The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Is anyone here knowledgable about food safety? I really hate getting food poisoning. I've been in Asia for a few months and I'm surprised to see prepared foods including seafood and meat being left at room temperature at grocery stores and food markets all day long. I've seen this in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. In the US prepared foods are required to be refrigerated or heated at all times for food safety reasons.
I did some googling but didn't find any satisfying answers as to whether I personally (as an American) can safely eat food that's been left at room temperature for hours in grocery stores in Asia or not. One forum I read said that food producers (i.e. farmers) have much more strict regulations in East Asia than the rest of the world so it's not a concern. (They also said that in the US and other countries, food safety falls more on the end seller rather than the producer as in East Asia.) Another forum said that Asians are just more used to the contagions that would be present than foreigners so they don't get sick. Another forum mentioned something called "fried rice syndrome" which is a common food poisoning from leftover rice that hasn't been stored properly. If either of the latter two cases are true I think I should avoid eating food that's been sitting out but I'd like to get some advice here.
In my experience, western visitors to Asia are more likely to get diarrhea from poor quality water than to get any sort of food poisoning, so as long as you are confident in the drinking water I wouldn't worry. Something to consider is that there is a big difference between leaving out raw meat and prepared food because many herbs and spices act as antimicrobial agents. This is sometimes cited as one of the reasons that cuisines from tropical regions are more heavily spiced than in colder climes.
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