I don't know at what point it becomes genuinely 'dangerous', but it's better to have the meat fresh. It will upset your system the more off the meat is, which will decrease your appetite for a while and may cause fever/diahrrea etc... Meat which would cause this should taste bad in the first place, but if you go ahead and eat it, feel bad and make sure not to eat such off-meat again you should be fine. The excess-bacteria can cause you problems, acid-resistant bacteria can survive the stomach and assault the organs adjoining the intestines. I think after a minor incident your body should recover after feeling dodgy for a bit, a more serious incident can push your body to more extreme measures of cleansing such as diahrrea(to flush out)/fever(to cook/kill). I don't know how off the food would have to be to be truly dangerous. Dangerous I would think is anything which would cause long-term problems. Ground beef is damaged meat and more exposed to bacteria, so will go off faster. Similarly, when liquid in the meat crystallises upon freezing this damages the meat, bursting the cells and exposing them to bacteria. Also, besides this, the older the meat gets the more of it's nutritional value it loses. I don't know how much of this is just 'lost', but bacteria will also decrease it. They are 'eating' the meat and excreting waste, the waste is what causes the nasty smell. The waste is much less useful than the fresh. I don't know however, whether the waste in itself would be harmful, or if it's simply a marker our body recognises and uses to warn us of bacteria(by recognising it as a bad smell).
I'm actually experiencing the decreased appetite, and increased queasiness regarding any animal product which could possibly be less fresh at the moment. I have some fat-scraps for example from my butcher which he gave me out of something looking like a bin, and he made sure it was 'for the birds'. Now this looks and smells fresh in general but I'm fairly queasy already and very cautiois. This is because my body has already been weakened by eating off-mince, the decreasing freshness of which I had previously mentioned being concerned about in another thread. This mince smelled and tasted bad from the first day I got it, and continued to increase in rancidity. So if you follow your senses you should be fine, and your body has defence mechanisms(fever, diahrrea etc) to fall back on if you slip up. You can eat some really off food(which you have to go against your basal instincts to do in the first place), much worse than anything I've had and recover. Some people even purposefully eat off-meat as they want to cleanse their bodies(through diahrrea etc). What they don't seem to realise however is they they're cleansing their bodies of the 'bad stuff' in the off-meat. They will say that it is good because they feel better after they're done cleansing. 'Well no shit!' You feel good; you eat bad stuff; you feel really bad; your body goes through process to make it better; you feel good, which is a hell of a lot better than feeling really bad. Whereas before you were used to feeling good.
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