http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/us/05popcorn.html
The above article is from the New York Times and might be interesting to all of us (It talks about inflammation and the person was diagnosed at National Jewish Hospital in Denver)!!
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6 comments:
After reading that article my thoughts are maybe we should never go outside or eat or drink anything because I feel like everything is a potential risk.
I agree...it seems that anything in excess will end up being bad for us!!
Maybe another point is that artificial foods are not always better than real ones. Diacetyl tastes and smells like butter, but of course it isn't butter, and it seems to be harmful to the lungs. I guess this popcorn addict didn't want to get fat so he used the artificial flavor instead of butter. How many of us use artificial sweeteners instead of sugar? I know people who say "Oh, never eat sugar, it's bad for you." But how many foods do you know of that are so pure they are actually crystalline? The ability to make informed decisions about our lives...that's why we're in school!
However, real dairy butter (and pure sugar) can make you gain weight if eaten in large quantities...and we learned recently in our Inflammation course (495) that obesity is an inflammatory disease...so it's a toss-up I think...eat fake butter-flavored popcorn and develop lung inflammation or eat real delicious butter and develop full body inflammation...It goes back to the old saying "Everything in moderation"!! : )
The city of Barcelona has recently found that a local river, which is the source for their tap water, is contaminated with diacetyl. Although butter-flavored water sounds really cool to me, there will probably be some health issues coming out of this. I don't know if evaporated diacetyl levels in the area are high enough to cause Bronchiolitis obliterans; but if they are, a large population could be exposed to this inflammatory agent and it would be interesting to see what subset of the population is at risk. It might turn out that the obese guy, who was previously the only one exposed to high levels of vaporized diacetyl due to his microwave popcorn eating habit, is actually at lower risk than the fit Barcelonan. This study might have already been done in the microwave popcorn factories, but how many really fit people work in popcorn factories? The original article also noted that the National Jewish patient lost 50 pounds after altering his popcorn eating habits. Is there a link between lung inflammation and obesity? Is Barcelona going to be the next “fattest city in Europe”? Will flamenco dancing get really, really loud in the future?
Reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17489412&ordinalpos=17&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
The HTML tag for my reference doesn't seem to be working, but here's the title which can be found in pubmed: Managing an odour episode in Barcelona's water supply: strategies adopted, the causative agent (diacetyl) and determination of its organoleptic properties.
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