Speaker 1: Hm, I'm Manny, I'm Noah. This is Devin, and welcome
Speaker 1: to no such thing, the show where we settle our
Speaker 1: dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. This
Speaker 1: week I attempt fate by asking, does food poisoning actually exist? I?
Speaker 2: No, there's no no such thing. No touch, thank touch,
Speaker 2: thank touch, thank touch, Thank so.
Speaker 1: This is a very old many no Devin discussion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've all heard the stories. Someone goes out to eat,
Speaker 1: then they're running to the bathroom, they're calling out of
Speaker 1: work sick. They say they have a bad case of
Speaker 1: food poisoning. Must have been the nachos, bad fish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this has never happened to me. But now let me
Speaker 1: be clear, I don't have a particularly strong constitution. I'm
Speaker 1: also not very selective or picky where I eat. I'm
Speaker 1: not checking the health ratings on the board. Sure, so
Speaker 1: when I add these things up, food poisoning isn't real.
Speaker 1: Or let me let me sayund it's a thrown around
Speaker 1: altitude loosely for my liking. All right, if I need
Speaker 1: to be diplomatic.
Speaker 3: Were you're you're saying, we hear, we hear about food
Speaker 3: poisoning more often than it happens.
Speaker 1: I think, so I would.
Speaker 4: Agree with because people, if you're going to call out
Speaker 4: of work.
Speaker 5: It's the easiest excuse I have food poison You don't
Speaker 5: have to fake being sick beforehand to lead up to
Speaker 5: lying about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you don't. You probably don't need to go
Speaker 1: to a doctor.
Speaker 4: No, probably because they're not going to do anything.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 4: No, Yeah, it's one day. You can come back the
Speaker 4: next day.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about actually being sick. What are your experiences.
Speaker 1: We don't need to get into details, but.
Speaker 5: Now we can get into details because this is what
Speaker 5: makes me so upset about saying I've had food poisoning
Speaker 5: two to three times.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's not a fact.
Speaker 4: No, or you know, you know, I feel he's going
Speaker 4: to be.
Speaker 1: There always, maybe every eight weeks. No, No, it's like,
Speaker 1: what are you doing now?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 5: What makes me upset about you saying it's not real
Speaker 5: is that food poisoning is probably the worst sickness you
Speaker 5: can have, you know what, A feeling like I want
Speaker 5: to die, Yeah all the time, because I've gotten food poisoning.
Speaker 5: Sometimes when you're sick, it's like, oh I get to relax, Yeah,
Speaker 5: home watching It's just miserable. You have like the shakes. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I hate throwing up. It's the worst thing in the
Speaker 5: world throwing up.
Speaker 4: Oh wait, wait, we got to talk about this real quick.
Speaker 4: Growing up.
Speaker 3: I don't know what the hell this is about.
Speaker 7: Set it up.
Speaker 4: Growing up.
Speaker 5: As kids, sometimes you get sick and you gotta throw up. Yeah, man,
Speaker 5: when we throw out, what do we do? We get
Speaker 5: up and you go throw up? What are you throwing up?
Speaker 3: In the toilet?
Speaker 4: Okay, in the toilet, right, not in the sink. We're
Speaker 4: not getting things we cook with to throw up into.
Speaker 4: Some people get bowls or or pots. These are these
Speaker 4: are things that that they to hold.
Speaker 3: The vomit, yes, and then they put it in the toilet.
Speaker 4: Would be I don't know what they do with it.
Speaker 1: This is what it would be like. Let me speak
Speaker 1: for my probably eating it later. It would be like, okay,
Speaker 1: I have I have a tummy. Yeah, I'm six years old. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm getting ready for bed, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take the plastic bowl and that's gonna be
Speaker 1: my case. I might not make it to the bathroom.
Speaker 1: These are basically storage bowls.
Speaker 4: Okay, So let's break it down for these.
Speaker 1: Aren't like, it's not like a cereal bull.
Speaker 4: Okay, what is it?
Speaker 5: It's like a plastic What are you putting in it
Speaker 5: when you're not throwing up into it?
Speaker 1: Pretty much nothing? Honestly, other bowls like it's.
Speaker 5: So, this is the thing I've learned, but over the
Speaker 5: last couple of years is that in the white community,
Speaker 5: they throw up into containers that they event.
Speaker 3: It's not just it's a community.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they have like they're like, that's the that's the
Speaker 5: pot that we would throw up in and then also
Speaker 5: cook our stupid.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that the bull thing bothers you so much
Speaker 1: because it's like, you don't think it's you don't think
Speaker 1: someone can wash the ball, like you don't trust and
Speaker 1: I know that.
Speaker 4: People could wash the ball. I understand that.
Speaker 1: You people don't even wash their bodies.
Speaker 5: I know you can sanitize things. To me, it's just
Speaker 5: like there are other did you not have trash cans
Speaker 5: in your home?
Speaker 3: My mom would beat my ass if I throw up
Speaker 3: in a bowl. But I can understand this from the
Speaker 3: perspective of like it's easier to I'm gonna wake up
Speaker 3: and I'm about to throw up, and I need to
Speaker 3: turn okay, but not putting something.
Speaker 5: Near the garbage cans. He's admitted to garbage cans, and
Speaker 5: it's the bull is not the only container.
Speaker 1: It is easier. It's it's a bowl, so it's easy.
Speaker 1: There's more. Yeah, I think I'm a I'm a baby basically.
Speaker 1: I think you a fifteen doing.
Speaker 4: Just think it's disgusting to throw up into a pot.
Speaker 4: That's crazy. It's like the fact, this is the cleanup
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 1: And then you, you know, wash it with lisol and
Speaker 1: other stuff. It's just like anything else at that point.
Speaker 1: There's disgusting leftover food all the time.
Speaker 4: That's food.
Speaker 5: It's not my throw up. Well, I don't want to
Speaker 5: see my throw up in any container.
