I thought this was satire when I clicked on it. The more I read it got progressively worse as I realized how long it took to even mention prion disease. This article doesn't really seem reviewed which seems to be a trend I'm noticing in Atlas Obscura articles. Is anyone else thinking this?<p>Edit: The person who wrote this article has no background at all in Food Safety, nor should they really be talking about this subject so lightly. Honestly, this article is dangerous to even really promote in the way its written. They lightly jester at that idea that a 1% fatality rate is an extremely rare occurrence and suggests that brains should be consumed in higher amounts. At first I thought this was satire but this advice is just genuinely harmful.
Author has a very hand wavey attitude toward prions.<p>There are many kinds of prions capable of causing spongiform encephalopathy in humans and likely others which are currently undiscovered. To suggest we continue eating brains because some people "probably have an immunity" is irresponsible. To my knowledge, evidence of immunity to prion disease has not been scientifically established.<p>Edit: Furthermore, prion diseases can have long incubation periods (years or decades before symptoms manifest), making them extremely difficult to detect in normal clinical settings.
Prions are scary- these bad shapes cause your shapes to be bad. There is no cure or even a way to detect them, except at autopsy.<p>Otherwise I'd totally be into brains. Good source of omega3s.
Animal organ meats tend to accumulate pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, synthetic growth hormones and antibiotics, etc. Livestock operations use the cheapest animal feed they can find, turning it into as much animal mass as they can with hormones and antibiotics, and bioaccumulation of toxins becomes an issue.<p>Eating anything coming out of that pipeline is probably not that great of an idea, but organ meats are the least advisable portion.
I've had scrambled eggs and calf brains before, as a small child. But the brains were canned, and even my great-aunt who cooked them spoke somewhat disparagingly of their flavor as compared with fresh; I remember them as salty and metallic.<p>I'd like to try fresh at some point, but I doubt even most of the specialty butchers around here would be too likely to carry them.
My takeaways from quickly skimming the article:<p>- not that many prion diseases among brain eating people surprisingly (but are statistics accurate? what if they develop later?)<p>- perhaps because our ancestors did it, human DNA has a gene that "protects" from prion diseases somehow. didn't know that could be a thing!
I mean isn't the problem that <i>we</i> weren't eating the brains but feeding them back to the livestock allowing prion diseases to spread horizontally and vertically.<p>If a prion infected livestock is processed and consumed completely by us, we'd still probably have some infections, but far less than the entire population of a country eating infected meat that has been eating prion infected meat all the time.
Disappointing this tells us scientists "established" the harm of dietary cholesterol in the 50s without mentioning that it was a mistake. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had to admit this around 10 years ago.