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Regarding:

https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/32569/eating-chicken-bones-and-chicken-bone-soup

I am torn--on the one hand, we allow food safety questions. On the other, whether chicken bones are good or bad for you seems quite close to a health claim question.

Should this this question be closed or not closed?

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I closed it. The question has nothing to do with food safety - the word "toxins" is a red flag normally associated with pseudoscience and fad diets, and even if the OP genuinely meant it in the sense of bacterial protein toxins or poisonous substances, to give him the benefit of the doubt, it's still extremely difficult to interpret as a culinary question because of the number of assumptions and wild guesses that would have to be involved in any reasonable answer.

Specifically, one would have to make only marginally-educated guesses about not only which substances could leach out of bones and in what quantities, but also about what level of intake of those substances should be considered "toxic". Clearly they are not "instant death" toxic, otherwise the OP wouldn't be around to ask the question, so what we're calling "toxic" is at best somewhere in the category of suspected carcinogens or other longer-term health risks, and those subjects have never been on-topic here on Seasoned Advice. We deal with culinary questions, not dietetics and medical research.

If it were even a notable claim then I might have suggested posting it on the Skeptics site, but there's no source cited, and I've never heard of it before.

Ever since this site launched, there have always been meta questions about the apparent difference between food safety and health/diet, but I think it's explained pretty well in our tag wiki - food safety is about foodborne pathogens, and introducing the concept of nebulous "toxins" does not grant anyone a free pass to ask fundamentally off-topic questions about how generally healthy something is.

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"Do they have calcium?" is answerable. The rest sure looks like health to me, all about bodies absorbing and filtering toxins. It's not asking if they're safe to eat.

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  • So does a cement brick - bioavailability will be another matter ... which points the whole question firmly towards the biology or health SE, I guess :) Jan 10, 2017 at 12:34

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