Should you really stop eating raw beetroot?

It is prob­a­bly the sum­mer heat that has weak­ened, once again, the abil­i­ty of many jour­nal­ists to check their sources and to do the sim­ple job of going back to the ori­gin of a piece of infor­ma­tion to analyse it, ver­i­fy it and have an opin­ion.

(It is under­stand­able that Google claims to be able to replace jour­nal­ists with robots, in fact most jour­nal­ists are already copy and paste robots).

The DGCCRF press release on the con­sump­tion of raw beet­root was there­fore relayed iden­ti­cal­ly, in many news­pa­pers and web­sites, with the fac­tu­al errors and approx­i­mate for­mu­la­tions it con­tained. In its cur­rent form it could lead peo­ple to believe that eat­ing raw beet­root is dan­ger­ous, where­as the orig­i­nal study is much less positive.

Let's go through the details again, so that you can real­ly appre­ci­ate the health risks of eat­ing raw beetroot.

Raw beetroot poisoning in France and in several countries?

Well, no… going back to the source, ANSES only men­tions France and Finland. Full stop. And in fact, almost only France (one case in Finland).

Not in Germany, not in Spain. Not in the United States, that coun­try obsessed with hygien­ism where they patent­ed a device to pro­tect birth­day cakes from bac­te­ria dis­persed by blow­ing out can­dles.

Google con­firms this: there are many arti­cles on the "dan­gers" of raw beet, but they deal with oth­er aspects (such as the high oxalate con­tent) and do not men­tion the risk of food poi­son­ing.

I con­clude that this is a very French dis­ease. Like the "crise de foie".

No known scientific explanation, or "unidentified cause"?

The DGCCRF says that there is no sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tion for the exact cause of the TIACs linked to the con­sump­tion of raw beet­root, and that it is based on the "tra­di­tion­al wis­dom" that beet­root has always been cooked.

The word­ing is very ambigu­ous. It evokes, at least for me, a mys­te­ri­ous pathogen, a sort of Ebola virus of beet­root, a threat unknown to all, impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy despite all the sci­en­tif­ic efforts made.

Here again, the orig­i­nal opin­ion of ANSES is much less clear-cut. It explains that, in the var­i­ous cas­es iden­ti­fied, the analy­ses were not iden­ti­cal and the same caus­es were not sought.

No com­mon fac­tor emerges (this is the "no sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tion"), but the analy­ses should be car­ried out more sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, in the case of new cas­es, in order to have com­plete results that would allow us to make a decision.

Collective or individual catering

There are many prepa­ra­tions that are pro­hib­it­ed in mass cater­ing, which are eat­en at home or in restau­rants. These include steak tartare, sushi and fish ceviche.

Why is this so? Because mass cater­ing usu­al­ly involves peo­ple with weak­er immune sys­tems (chil­dren, the elder­ly, the sick), peo­ple who do not have the choice of whether or not to take a slight risk, and because the scales are not the same: in a restau­rant, it is unlike­ly that all the cus­tomers will order tartare, where­as in a school can­teen it is often a one-off menu.

Finally, the con­se­quences are also dif­fer­ent: for a retire­ment home, deal­ing with a hun­dred or so res­i­dents suf­fer­ing from mild and harm­less food poi­son­ing can still turn into an organ­i­sa­tion­al nightmare.

Did you know, for exam­ple, that eggshells are for­bid­den in insti­tu­tion­al kitchens, which must buy eggs that are already cooked and pack­aged, or raw eggs stored in spe­cial con­tain­ers or pow­dered? Yet, every day, at home, you make eggs!

The actual level of raw beetroot poisoning

Short-term poisoning, not serious

In the "numer­ous cas­es" report­ed by the DGCCRF, none of them required hos­pi­tal­iza­tion, all of them were resolved with­in a few hours at the most, even though each case involved col­lec­tive cater­ing, in par­tic­u­lar school­child­ren, and there­fore "frag­ile" people.

In oth­er words, some­thing less seri­ous than the tourista that mil­lions of tourists suf­fer as a nec­es­sary and tem­po­rary evil.

How I prepare it

(And here we see that the recipes, the way beet­root is served, do not seem to be analysed at all).

When I make raw beet­root, I let it mar­i­nate in sea­soned olive oil for a few hours. This mari­nade will some­how "cook" the beet­root, which will lose some of its very par­tic­u­lar, slight­ly earthy smell (you may or may not like it, I love it) and some of its crunchiness.

At the last minute, I add the oth­er ingre­di­ents, often crushed wal­nuts, and it's a com­bi­na­tion that works per­fect­ly well.

Depending on the taste, the beet­root can be mar­i­nat­ed for more or less time.