Speaker 1: Something to come around.
Speaker 3: I mean, your your your vomits, Your vomit is your
Speaker 3: food with like a little bit of a mile I
Speaker 3: guess sometime food plus.
Speaker 5: Okay, But y'all are acting like you don't have other options. No,
Speaker 5: I know in that versus on my bed. Sure, I'll
Speaker 5: throw up in that.
Speaker 1: Is essentially that's what we're saying.
Speaker 5: You have one bowl that you would use, right, It's
Speaker 5: not even like they're rotating the containers that.
Speaker 1: Worse, wouldn't that be worse for you. If now there's
Speaker 1: twenty bowls that are thrown up, I think is worse
Speaker 1: by your argument you have a dedicated bowl, Yes.
Speaker 4: You should have a dedicated bowl that you're not cooking it.
Speaker 1: Okay, I basically said that.
Speaker 4: No, but the people I'm not talking about you.
Speaker 1: Specifically, Okay, well, you're attacking me.
Speaker 5: But there are other whites on the internet saying this
Speaker 5: is the pot or bowl that we would throw up
Speaker 5: into and also make super whatever with.
Speaker 3: Look, I think I don't think. I think we're talking
Speaker 3: in circles at this point. I want to hear from
Speaker 3: I want to hear from the listeners.
Speaker 4: If you had yeah, if your family had sick, did.
Speaker 3: You have a dedicated vomit container.
Speaker 4: Bowl that you also made food in?
Speaker 3: Okay, that you also used.
Speaker 5: Not just like a bucket or or a bucket, have
Speaker 5: a bucket in your.
Speaker 4: Home, use a bucket?
Speaker 1: All right, all right, I think we're done.
Speaker 3: You said you've had food poisoning two to three times times.
Speaker 1: Do you have an idea of the culprit?
Speaker 5: So one time it was it was a bowl place,
Speaker 5: it was a Mediterranean bowl.
Speaker 4: I don't even know.
Speaker 5: It may have been like a cavo or something got sponsor.
Speaker 4: It was one of and it's this was before it
Speaker 4: was crazy.
Speaker 1: It was too crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a little nutty.
Speaker 4: So it was like it wasn't even something I considered
Speaker 4: to be risky.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and once again, this is what I think gave
Speaker 5: it to me, because you know, the classic food poisoning
Speaker 5: thing is you get food posoning and you go through
Speaker 5: all the day until you ate. Recently, you're like, that's
Speaker 5: the no one, that's norm When that was out of
Speaker 5: the ordinary, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Only a year ago.
Speaker 3: On my way back from LA I landed at like
Speaker 3: eleven or midnight, but I was really hungry, and I
Speaker 3: went to a bodego on my way home and got
Speaker 3: like a buffalo chicken saying, which is like a hero,
Speaker 3: and ate it probably thirty to forty five minutes later. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that is when I was like Kevin, it was coming
Speaker 3: right out of me. I was on the toilet forever.
Speaker 3: I had like a cold sweat and shivers and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But here's the interesting part. The next day, I was
Speaker 3: shocked at how I could have gotten so sick from
Speaker 3: that so quickly.
Speaker 5: That's what I was going to say, Man, I didn't
Speaker 5: want to call you out, but that seems a little
Speaker 5: too fast. Thirty forty five minutes, I asked my doctor,
Speaker 5: even in your body yet she was saying.
Speaker 3: That the culprit could be anything you've eaten in the
Speaker 3: last ten days. I think we are so attuned to
Speaker 3: thinking that it's something I just ate that got me sick.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I don't believe that.
Speaker 3: So I wonder, like, all right, maybe you have a
Speaker 3: regular sickness and you just finished eating and then you
Speaker 3: thought it was that thing.
Speaker 5: I can see the last I'll give you two. I'm
Speaker 5: not getting food boys nine days ago.
Speaker 4: That is out. It came out already.
Speaker 5: If we're going to say that, then there was one
Speaker 5: time in Toronto, I ate a pizza with eggplant on it.
Speaker 5: Sure something was going on with it. It was one
Speaker 5: of the things where I was as I was eating it,
Speaker 5: I was like something, Oh, this feels like I like eggplant,
Speaker 5: but this is this is not something is up. Went
Speaker 5: in the bathroom at the pizza place. I'm still there,
Speaker 5: threw up. So that's you talk about thirty forty five
Speaker 5: minutes about mid eating.
Speaker 3: Well you use zero minutes if you didn't eat anything
Speaker 3: in that moment. You probably would have went to the
Speaker 3: bathroom and threw up.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: No, I was eating the pizza. The pizza made me
Speaker 5: feel sick, and then I threw up. It was and
Speaker 5: it was a response to.
Speaker 1: The Okay, but I know what happened after you ate
Speaker 1: the pizza. But maybe there's something in something that's inside
Speaker 1: of you before the pizza. The pizza is just kind
Speaker 1: of pushing it. Three doctors right here, you know, and
Speaker 1: that's just spring it. You're blaming the pizza the new pizza,
Speaker 1: but maybe it was the old thing.
Speaker 4: The pizza made me feel.
Speaker 1: You're saying that's how you feel, that's what you think.
Speaker 8: The fact.
Speaker 4: Now you're telling me how I facts.
Speaker 3: Don't care about your feelings.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, as I was eating the pizza, I was like,
Speaker 5: oh my god, this pizza is making me feel naice.
Speaker 1: Because and then it's interacting with what say okay, it
Speaker 1: was the trigger.
Speaker 4: I would put the pizza.
Speaker 5: Down and say, okay, I'm not I'm gonna not touch it,
Speaker 5: and I felt Okay.
Speaker 4: The reason I'm telling that story is I didn't think
Speaker 4: it was food what it was.
Speaker 1: I thought you were trying to say it was You
Speaker 1: don't think I had a reaction.
Speaker 4: To the pizza. But it's not food poisoning, So.
