Buy Dying for a Hamburger: Modern Meat Processing and the Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease here, one of many top quality Butchering
books at Chef2Chef. We greatly appreciate your patronage at Chef2Chef and look forward to offering you great products and prices in the future.
Current Page: Cookbook Store : Butchering : Item 11 of 71
|
|
![]()
|
|
Dying for a Hamburger: Modern Meat Processing and the Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease
by Murray Waldman and Marjorie Lamb
Available from Amazon
$16.47
|
Features
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books June 30, 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 031234015X
ASIN: B000VYVCDY
Product Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Alzheimer's disease is the fourth leading cause of death among older Americans, but its cause remains a mystery. Waldman, coroner for the city of Toronto, and Lamb (Two Minutes a Day for a Greener Planet) argue that Alzheimer's is a new disease and not, as many believe, one that has simply become more widespread as people live longer. The authors assert that, like mad cow disease, it's caused by infectious agents called prions; the protein plaques in the brain of Alzheimer's patients, they argue, resemble those in the brains of people with prion diseases. (Stanley Prusiner, the Nobelist who discovered prions, speculated 20 years ago that Alzheimer's might be a prion disease.) Waldman and Lamb believe the increased incidence of Alzheimer's is due to mass consumption, and the resulting mass production, of meat over the last century, which would explain its rarity in places like India. Scientists have shown that prion diseases can be transmitted between species (e.g., from cows to humans), and that high temperature doesn't kill prions. This isn't a jeremiad against eating meat. Waldman and Lamb lay out their case in a measured fashion that many will find convincing and disturbing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
Waldman and Lamb open with the fact that there is no sure answer as to the cause of Alzheimer's disease, which they compare with other illnesses that cause brain damage, including mad cow disease, before exploring probable causes. They claim that common to all these afflictions is the prion, a rogue protein found in the brains of Alzheimer's victims that is passed to humans from mad cow-infected livestock via a complex food chain (see also Maxime Schwartz's superb How the Cows Turned Mad, 2003). The description of how four giant meat-processing corporations that dominate North American butcher aisles use "everything but the moo" to beef up our dinner plates while fattening their purses gives serious pause, and when naturally herbivorous cows force-fed beef are linked to the rise of Alzheimer's, the book takes on Upton Sinclairian, muckraker dimensions that just may turn some beef eaters into vegans. Meanwhile, the squeamish may have decided to leave unfinished a book that lays blame for Alzheimer's at the feet of cannibalism, albeit bovine, not human. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Dying for a Hamburger: Modern Meat Processing and the Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease (Hardcover)
This book has a good argument to a point, but in my opinion drops the ball on dairy cattle. These aniimals are not slaughtered at a relatively young age, as with beef cattle, but are kept in the breeding and milk production cycle as long as possible. This seems to be an ample length of time for symptoms of mad cow disease or other prion-type maladies to surface, but there seems to be no report that this has ever happened. The author mentions that not only are (or were) dairy cows more likely to be fed the "cannibalistic" protein supplements, but are in fact more likely to be made into hamburger, which he says exacerbates the spread of prionic diseases. So the excuse for lack of evidence falls short with dairy cattle, and there seems to be little to support his conclusions. His statistics are also questionable in that only 50,000 or so deaths are attributed to Alzheimer's in the US for any given year; given the average 8-year progression from first syptoms until death, and the 35 million or so persons over 65 years old, the report of cases and nursing home residents seems exaggerated. Only 2.5 million deaths occur annually in this country, a very stable number since 1990, and it seems unlikely that 500,000 of them are individuals with Alzheimer's but only a tenth that many are attributed to it.
Comment (1) | Permalink |
(Report this)
|
|
|
Dying for a Hamburger: Modern Meat Processing and the Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease
by Murray Waldman and Marjorie Lamb
Available from Amazon
$16.47
|
|
