Ain’t No Thing But a Chicken Wing

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Updated on April 14, 2009

Worker Bees’ Daily Bites:

Is it possible to combine compelling, handy health information with humor? Bees agree: it ain’t no thing! Get clickin’, Apples, and then scoot over to the forum to share your thoughts!

Raising Insurance Rates Everywhere

We know young male drivers get in more auto accidents than anyone. Apparently, it’s all the video games.

Finally, Britain Is Bad at Something!

We might not eat our vegetables, but at least we don’t eat 50% too much salt. Oh, wait, we eat 200% too much. Good grief! Processed food products have got to stop! Salt is in every processed food imaginable. Why? It tastes good, it’s really cheap, and it makes poor-quality ingredients seem more appealing to the taste buds. From salad dressing to burgers, from cheese sauce to pasta, food producers of America are on a relentless mission to turn every body into a giant salt flat.

Biggest salt desert in the world!

Gardawind Flickr Photo

Pork: Just Another Meat, Really

Junior Apple Greg wrote in the other day to ask if pork (and ham) is a safe protein bet. While associations of cleanliness don’t extend to our cloven, curly-tailed friends, the truth is that pigs are just as safe as any other meat and the days of pork-borne trichinosis are pretty much gone, thanks to tougher standards for factories farms. Absolute safety of pork (and meat), though, is another issue altogether.

Pork is usually really high in sodium, mainly because so much of the pork people eat comes in processed forms like bacon, sausage, ham and deli meats (and why Mark’s email to the Apples this morning recommended indulging in bacon on an infrequent basis – and make sure to find the lower-fat variety). Even pork loin is often packaged in a saline solution. If you can find organic, low-sodium pork, that’s sayin’ something.

However, the pig farmers of America want you to know that pork is great because, hey, it doesn’t have mad cow disease. Now that’s some marketing. (Imagine the possibilities: “Pork – unlike cheese, it doesn’t melt. Therefore, it’s better.” “Ham – why refill the stapler when you can make a sandwich?” Hey, this is fun! “Pork: Absolutely nothing to do with the price of tea in China. And therefore better.”) Meanwhile, scientists are attempting to clone pigs that are packed with Omega-3 fatty acids. And that concludes our pork dissertation for today.

The very picture of health. Or something.