Speaker 5: You wouldn't call that food poison no, because how was
Speaker 5: it poison It didn't give it didn't have the time
Speaker 5: to poison me.
Speaker 1: So what do you think that is?
Speaker 5: I just had some sort of reaction to the ingredient,
Speaker 5: like allergy, maybe an allergy.
Speaker 3: I'll be honest, Like, I know when you get a cold,
Speaker 3: what makes you sick? Like you're getting like if it's
Speaker 3: like an infection in some way or like a bug.
Speaker 3: I don't know what food poisoning? How you get sick
Speaker 3: from that?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 3: Like, like what undercooked food that's causing your body to
Speaker 3: react badly?
Speaker 1: That's what I want to find out.
Speaker 5: I think it could be undercooked, right, I think it
Speaker 5: could be prepared in a not a good way, so
Speaker 5: cross contamination.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I mean, I'll say this. I know I'm
Speaker 1: a skeptic, but like I I'm a big fan of
Speaker 1: Gordon Ramsey. I've watched many of his shows, hundreds of
Speaker 1: hours of his reporting, and watching that, I am like,
Speaker 1: there's some funky stuff going on in kitchens. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: around the world.
Speaker 4: Frankly, raw meat next to the vegetables next to.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, I understand how this can happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if it happens, If.
Speaker 4: It were to happen, I want to believe what you like,
Speaker 4: if I did it.
Speaker 1: Food prep obviously the source farms, Yeah yeah, I've seen
Speaker 1: some videos from these farms. Doesn't seem that clean.
Speaker 3: No, remember when Chipotle had the big was it salmonella outbreak?
Speaker 3: To me, that's food poisoning, Like you consume that and
Speaker 3: then you get sick from it. Yeah, but that's not
Speaker 3: happening as often as people are saying they get food
Speaker 3: poisoned for recalls that stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a different thing. That's like a recall that
Speaker 5: someone messed up a whole batch of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, see that. I think that's where things are complicate,
Speaker 1: because of course we're like boris Head last year. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's these things where there's nationwide recalls and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: and you then it's like, okay, they're tracing this back
Speaker 1: to the source and they know this is it contamination.
Speaker 1: And then there's other stuff where it's like okay, me
Speaker 1: and my buddy go to the socco place, Yeah we
Speaker 1: get the same thing. He's having a problem, and I'm
Speaker 1: not why is that.
Speaker 4: Because not everyone.
Speaker 5: This is also the thing with food poisoning is that
Speaker 5: two people could get the same exact meal and have
Speaker 5: different reactions to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, clearly. One more question, do you guys wash your chicken?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 5: I hate the same as on camera, but I don't
Speaker 5: because I notice is controversial and in the black community.
Speaker 1: Yeah so sometimes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but you're not supposed to wash your chicken because
Speaker 5: if there is something on it, you're just spreading it,
Speaker 5: you're not actually cleaning it.
Speaker 4: Let's say I used to do it because that's the
Speaker 4: way I was taught.
Speaker 5: So you get vinegar and lemon juice, and you like
Speaker 5: kind of give it like a little bath in the bowl.
Speaker 3: As far as black community misconceptions go, that one's up
Speaker 3: there with we don't need to wear sunscreen. Yes, got
Speaker 3: my ass fried a couple of times by following that advice.
Speaker 5: We don't need to wash the chicken, y'all. I know
Speaker 5: we're gonna get the emails. It is okay, I haven't
Speaker 5: been washing chicken for years. I have not gotten food poisoning.
Speaker 1: So I want to find out what is food poisoning?
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, is it real?
Speaker 1: That's my second question? How common is it? Okay, why
Speaker 1: don't I get it? How can we stay safe?
Speaker 4: What if thing's so void?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we'll find out after the break. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 4: I'm Manny, I'm Noah Devin.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about food poisoning. I'm skeptical of how
Speaker 1: common it is. I feel like it's used to liberally,
Speaker 1: and I'm wondering why I don't get it personally. So
Speaker 1: I did some research. I had some perfect phone calls
Speaker 1: with some experts in the field. First up, I spoke
Speaker 1: to doctor Ben Chapman.
Speaker 9: I'm a professor and food safety extension specialist and department
Speaker 9: head at North Carolina State University, and the area that
Speaker 9: I focus on is food born illness and food safety,
Speaker 9: especially around restaurants, retail stores, and consumer homes.
Speaker 1: And more importantly arguably, he has his own podcast called
Speaker 1: Food Safety Talk. So this is the guy to.
Speaker 4: Talk to him.
Speaker 1: Hey, yeah, So first up, I asked him to explain
Speaker 1: what food poisoning actually is.
Speaker 9: Food poisoning technically is like one slice where someone eats
Speaker 9: something and there's a toxin in it and you get
Speaker 9: really sick, really quickly, like within six or eight hours.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 9: Back in the seventies, or eighties where a whole bunch
Speaker 9: of people went to a wedding and the next day
Speaker 9: everybody showed up at the emergency room or at their
Speaker 9: primary carreer doctor and then started talking like, oh, what
Speaker 9: did you have the chicken?
Speaker 7: Did you have the fish? Whatever?
Speaker 9: Right, Like, that's kind of the common look at poisoning.
Speaker 9: Food born illness is a little more nuanced. We see
Speaker 9: outbreaks now that might be like as few as three
Speaker 9: or four people, and they might be in four different
Speaker 9: states or in two different countries, And that has I
Speaker 9: would say, broadened the view of food born illness because
Speaker 9: it might be E. Coli or samonella or listeria. Those
Speaker 9: are kind of very common bacteria that we hear about,
Speaker 9: and those often take you know, maybe forty eight or
Speaker 9: seventy two hours after eating something to actually start even
Speaker 9: having symptoms, and it might be another week before someone
Speaker 9: gets sick enough to go to the doctor, depending on
Speaker 9: what the on what the illness is.
