Your health: FDA warns against eating raw cookie dough

Eat cookies, not cookie dough

Always cook your cookies.

The Food and Drug Administration warned last week that Americans shouldn't eat cookie dough or other raw batters, even if it's egg-free, due to the risk of contracting E. coli, The Washington Post reports.

Many might think it's the risk of salmonella and raw eggs that the FDA wants Americans to avoid. But this warning is about tainted flour after E. coli outbreaks in recent months were linked to cookie dough made with flour manufactured by General Mills.

And the reason is sort of disgusting: animal excrement. When birds and other animals do their business above wheat fields, they can spread bacteria from their infected feces onto the grain. That wheat is later processed into flour.

While the process does try to kill pathogens, it's not as intense as, for example, pasteurizing milk.

"There's no treatment to effectively make sure there's no bacteria in the flour," said Martin Wiedmann, food safety professor at Cornell University.

So if you eat cookie dough, you might be eating, in a sense, the diseased-remnants of bird poop.

Risk of becoming infected is nearly nullified when you boil, bake, roast, microwave or otherwise heat and cook with flour. None of that happens when you eat dough.

It's affected dozens already. As of June 8, 42 cases had been reported in 21 states, with 11 hospitalizations.

Device drains food out of your stomach

The most surprising thing about the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the obesity-control device called AspireAssist may be how little mainstream attention it attracted, The Washington Post reports.

Because, frankly, a weight-loss machine that lets you eat all you want and then drains the food out of your stomach is a pretty startling invention.

AspireAssist works like this: In a 15-minute outpatient procedure, a surgeon implants a tube into a patient's stomach. The tube is connected to a valve that lies flush against the skin of the abdomen. Twenty to 30 minutes after every meal, the patient opens the valve and uses a connecting device to drain the stomach contents into a toilet.

"The device removes approximately 30 percent of the calories consumed," the FDA said in announcing the approval June 14.

But is it actually just a "medical bulimia machine"?

That's what Yoni Friedhoff,- family physician, obesity medicine specialist and professor at the University of Ottawa, asks in his blog Weighty Matters. "Superficially it really does sound horrifying," he says.

Although few major news outlets made much of the FDA decision, a number of bloggers responded - usually with fury.

"I am absolutely, utterly and totally appalled that it was approved," says Florida endocrinologist and diabetologist Joseph Gutman, quoted on TheVerge.com. "This is mechanized bulimia. It's a device that makes bulimia OK." Gutman says he's rounding up physicians to jointly sue the FDA to take the device off the market.

The FDA approval said that the machine is intended for obese people who have been unable to lose weight by other methods and that it should not be used by anyone with an eating disorder.

Friedhoff, though he notes the initial skepticism, takes a thoughtful approach, saying it's too soon to judge what AspireAssist can and should do.

"It's going to be at least a decade before we'll even have the chance of having the robust long-term data to make an informed decision," he writes. "Until then, all I can really say is that I'm looking forward to reading it."