So a new "report" by a fledgling food research group named Clear Food has come out about hotdogs. You might have heard about this on the news, or from some day time talk shows that talked about it recently, or the many articles about the subject. In many of the articles, the title is something like "human DNA found in hotdogs", "meat found in vegetarian hotdogs", or some combination of the two followed by "report shows" or "study shows". In the report itself and mentioned in numerous articles, Clear Food claims that 345 hotdogs and sausages were analyzed, and 14.4% were found to be problematic. 10% of vegetarian samples have meat in them, there are label inaccuracies, 1/5th of the vegetarian samples had hygienic issues, pork was found in 3% of the samples where no pork should have been, and most shocking of all-- HUMAN DNA WAS FOUND IN 2% OF HOTDOGS (omgwtfbbq), and 2/3rds of the human DNA was in vegetarian hotdogs at that! YOU MIGHT BE LITERALLY EATING PEOPLE (maybe) Pictured above: a cannibal. Problem? Snopes.com, a website dedicated to validating and debunking urban legends, rumors, and stories of questionable origin, tackled this topic and concluded that Clear Food's claims where unproven. As of writing this, Clear Food's tests, testing conditions, methodology, and any possible confirmation or duplication of their claims are nowhere to be seen. No brands have been singled out as the problematic ones, which you would think would be important when they're finding human DNA in the things among all of the other problems, right? Yet despite the total lack of peer review or verification of Clear Food's claims, countless news outlets ran articles on this subject without disclosing those important little details. Clear Foods has been using this hotdog report as an example of their work for their new Kickstarter. A new kickstarter, for a new company, with a new report that no one has heard of a week ago- but I digress. They've raised 77,696$ at the time of writing this out of their 100,000$ goal, with 24 days to go. Suspiciously there are only 275 backers, meaning each backer pledged an average of 280$. For such a large amount of money, I would imagine there would be significantly more backers pledging smaller donations. Regardless, this "report" has been spread so far and so much across the internet that they've amassed a large amount of their funding in a relatively short amount of time. I have been digging into this subject for a couple hours now, and the more read about it, the more skeptical I am of Clear Food's legitimacy. At this point, Clear Food looks more or less like a scam. It seems a lot of people don't share my opinion, however. I've seen comments from people who are buying into it and are already vowing never to eat a hotdog again. It's a great example of how gullible people are, and how someone can profit off of this gullibility with some pretty graphics and unsubstantiated claims. None of the media seem to have updated their articles with any of this information- yet, I did notice a lot of them say the Clear Food report is a report, while Snopes says a lot of them said it was a study. Minor discrepancy, but whatever. So in conclusion, anyone up for a hotdog? If you aren't, there's PLENTY of reasons that I would find valid. Except the Clear Food report.
Snopes didn't seem like they did their homework here (on the company). This company recently closed Series A in September: http://www.businesswire.com/news/ho...Launches-Bring-Next-Gen-Genomics-Transparency It's also not exactly surprising for a company with no product and no news to report to not show up in social or general media, and tech startups are notoriously secretive before they have secured funding (makes sense if you think about it). Checking into their team and board members turned up no red flags, a PhD who's worked on Mass Specs, a guy who works for a company that produces a product to determine food freshness, etc. ~ As for Kickstarter, tech KS tends to attract higher donors than other types of campaigns. $234/backer for a heating rod https://www.kickstarter.com/project...e-alternative-to-the-electric?ref=recommended $210/backer for a digitizer pen https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1958554063/phree-make-the-world-your-paper/description Those are products tho, I had a hard time finding websites/services (and don't feel like looking more for now). And doing a KS when you are in the press? Of course you do that, that's not suspicious, that's smart. ~ As for the report, who knows. It is true that this is basically just them talking. I await more information.
Well, here in Brazil something similar did happen, but not with companies. Some guys were actually murdering people and using human meat in their food( don't recall if it was a restaurant or just a snack bar). But what I really want to say @Saprophyte , is that I initially loved your signature, but then I remembered that part from Evangelion. Damn anime ruined a part of my soul.