Speaker 5: The timing here makes a lot more sense. I know,
Speaker 5: Manny before it's talking about his doctor's telling me what
Speaker 5: ten days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she was saying, like it could have been anything
Speaker 3: in the past ten days.
Speaker 5: Six to eight hours. That feels like the perfect times.
Speaker 5: That's when I get food poisoning. That's the time table
Speaker 5: to start settling in. Yeah, for dinner, and then the
Speaker 5: middle of the night you're like, what's going on?
Speaker 1: I mean, even lasteria can incubate for seventy days, which
Speaker 1: is really crazy. It's not as easy as just going like,
Speaker 1: what's the last thing you ate, which is obviously what
Speaker 1: most people would do instinctively. We want to be something
Speaker 1: you had literally months ago. Yeah, so I asked, what's
Speaker 1: actually happening in the body during food poisoning. That's him
Speaker 1: to go Osmosa Jones mode.
Speaker 9: Yes, we start with the pathogenic KEY coli, and the
Speaker 9: one that we worry about the.
Speaker 7: Most is E. Coli on seven seven.
Speaker 9: So essentially, what's happening is someone eats food that has
Speaker 9: the pathogen in it. The pathogen passes through the stomach
Speaker 9: and ends up getting to the intestines and that's the
Speaker 9: right place for infection for that put to bacteria, and
Speaker 9: the intestines are a really good environment for E. Coli
Speaker 9: because we have nonpathogenic E. Coli in our body at
Speaker 9: all times. Without having E. Coli in our intestines, we would.
Speaker 7: Not digest food correctly. So we have this like kind.
Speaker 9: Of rogue type of bacteria that's there that lives amongst
Speaker 9: all the other E. Coli can then move in and
Speaker 9: out of cells pretty easy, infects as it grows. A
Speaker 9: byproduct of its growth, it's essentially the waste from the bacteria,
Speaker 9: and so that toxin ends up going to the kidneys
Speaker 9: and then damages kidney cells or ends up in the
Speaker 9: bloodstream in the eyes and can create blood clots because
Speaker 9: the body is trying to attack this toxin, and can
Speaker 9: lead to blindness.
Speaker 1: I asked how common this is, Going back to my question,
Speaker 1: people throw this around all the time. I had food poisoning,
Speaker 1: this that whatever.
Speaker 9: We estimate that they're around forty eight to fifty million
Speaker 9: cases of food borne illness in the US. If you
Speaker 9: went across the population and ask people whether they had
Speaker 9: an irregular bowel movement or if they felt nauseous, how
Speaker 9: many times a year that might happen, you might see
Speaker 9: the population might say three or four times a year.
Speaker 9: I have that, but did not equate it to anything.
Speaker 9: It's just I had the twenty four hour flu. And
Speaker 9: what we don't know is how much of that is food.
Speaker 7: Born and how much is not.
Speaker 9: On average, somewhere in between one and six and one
Speaker 9: in five people are going to get food borne illness
Speaker 9: a year in the US, and the vast majority won't
Speaker 9: equate it to something that they've eaten or maybe never
Speaker 9: will be able to solve that down outbreak. It was
Speaker 9: just something they were exposed to in the food supply.
Speaker 1: It's pretty common.
Speaker 3: This might be the earliest and in the episode's playtime
Speaker 3: where the host has been wrong, I.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not gonna you know, I can't play
Speaker 1: too long.
Speaker 5: I'll say too like I've had food poisoning, but I've
Speaker 5: never gone to the doctor for it.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I'm unreported.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming these numbers are more than just from the
Speaker 1: hospital surveys and in real studies. But yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you could easily even if you were surveyed, you still might.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't say necessarily you had food poisoning or food
Speaker 1: born illness. Yeah, you might just be like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: stomach bug or whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: My biggest question personally, well am I not getting it?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 9: Genetics is one how bacteria and viruses kind of attack
Speaker 9: our body. There's lots of different ways. It really could
Speaker 9: come down to the shape of the receptors on a
Speaker 9: specific cell in my body is different from yours, and
Speaker 9: that that virus only wants to unlock that receptor. We
Speaker 9: could be eating the same food in genetics wise, I'm
Speaker 9: more predisposed to it than you are.
Speaker 7: Then there's a.
Speaker 9: Whole other area of how much and what kind of
Speaker 9: bacteria or virus is there. There aren't a lot of
Speaker 9: foods that we eat that I would say are evenly homogeneous,
Speaker 9: the exact same amount of the same thing all over it,
Speaker 9: Like every episode of tastes the same because it's the
Speaker 9: same all through. But we don't eat a lot of
Speaker 9: foods that are like that. Every bite is a little
Speaker 9: bit different. And where bacteria and viruses go is also
Speaker 9: not homogeneous, so they could be concentrated in certain areas.
Speaker 9: The type of food we eat, how much of it,
Speaker 9: that's also a big factor. And then I would say
Speaker 9: the third big factor is whether either of us have
Speaker 9: been exposed to that bacteria or virus before and we
Speaker 9: have acquired immunity.
Speaker 7: And there's some really really.
Speaker 9: Good historical data on this, like people who grew up
Speaker 9: on dairy farms, for instance, are way way, way less
Speaker 9: susceptible to EQUALIE contamination because they lived in an environment
Speaker 9: that where there was equali all the time, and maybe
Speaker 9: they got sick and exposed when they were two or
Speaker 9: three years old and they have immunity to it because
Speaker 9: of that.
Speaker 3: There was a lot in there. But it did answer
Speaker 3: one of my burning questions, which was, you know, if
Speaker 3: Devin and I split a burrito, is it possible that
Speaker 3: he could get food poisoning from it and I couldn't.
Speaker 3: And the answers yes, it seems like, yeah.
