their chicken. But the company eventually changed its mind. In a February 2014 Chick-fil-A press release that made no mention of Hari, the company stated it would transition to serving antibiotic-free chicken within five years.

On another front, Hari's concern over Kraft using yellow dye numbers 5 and 6 prompted her to produce a video calling for people to sign a change.org petition. In her video, she spoke about research that shows these dyes are linked to hyperactivity in children, and she noted that Kraft had already reformulated their products for some markets overseas that prohibit yellow 5 and yellow 6. Her petition garnered over 365,000 signatures.

In late 2013, Kraft pledged to remove these dyes from their popular children's shaped macaroni and cheeses by 2014. And on April 20, 2015, the company announced plans to drop the dyes and artificial preservatives from its classic mac & cheese. "We finally did it!" Hari proclaimed on her blog.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vani-hari-food-babe-sounds-the-alarm-for-change-in-the-food-industry/

Steven Gorski contradicts what she says at the end of the article but, we all know by now, that Gorski is a Monsanto shrill.

[ProudLib72]

21. All I read was Spanone's OP

I apologize if she is actually in the know.

[Marrah_Goodman]

14. Not seeing what was wrong about what she said.