Major supplier of beef found to use Ammonia in it's products

[BerenTebogo]

I put teriyaki sauce and salt on pretty much everything I eat, lol.

[zoobernut]

Toxicity looks at the measurement of food to do harm, "toxicity simple means that a substance can cause harm if enough is consumed" (Rolfes, 657). It's from my Understanding Nutrition book. Anything can be toxic if you consume too much of it, but if you consume a very small dose, your body is very likely to clean it out.

(add) If you eat a burger from BK or w/e the place that uses this meat once a week, it most likely won't do anything to you. However, the toxicity that leads to damage will go up depending on how many times you eat it a week...a day(><).

Edit: For example, water can be a toxin that can cause death if consumed in large quantity. There was the radio drinking water contest a while back that a mother died trying to win a wii for her kids. But if you drink a glass of water nothing will happen to you.
Here you go: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/13/wo...radio-contest/

You are stupid stop replying to this thread. You don't read posts and you don't comprehend them before posting a reply.

Kaeko I agree with you about weighing the pro's and con's to each situation. I think in this particular instance the reason why people are up in arms about the ammonia is because at least how I am looking at it is that it is easier to cook your food properly to kill potential pathogens and have chemical free food than to have food with ammonia added or some other chemical and have that additive not do its job so you still have to cook your food properly.

If the ammonia was working then it might be slightly less of an issue or at least a closer debate. But if it isn't even doing what it is supposed to do because if they put enough in to do its job it flavors the meat then why have any in there at all? They might as well take it all out but they don't because they are using it as a shield, to make themselves exempt from inspection. They are exploiting a loophole basically.

So now we have dishonest meat processors AND chemicals in the food. Neither look good. Oh and the meat still contains pathogens which are potentially dangerous if you don't cook your food properly.

[Kaeko]

I think you'd probably enjoy Food.Inc if you haven't see it already. I disagree with a whole lot of the movie but it's still a good documentary. Covers a lot of issues in this topic.

[CDF]

The focus on ingested ammonia from meat consumption is really misplaced in light of the totality of industrial food production practices. Yes, the efficacy of ammonia antimicrobial treatment is questionable because extremely pathogenic strains of E. coli and salmonella still remained in several cases, but the dangers of the treatment itself seem a bit exaggerated even though it was only fairly recently that ammonia treatment was implemented on an industrial scale, which given the ooga-booga monolithic food industry's M.O. understandably makes it sketchy on its face.

But instead of speaking in vague generalities about the long-term effects of anything consumed in potentially toxic amounts, let's consider that the toxic consequences of potentially excessive ammonia ingestion from food (this is not equivalent to inhaling ammonia gas or drinking cleaner) would manifest in acute neurological symptoms (a primary mechanism through NMDA receptor activation resulting from elevated ammonia concentration in plasma) well before elevated plasma pH or damage to GI tissues could be achieved. This, I hope, would be easy to notice.

Obviously, though, ammonia is required for amino acid synthesis, whether free in blood plasma or otherwise. No one recommends ingesting ammonium salts or urea, much less inhaling ammonia-based household cleaner fumes, but the nitrogen from orally ingested ammonium salts has actually been shown (as early as 1949 from my desultory lit search) to be a non-essential source of nitrogen for humans when it was incorporated, in significant amounts, into free plasma amino acids synthesized by the body, despite the reasonable assumption that most of the ammonia would be excreted if the amounts consumed would induce neurotoxic events. Regarding the quantities of ammonia consumed, this study cites oral administration of 3.45 mg/kg/day of 15-N labeled ammonium chloride in men, so the quantities administered here are probably well above that seen with ingestion of ammonia-treated meat "products."

That is just a FYI for those of you still on this "ammonia yuck!" tip. Sure, from an individual's standpoint it is easy to question why use chemical or radiative treatment at all if you can just cook meat thorougly to kill any pathogens, but the FDA operates from a public health perspective and weighs the risks of E. coli and salmonella "outbreaks" to that of ingesting ammonia from treated food products (not just meat).

[Khamsin]

The life expectancy of many 3rd world countries

Which, apparently, have the best quality food.

Notice the 'industry' trend above...happens all the time in any non-third-world country.

[Pirian]

Which, apparently, have the best quality food.

Which, apparently, have no food.

A lot of 3rd world nations won't take a lot of our food that we want to give them because it's been altered more than their government is willing to accept.

[Ksandra]

sucks to be them then.


Pirian if you think fast food is so disgusting why give a fuck if others eat it or not? Jealousy you can't eat it too?

[Pirian]

sucks to be them then.


Pirian if you think fast food is so disgusting why give a fuck if others eat it or not? Jealousy you can't eat it too?

Oh, I don't care if they eat it. Just so they are assured that what they are putting into themselves is only a couple steps above poison is my goal.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make 'em drink. Really, enjoy your delicious, cheap, low quality food, and I will enjoy my delicious, more expensive in comparison, higher quality food. Also, enjoy dying younger, in poorer health, and I'll enjoy living longer, in better health. I'm done with this discussion lol