Speaker 1: So it could be because you got lucky with your
Speaker 1: bites or simply you're built different. Yeah, which seems to
Speaker 1: be my life. But yeah, yeah, I think so safe
Speaker 1: to say. So. Now, I did ask about when people
Speaker 1: do react immediately, because he said, you know, most of
Speaker 1: these have incubation periods that are at least a few hours,
Speaker 1: if not days or weeks or months. So I asked,
Speaker 1: you know, what is it when people do react immediately
Speaker 1: like you mentioned with your egg plant pizza.
Speaker 4: To be fair, I said, I did not think it was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's let me be clear, but you said you
Speaker 1: were eating it and you were like, this feels allthing
Speaker 1: right right before you even had a.
Speaker 4: Reaction, yes, right, and my mouth felt weird.
Speaker 9: Probably the number one misconception is that the last thing
Speaker 9: I ate is what made me sick, right, And you
Speaker 9: kind of hear it all the time in conversations where
Speaker 9: it's like, I'm not going to eat at X restaurant
Speaker 9: again because man, I was terrible. I went home and
Speaker 9: all night I you know, I had diarrhea or vomit
Speaker 9: or whatever. The misconception there is that most food born
Speaker 9: illnesses take at least twenty four hours before like from
Speaker 9: exposure to test symptoms, and so you've got to think
Speaker 9: back to like, well, what I e two days ago,
Speaker 9: and oh, like, should I've eaten a lot of stuff
Speaker 9: over the last two days. That being said, there are
Speaker 9: cases where people get sick very quickly, within thirty minutes.
Speaker 9: It's just not bacterial or viral. It's a chemical contaminant.
Speaker 9: We've seen cases where someone may have inadvertently used like
Speaker 9: a cleaning chemical in food. And the difference there is
Speaker 9: there's often reports of it tasted bad too. Yeah, like
Speaker 9: there was something I detected sensory wise that was off
Speaker 9: with this food and it led to an illness.
Speaker 7: That's like usually the case. So if it was a
Speaker 7: toxin or a chemical. Yeah, it could be very quick.
Speaker 3: So Devin innocent, vindicated, but not for the reason we thought.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, it's food poisoning in a sense,
Speaker 1: just not your yeah plastic, you.
Speaker 3: Got poisoned from food, but yeah, not necessarily bacterial.
Speaker 1: So now I want to take a step back. We've
Speaker 1: kind of gone deep inside the food poisoning process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but now I want to see how it spreads on
Speaker 1: the larger spectrum, how these outbreaks occur. So after the break,
Speaker 1: we find out where food borne illness comes from and
Speaker 1: talk to a lawyer who took on a fast food
Speaker 1: giant to change the game as we know it.
Speaker 2: Mmmm.
Speaker 8: Health officials say people infected with the E. Coli bacteria
Speaker 8: maybe unknowingly infecting others. More than one hundred and fifty
Speaker 8: people have become ill after eating tainted hamburger meat a
Speaker 8: Jack in the Box restaurant in Idaho and Washington State.
Speaker 7: One child has died.
Speaker 6: My name is Bill Marler. I'm a food safety attorney
Speaker 6: based on Bambridge Island, Washington, which is a ferry ride
Speaker 6: away from Seattle. By the time the Jack the Marx
Speaker 6: case was over, I knew more about food safety litigation.
Speaker 6: I knew more about E. Coli than you know any
Speaker 6: lawyer in the world.
Speaker 1: To sum it up very briefly, Jack in the Box
Speaker 1: restaurants were linked to an equal lay outbreak in early
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three, the largest outbreak ever documented in
Speaker 1: the US at the time.
Speaker 6: Ultimately, there were over six hundred and fifty people sick,
Speaker 6: and four children died. About seventy five suffered acute kidney failure.
Speaker 6: Hundreds and hundreds of people were hospitalized. In many respects,
Speaker 6: you could liken the Seattle area were like a war zone.
Speaker 6: You know, there were more kids in the hospital than
Speaker 6: there were dialysis machines.
Speaker 1: It turns out Jack in the Box wasn't consistently cooking
Speaker 1: their hamburgers to the recommended internal temperature. There was a
Speaker 1: major investigation, and Bill Marler's lawsuit on behalf of the
Speaker 1: victims secured what was at the time the largest ever
Speaker 1: settlement related to food borne illness, over fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1: It also led to a few major food safety outcomes.
Speaker 1: Freshly inaugurated President Bill Clinton ushered in new regulations requiring
Speaker 1: the USDA to test samples of RAGROUNB for equal one
Speaker 1: to five to seven, which was now declared in adults.
Speaker 1: That means if it's found in the product, it cannot
Speaker 1: be sold. The FDA increased recommended internal temperatures for hamburgers
Speaker 1: from one hundred and fifty five degrees fahrenheit and one
Speaker 1: to five to seven. Infection became a reportable disease, meaning
Speaker 1: all cases must be reported to the government to then
Speaker 1: be monitored for a larger outbreak. Due to the work
Speaker 1: of Bill Marler and others, E Coli outbreaks connected to
Speaker 1: beef in the US have effectively gone down to zero.
Speaker 1: That's in a nutshell Bill's story and how he got
Speaker 1: into it, and now he's just a food safety guy.
Speaker 1: So I asked, from a legal standpoint, how Bill goes
Speaker 1: about tracing an outbreak, And things have changed a lot
Speaker 1: since the nineties, just the technology and science behind it.
