Een interessant bericht van Vinny Pinto, EM-expert uit Amerika, die hij vandaag op zijn Facebook-prikbord plaatst:

How I Answered the Question “But don’t you worry about germs and parasites when you eat raw meat, fish and dairy?”

In 2006, I was giving a one-day seminar near Appleton, Wisconsin on a special class of beneficial probiotic microbes (Syntropic Antioxidative Microbes, Type 4 consortia) and their applications in agriculture and in human and animal health. During the Q&A part of the session, a woman said: “I came to this seminar because I know of your work in the realms of largely-raw and partly-raw Paleolithic diets, and I have visited your raw Paleo diet website many times. I drove a long distance today to ask you this question: Don’t you worry about being exposed to germs and parasites when you eat raw meat, raw fish and raw dairy?”

Here is what I said to her in reply:
“Yes, I worry a lot about microbes and so-called parasites in relation to my consumption of raw meat, fish and dairy! Specifically, what I worry about is the possibility that, due to modern sanitation practices and the ubiquity of antibiotics and anthelmintic drugs in modern agriculture, I may not be exposed to as many microbes and so-called parasites in the raw meat, dairy and fish that I eat as I would prefer.

You see, I believe that in order to be truly healthy, and to able to have a truly strong immune system, our bodies need to be regularly exposed to a very wide variety of microbes and so-called parasites, where most of the latter are not true parasites at all, but rather commensals which are quite necessary for optimal health! So, I tend to go out of my way to increase my exposure to all sorts of microbes and so-called parasites in my diet, and about the only cautionary rule of thumb that I employ is that I totally avoid the eating raw meat of carnivorous animals (such a pigs), in order to avoid trichinosis, an illness caused by exposure ot a type of roundworm known as Trichinella spiralis.”

In a smaller break-out group a bit later in the seminar, I expounded upon my earlier answer to the woman’s question about microbes and “parasites” in raw foods, adding that the vast majority of microbes, over 99.99% of them, are harmless, and that even many of the so-called foodborne “pathgenic microbes”, such as Listeria, Salmonella, and the “bad” strains of E. coli (i.e., the O157:H7 variant) are harmless to persons who have healthy GI tracts and who have not abused their bodies and their GI tracts by having ingested antibiotics.