You got some some information I didn't find @Sokolov , thanks. Very interesting. I've browsed through the tech section and have been doing some calculating and nothing comes close to 280$/backer. It's not really damning, it just stuck out to me. But I think that's splitting hairs at this point. Not sure if this was directed at me or Snopes. I just said I found it suspicious that there aren't more backers pledging smaller donations, not they're doing a KS while the media is talking about them. Indeed, it would be disadvantageous if the media was NOT covering your KS while they're talking about you. Anywho, I'm looking into Clear Labs. Their "flagship product" Clear View, which is what you get linked to if you click on their Technology page, is presumably what they used to evaluate the hot dogs in their report. You can request an invite to their private beta of it. I suppose that's nice, but the overall secretiveness of it seems counterproductive and hypocritical when they're trying to make the food industry more transparent. But, with that said, I do take back the "more or less a scam" part of the OP. I read another article about the Series A deal, which says Sasan Amini said "Clear Labs plans to launch the full version of its food analytics and database platform in the first half of 2016". I'm relatively sure they're doing... something. But we might be waiting a good long while before any real details come out. Well, fortunately for us, the language Clear Labs used is vague enough to allow for some other reason that human DNA is in hot dogs. They just said "human DNA", so it could have been a hair or something. Worst case scenario they're grinding up people and hot dogs out of them, but let's hope that isn't the case. <.< Lol. Yeah I can't say I'm a big NGE fan either, but I found that clip funny enough to warrant space in my sig.
Oh, I initially thought this thread was gonna be about the WHO statement that hot dogs and bacon cause cancer. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/h...f-cancer-with-processed-or-red-meat.html?_r=0
Even if WHO is 100% correct, it is still so worth it. A bacon burger or a bacon dog, with cheese of course, is to die for.
Remember that the WHO's listing is about the confidence that it is a carcinogen (a hazard assessment), and not how likely you are to get cancer from those things (a risk assessment). In this case, even if one were to eat bacon daily, the risk of cancer will increase by a negligible amount.
I could be wrong but if I recall the WHO report claimed that you have an 18% increased chance of getting cancer if you ate 2+ pieces of processed meat per day such as bacon, ham, etc. It wasn't an 18% increase over your normal "average" chance of getting cancer. It was an 18% increase over the chance of getting cancer from processed meat which had a very low chance to begin with. The media sensationalized the headlines and the meat industry was royally pissed about it.
I'd argue that the very act of being alive increases the risk of cancer and small chance percentage increases of getting cancer by doing stuff like digestion and walking around in moderate ammounts of solar radiation are just a way to prove you are not living as pod people. cause lets face it. we are going to have telomere shortening and we wont have telomerase except to make new gammetes so it's going to break down eventually, might aswell get some use out of it. unless you are a lobster
I believe the normal rate is under 5%. Thus, even at 2 pieces of bacon a day, you end up at an extra 0.9% risk at most.
so i'll take 5% and 5.9% and a world population of 7.3 billion and that gives me: 430700000 - 365000000 = 65700000 cases of intestinal cancers prevented if we stopped eating processed meats worldwide.
That's not how it'd work actually, because 5% and 5.9% are individual risk assessments for an average person of a particular culture. You can't extrapolate it that way because those billions of people have very different values, and many also would die to other causes long before they could even develop such a cancer.
you want me to calculate how many would die anyway before they'd get cancer? that's creepy, go get your head checked psycho.
Yeah I did hear about that, but I haven't looked into it much. Because I'm pretty sure I can speak for everyone who's ever had a vegan/vegetarian friend; they LOVE to lecture you about all of the horrible things meat has in it and the process in which it's made. And I'm relatively 1000000% sure I've heard the red meat = cancer argument like 10 years ago. So it's nothing new to me at this point. YEAH Hear that Sokolov? You're a psycho creepy cactus, whatchu gonna do now? I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go eat a couple elvis sandwiches and get cancer.