Speaker 6: So I spend a lot of my time doing the
Speaker 6: epidemiology of figuring out an outbreak. I think I may
Speaker 6: be the only lawyer in the world who has an epidemiologist,
Speaker 6: and I actually have three on my staff. I kind
Speaker 6: of look at ourselves as a health department with a
Speaker 6: prosecuting attorney attached to it. We figure out can we
Speaker 6: connect up this person, and then can we connect it
Speaker 6: up to a product, And then my job is to
Speaker 6: go after that company and make sure that they do
Speaker 6: right by my client and don't poison people again. I
Speaker 6: got called by a father of a child who had
Speaker 6: a very severe about of equali. The kid's kidney function
Speaker 6: he's four years old, is about forty percent right now,
Speaker 6: so the likelihood of him losing his kidneys in his
Speaker 6: teens is pretty high. He had whole genome sequencing done,
Speaker 6: but he was not a match to anything. And the
Speaker 6: public has access to this database where if you know
Speaker 6: the genetic fingerprint number of that particular person, you can
Speaker 6: plug it into a database and it'll populate a whole
Speaker 6: genome sequence tree, so you can look to see whether
Speaker 6: or not they're linked to anything. And here the kid
Speaker 6: no outbreak. So I was like, well, that's just, you know, sucks,
Speaker 6: and I can't figure this out. So I was talking
Speaker 6: to the family and figuring out, like what other possible
Speaker 6: potential sources there were, And I asked him if they
Speaker 6: had any animals and he says, we had a dog,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, well, what did you feed the dog?
Speaker 6: And he said, well, we fed him Darwin raw dog food,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, h Darwin raw dog food has had
Speaker 6: problems in the past with bacterial contamination. So we had
Speaker 6: it tested by an FDA certified lab and it came
Speaker 6: back positive for E. Coli and two forms of salmonella.
Speaker 6: E coli was a genetic match to the kid, and
Speaker 6: that I turned that material over both to the company
Speaker 6: and to the FDA, and the FDA did an investigation
Speaker 6: concluded the same thing. I concluded that the cause of
Speaker 6: the outbreak, or cause of this kid's illness was the
Speaker 6: dog food. And you know it's likely that dog ate
Speaker 6: the food, the dog licked the kid. You know, that
Speaker 6: kind of stuff happened. So a lot of times I
Speaker 6: figure these outbreaks out on my own.
Speaker 1: We heard how the cole I and ground beef has
Speaker 1: basically become a non issue now after the Jack in
Speaker 1: the Box lawsuit. But there's a lot of frustration now
Speaker 1: we haven't had the same level of action on other issues,
Speaker 1: like salmonella in chicken, which is a common one you
Speaker 1: hear about. Yeah, so here's Bill talking about that.
Speaker 6: I've repeatedly been beating my head against the wall for
Speaker 6: twenty years to try to get some movement there, but
Speaker 6: you know, it's completely completely legal to sell salmonil attained chicken.
Speaker 6: It's the rationale. Well, the housewives or the house husbands
Speaker 6: nowadays are responsible for handling the product, like you know,
Speaker 6: it's a nuclear weapon. Over half of salmonella cases in
Speaker 6: the United States are caused by chicken. That's one point
Speaker 6: three million Americans every are sickened by salmonilla.
Speaker 7: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: How does the U stock up against Europe or elsewhere
Speaker 1: in the world.
Speaker 6: It's not like Europe has not had some significant outbreaks,
Speaker 6: but you know, for salmonella, they just said, we just
Speaker 6: won't have salmonella or camflo bacter, which is generally also
Speaker 6: found with chicken. What they do in Europe is if
Speaker 6: there's a flock of birds that have salmonella, they'll eradicate
Speaker 6: that flock. It's not like we don't do that here.
Speaker 6: We eradicate flocks all the time, but it's usually for
Speaker 6: bird flu ye. But in you know, EU, UK they
Speaker 6: eradicate flocks. They also vaccinate animals. We think that that's
Speaker 6: too expensive. So what happens is you have to assume
Speaker 6: that every chicken you buy in a grocery store is
Speaker 6: contaminated with salmonella and and or cam flobactor or both,
Speaker 6: and you're likely right, but you know, we could do
Speaker 6: way more. We finally got a little piece of legislation
Speaker 6: banning salmonella in certain chicken products that went into effect
Speaker 6: in the Biden administration, and then the Trump administration killed it.
Speaker 6: I remember years ago when the ecoli was listed as
Speaker 6: adulter in the industry was like, Oh my god, Hamburger's
Speaker 6: going to cost way too much.
Speaker 4: It's like the world's going to fall. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: it's terrible. It's terrible.
Speaker 6: You know, it's consumers, they should deal with it. And
Speaker 6: you know, it all worked out. There are tens of thousands,
Speaker 6: maybe hundreds of thousands, and probably now by now millions
Speaker 6: of people who did not get sick because of ecola
Speaker 6: as an adulterate and increased cook temperatures on red meat.
Speaker 6: It's crazy that you wouldn't sit that, sit back and
Speaker 6: look at it and go, huh, maybe we should do
Speaker 6: that too. But there's just so much inertia on the
Speaker 6: part of industry, so much inertia on the part of
Speaker 6: government to actually solve these problems. And I don't know,
Speaker 6: I don't know there's a level of frustration that I
Speaker 6: still have that I just uh, yeah, it's I yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's really sometimes very frustrating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's such an uphill battle, I think when you're
Speaker 3: trying to convince like a population to do something, but
Speaker 3: your proof is that something won't happen if you do
Speaker 3: it right, like he will, like they want to pass
Speaker 3: better protections on this, on this kind of stuff, but
Speaker 3: like you know, the proof would be that you didn't
Speaker 3: get sick, and then you're just someone could be like, well,
Speaker 3: I wasn't gonna get sick anyway. We're just lucky that
Speaker 3: people don't really want raw or like rare chick the
Speaker 3: way we do.
Speaker 1: With a steak or something.
Speaker 3: If someone goes to a restaurant at a steak or
Speaker 3: a burger, like I know Noah enjoys a medium rare
Speaker 3: even rare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the meat it's fine, hamburg the ground beach
Speaker 1: is not really an issue so much. And then I
Speaker 1: do ask kind of rapid fire to kind of go
Speaker 1: through a bunch of these things because I was like,
Speaker 1: I was scared to ask these guys if it's okay
Speaker 1: for me to order our rare stick. We're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break, and when we're back, we conclude our
Speaker 1: episode with some rapid fire food safety questions. So I
Speaker 1: went back to Ben Chapman, our food safety expert from
Speaker 1: North Carolina State, to kind of run through a list
Speaker 1: of problematic foods to see where he stands.
