MD and I would like to wish you all a happy, safe and prosperous 2008. Thanks for hanging in there with me for the past couple of years and putting up with my dilatory answers to all your comments.

Speaking of comments (of which there are now about 30 stacked up on me), one of my new year’s resolutions is to try to be more diligent in getting all the comments dealt with. You can help me do so by not asking specific medical questions related to your own health or that of a friend or family member. If I weren’t a physician I could answer these questions all day long, but since I am a licensed physician all kinds of medico-legal issues are involved. I hate to just blow people off when they ask these kinds of questions, so I simply procrastinate and don’t answer.

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Although this isn’t really the season for an E. coli O157:H7 infection – such infections are most common in the summer and spring – a recent New York Times article (requires free registration) about the lengths to which slaughterhouses are going to eliminate such infections got me to thinking.

There are a couple of reasons we’ve had this plague visited upon us: we mistreat our beef cattle and we mistreat ourselves. There isn’t a whole lot we can do to deal with the mistreatment of cattle on a feedlot, but there is a lot we can do to keep from mistreating ourselves. Before we get into the steps we can take to protect ourselves from E. coli O157, let’s take a deeper look at where this bug comes from and what it does.

There are countless millions of harmless E. Coli bacteria in the digestive systems of cattle just as there are in our own. But when cows are fed on grain, which contains many more calories per pound than does grass or hay, they gain weight and fatten more quickly, and the conditions in their GI tracts changes to favor E. coli O157. If the cattle are ill or stressed – conditions common to a feedlot – they become even more susceptible. The first E. coli O157 infection was reported in 1982, which makes it likely that the bug mutated from a non-pathogenic E. coli around that time.

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I loved medium boiled eggs with salt and pepper and a pat of butter as shown above (my breakfast this morning), but I don’t have them all that often because it’s a real pain to peel them. Not only is it a pain for me to peel them, I seem to always end up with pieces of the shell in with the eggs, which I hate. Then I came across the video linked below.

At first I figured this was one of those things that looks easy but in reality is really difficult. But it’s not. It works pretty much as portrayed in the video with one caveat: you have to blow much harder than it looks like this guy is doing. And it helps if the eggs aren’t boiled until they are truly hard. If they are semi-soft, they come out pretty easily. When they do come out, they come out shell free.

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A number of readers have expressed an interest in how MD and I eat. I’ve shown some photos in previous posts, but since I had my camera out taking photos of Tahoe I decided to throw in a couple of meals so that you can see exactly what we eat. The above photo is my dinner plate last night, which was all cooked on the grill except for the tomatoes. What you can’t see in this photo is the glass of red wine (it was a Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet, if you’re interested). We had berries and heavy cream for dessert and a cup of decaf Americano.

Below is my plate at breakfast this morning. Besides the eggs, bacon, fruit and toast (we allow ourselves one slice of low-carb bread for breakfast on Sundays but no other days) you can see, we split a bottle of cheap champagne (a low-alcohol (11%) Prosecco brut, which we also do only on Sunday mornings)colored with a little orange juice, and Cafe Americano.

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