Foie gras might promote arthritis, Alzheimer’s or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
A Swedish and American team of collaborators have it in for force-feeding palmipeds.
Apparently, injection or ingestion of tangles of amyloid A protein, found by these scientists in foie gras, by certain transgenic mice will aggravate their propensity to develop similar, severe tangles that lead to death from interfering with internal organ function. Spleen, liver, GI tract, heart muscle – but not the brain.
The fact that mice do not normally ingest sources of raw goose or duck liver, not to mention the other incriminated aliments such as “meat derived from sheep or seemingly healthy cattle”, was not mentioned as a possible cause of the inability of these mice to metabolize the source proteins. Nor was there any discussion of how too much interleukin 6 production predisposes these mice to amyloidosis even without their rich new diet. I also blink at the use of phosphate buffered saline solution as a control substance rather than, say, liver extract prepared the same way from non force-fed fowl.
The line I appreciate the most is “The AEF activity of foie gras was reduced, but not abolished, by cooking, as specified by the supplier.” (The suppliers were unnamed foie gras producers from the US and France). This entailed 20 minutes of 95 degrees C cooking. That’s pretty minimal for a foie gras mi-cuit but I’ll let it be; people do occasionally serve it salted and raw. Then again, “when this material was dissolved in 6 M guanidine HCl, incubated at 37°C for 24 h, dialyzed against PBS, and injected” it became perfectly harmless. I’ll suggest it to Joël Robuchon.
“Amyloidogenic potential of foie gras” by Alan Solomon, Tina Richey, Charles L. Murphy, Deborah T. Weiss,Jonathan S. Wall, Gunilla T. Westermark, and Per Westermark. PNAS | June 26, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 26 | 10998-11001 (check it out for yourself:) OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE
Posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 5:58 pm Categorized as:General You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