Speaker 4: Sushi.
Speaker 9: How big of a risk is that restaurants are required
Speaker 9: to do parasite destruction in raw fish, specifically if it's
Speaker 9: gonna be served raw, so that means that it's got
Speaker 9: to be frozen usually or some other mechanism before consumption,
Speaker 9: and parasites are the issue with sushi.
Speaker 1: Next, like beef tartar or even just a very rare
Speaker 1: steak or burger.
Speaker 9: So beef tartar is just ground up meat, I would
Speaker 9: say that's one of the most riskiest things you can eat,
Speaker 9: and especially tartar, which if it was ground beef that
Speaker 9: was sold in the US, that has a testing regime
Speaker 9: associated with it to make sure before it's released that
Speaker 9: there aren't pathogens in it. Tartar doesn't go through that.
Speaker 9: You're starting with like a whole muscle and you're cutting
Speaker 9: it up or grinding it and making it. Moving to
Speaker 9: the next one that you mentioned, was like a rare steak.
Speaker 9: I eat rare steak on a weekly basis. The pathogens
Speaker 9: would be on the outside, so searing the muscle on
Speaker 9: the inside, it's essentially sterile, and then undercooked or rare
Speaker 9: hamburger is like somewhere in the middle where there's a
Speaker 9: little bit of protection. When it comes to ground beef,
Speaker 9: it's getting cooked a little bit, but who knows how much.
Speaker 9: And so I'm a fan of temperature specifically, so I'm
Speaker 9: looking for like one hundred and fifty five degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 9: If it's a steak, I'm probably cooking my steak to
Speaker 9: like one hundred and twenty degrees. That very outside of
Speaker 9: it is probably getting into four hundred and killing everything, Okay,
Speaker 9: And then tartar is something that I think is really risky.
Speaker 1: Next, I asked about oysters, because you know, once in
Speaker 1: a while I see a story and it's like oysters
Speaker 1: the most dangerous thing you can eat. Yeah, people just died. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, well, I see oysters all the
Speaker 1: time from places that I don't think frankly should be
Speaker 1: serving oysters. That's all year round, all this stuff. So
Speaker 1: I was like, all right, I need I need this,
Speaker 1: gotta tell me what's up.
Speaker 9: Raw oysters are among the riskiest things that we have.
Speaker 9: Many of the cases that we see when it comes
Speaker 9: to oyster illnesses or things like the pathogens called vibrio.
Speaker 9: Often people are predisposed to bibrial illnesses if they are aging,
Speaker 9: if they are heavy drinkers, and they have liver issues,
Speaker 9: and weirdly that is a factor for people getting sick
Speaker 9: from raw oysters. Is someone who consumes a lot of
Speaker 9: alcohol and then is exposing themselves to these pathogens.
Speaker 4: So I have to style getting oysters, is what he's
Speaker 4: telling me.
Speaker 1: I think overall, you're okay, especially if you're not predisposed
Speaker 1: per se on that aging And yeah, and if you're
Speaker 1: I guess maybe the advice would be trying to find
Speaker 1: oysters that are actually local and not shipped across the
Speaker 1: country or something like that, so hopefully they're fresh. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask about leftover rice. There's another one
Speaker 1: where I was like, this one's just is crazy because
Speaker 1: more than anything oysters. Of course, I believe people get
Speaker 1: sick from this, but yeah, you see them all the time,
Speaker 1: but it's not like an everyday occurrence. Left the rice
Speaker 1: people are eating all the time.
Speaker 4: I haere yesterday.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I think it's a really big social media issue.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: The entire leftover rice controversy or issues come from an
Speaker 9: actual true story where someone got sick from eating leftover rice.
Speaker 9: This the illness was associated with something called basill is serious.
Speaker 9: The bacteria survives as a spore with dry rice, and
Speaker 9: so most of our rice has basilli.
Speaker 7: Is serious in it.
Speaker 9: The spore wakes up during cooking, which is counterintuitive, right.
Speaker 9: It has to be heat treated to essentially shock it awake.
Speaker 9: And then if rice is stored incorrectly after cooking, it
Speaker 9: can grow. And in fact, that is really the issue
Speaker 9: with leftover rice. It has nothing to do with leftovers.
Speaker 9: And and in fact, the case that drew this was
Speaker 9: someone left rice on their countertop for two days after
Speaker 9: making it and that's like not a good idea for
Speaker 9: any food, and then took it and put it in
Speaker 9: the refrigerator and a couple of days later ate it,
Speaker 9: and the story became.
Speaker 7: Well, they ate leftover rice.
Speaker 9: It's like true, they did, but the leftover wasn't the
Speaker 9: factor that it was post cooking leaving it on the countertop.
Speaker 7: Yes, And so essentially yeah.
Speaker 9: In that you're you provided the perfect environment for the
Speaker 9: bacterial to grow. I eat a lot of leftover rice.
Speaker 9: I will eat it on a weekly basis. I cook
Speaker 9: rice and then I put it in the refrigerator right away,
Speaker 9: and then I might eat leftover rice for a week afterwards.
Speaker 9: So it's not a time factor once it's in my refrigerator.
Speaker 9: It's really about how quickly I get it in the
Speaker 9: drinder after I make it.
Speaker 1: And the last one was about washing chicken.
Speaker 4: Mmmmm.
Speaker 1: So here's what Ben had to say about washing chicken.
Speaker 7: We did a lot of research on this issue.
Speaker 9: We actually brought people from the community in to prepare
Speaker 9: chicken who identified themselves as someone who washes chicken, so
Speaker 9: we better understand what happens during that process. And what
Speaker 9: we've learned is why people wash chicken is because they
Speaker 9: think that they're removing something. Some people think they're removing bacteria.
Speaker 9: Some people think they're removing slime. Yeah, all of those
Speaker 9: things are taken care of during the cooking process, and
Speaker 9: so washing can only increase risk. When you're washing it,
Speaker 9: you're taking the bacteria that is on the outside and
Speaker 9: you are depositing it somewhere in your kitchen, whether it's
Speaker 9: in your sink basin or outside of the sink. And
Speaker 9: so the work that we did demonstrated that people who
Speaker 9: do that can often.
Speaker 7: Contaminate their sink, contaminate.
Speaker 9: Other food that they're making along the same time, and
Speaker 9: other places within their kitchen like spice bottles. So the
Speaker 9: kind of message that's out there as don't wash your chicken,
Speaker 9: which is really not a great message because people are like, well,
Speaker 9: I wash my chicken, so why don't you tell me
Speaker 9: how to do it safely?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 9: Yeah, And so it's it's more about like, if this
Speaker 9: is something that you're gonna do, making sure that you
Speaker 9: clean and sanitize your sink basin, which is the most
Speaker 9: likely place to get contaminated because we do a lot
Speaker 9: of other food related things in the sink, like rints
Speaker 9: less for in a calendar, for instance, and so bacteria
Speaker 9: that's in the basin can bounce up into that calendar,
Speaker 9: which is what we saw in our study.
Speaker 1: Hopefully this helps. Before you get into our takeaways, I
Speaker 1: do want to recommend a documentary that both Ben and
Speaker 1: Bill are in.
Speaker 7: Oh Wow.
Speaker 1: It's on Netflix, and it's called Poisoned. The Dirty Truth
Speaker 1: about Your Food this is my first step in my research,
Speaker 1: and then I grabbed these guys from the documentary. It's
Speaker 1: directed by Stephanie Sucked and it's based on a book
Speaker 1: by the journalist Jeff Benedict. So I will say watching this,
Speaker 1: it took me about three minutes of hearing Bill talk
Speaker 1: before I was convinced I was pretty wrong about food
Speaker 1: poison because it opens and you know, talking about all
Speaker 1: these horrible stories. I was like, yeah, okay, this exists.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fair enough. Hey, we love someone who knows when
Speaker 3: they're wrong and they can admit it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing about this podcast.
Speaker 1: And also I'm not embarrassed. Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know at the end of these episodes, when we
Speaker 3: learn like this large amount of information, I always wonder
Speaker 3: how much it's gonna change my life personally, And I
Speaker 3: think this is the first time where like, actually, yeah,
Speaker 3: I probably will. I've never really checked the temperature of
Speaker 3: the chicken. I just kind of look at it and
Speaker 3: it's like kind of looks done, and you know, I
Speaker 3: might start I do have a thermometer, I might start
Speaker 3: poking it. Yeah. And then on the opposite side of this,
Speaker 3: like I do feel like a little I feel like
Speaker 3: it's I feel safer getting rarer meats. Yeah, when I
Speaker 3: go to a restaurant, so I might try something that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's more just understanding what the actual risks you
Speaker 1: should be worried about our overall. I feel like, yeah,
Speaker 1: usually we talked to an expert and it's and they
Speaker 1: tell us what's wrong with something, and I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, great, thanks, I'm not gonna change let me
Speaker 1: go back, let me go back my life. But this
Speaker 1: one seems pretty important.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is helpful.
Speaker 5: I would say I was, you know, as someone a
Speaker 5: food poisoning victim survivor survivor. Yes, sir, I thought your
Speaker 5: premise was ridiculous. I did think people overestimated. So the
Speaker 5: fact that it really isn't you know, like there's a
Speaker 5: lot of food poisoning.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: So I will say I'm going to apologize to some
Speaker 5: people out there who I said maybe.
Speaker 1: Faking anyway, right to your Congress people, I guess about salmonella.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's do that's something. What are we doing?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's crazy.
Speaker 3: Feels similar to the Headlights episode where it's like, look
Speaker 3: what they're doing over there makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: Just they just want demonstrable differences and not and like
Speaker 1: Bill says, where it's like everyone freaked out how expensive
Speaker 1: meat would be. It adjusts. It's not you know, once
Speaker 1: it's built into the thing. It's just that's what it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, over all these the factory farms and stuff.
Speaker 1: It makes me want to go, you know, avoid that more. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, who knows. Yeah, it's it seems pretty bad
Speaker 1: out there. Of course, the ownus just falls on us
Speaker 1: as consumers and cookers ourselves.
Speaker 4: To do it.
Speaker 1: Like so many other things issue too.
Speaker 4: If no one cares until they're a victim of it.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: So like I'm not really thinking about Semonel if I
Speaker 4: don't have.
Speaker 6: You know, they had this big food safety conference in
Speaker 6: Cleveland a couple of weeks ago, four thousand people in
Speaker 6: a room. And they always pick somebody once a year
Speaker 6: to be like the keynote speaker for the conference. But
Speaker 6: the guy who gave the speech, he goes. You know,
Speaker 6: one of the things that we should really do is,
Speaker 6: you know, put Bill Marler into retirement.
Speaker 7: Is Bill Marler here.
Speaker 4: Kills kills kills such.
Speaker 1: Thing, No such thing as a production of kaleidoscope content.
Speaker 1: Our Executive producers are Kate Osbourne and Mangeshkur. The show
Speaker 1: is created by Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, That's Me and
Speaker 1: Devin Joseph. Theme and credits song by Manny Fidel, mixing
Speaker 1: by Steve Bone. Our guest this week are Ben Chapman
Speaker 1: and Bill Marler. Visit No Such Thing dot show to
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Speaker 1: a question for us, our email is many Noah Deevin
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com. You can also lead this voicemail
Speaker 1: by calling the number in our show notes. We'll be
Speaker 1: back next week with a new episode.
Speaker 4: Thanks Hells, Hess Hells, No Such Thing