Food Safety
Perfectly Natural
Published June 19, 2009 @ 06:02AM PT
Apparently, almost no alternative medicines work as claimed, and they may include things like lead and arsenic. Funny how it took $2.5 billion worth of studies to prove that.
But yet Michael Pollan noted the following in In Defense of Food, which as you can probably tell, has been my latest favorite book:
People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, yet their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take - most of which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement takers tend to be better educated, more affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater than usual interest in personal health - confounders that probably account for their superior health.
Funny how confounding variables in complex biological systems might even completely mask potential harm from eating worthless supplements that may be contaminated with lead and arsenic. It might almost lead a person to believe that the scientific establishment has only a fuzzy grasp on what makes us healthy or sick, to the point where the only way they can even figure it out is to run long term, controlled tests and just see what happens.
But food contaminated with methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)? That stuff, buddy, that is safe to eat.
As a closing thought, apropos of very little and via Ezra Klein, Jon Stewart talks about healthcare reform.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Heal or No Heal | ||||
|
||||
One Step Closer to Food Safety Legislation
Published June 10, 2009 @ 11:38PM PT
There's a major food safety bill in front of Congress right now (The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009) and today it moved one step closer to becoming a law. It passed the House Energy & Commerce committee's subcommittee on Health. The bill will:
- Require all "food facilities" (which does NOT include farms or restaurants) to pay $500 fees annually.
- Require all "food facilities" to be inspected every 6 mos to 4 years, depending on their level of risk (the riskier you are, the more you get inspected).
- Establish a new traceability system from farm to fork. This is going to be an enormous undertaking and it will be very difficult on a technical level for the FDA to accomplish it. It's hard to say right now how it's going to look in the end, but the bill does specifically exempt farms that sell directly to consumers and restaurants.
- Give the FDA the authority to call a mandatory recall or look through a company's records.
The next step will be a vote by the full House Energy & Commerce Committee, expected next Wednesday. Following that, there will be a vote by the full House of Representatives. Assuming the bill passes the House, it will then go to the Senate. I don't have any information yet on what sort of timeframe we should expect from the Senate - they might not even look at it for months, even after it passes the House.
Same Old Pesticide Game With Glyphosate, Roundup
Published June 09, 2009 @ 01:36PM PT
Proponents of GMO crops, the untested, unlabeled genetically engineered foodstuffs flooding our supermarket aisles, will tell you that Monsanto's Roundup Ready (TM) products are an environmental success story because they reduce pesticide use. Not the use of Roundup, whose prime active ingredient is glyphosate, but that's beside the point.
It reduces the use of pesticides that have been around long enough to have gotten as much bad press as the pesticides they replaced, which were claimed to be perfectly fine and dandy until that story collapsed under the weight of evidence. Are we seeing a pattern, here?
Though indeed, looking over the carefully done glyphosate wikipedia entry, you can see why its supporters are so enthusiastic about it. It doesn't bioaccumulate, it seems to break down in soil when it isn't adsorbed to soil particles (though it adheres fairly tenaciously to soil, fwiw) and it results in fewer hospitalizations than older pesticides.
But it's not without health effects, as noted by even the notoriously risk-declaration-averse EPA. In combination with other chemicals ('inactive' or 'inert' ingredients) that may be included in Roundup, or other generic formulations, it may even become more harmful than indicated. So while glyphosate itself is not considered a particular risk to aquatic organisms, it may become very toxic to fish and amphibians in combination with a common type of surfactant used in Roundup.
And is pure glyphosate generally used alone? No, no it isn't. Therefore safety data on glyphosate alone presents an incomplete picture of its health effects.
Consider that a surfactant is a chemical, natural or lab-created, whose effect is to increase solubility in water. Which is to say that one of glyphosate's main claims to fame - that it's unlikely to show up in water and pose a threat to aquatic organisms - is immediately undercut by the fact that it's commonly mixed with a surfactant.
Pat Thomas, writing in The Ecologist covers not only additional of these suspected health effects that have shown up in various studies, including a possible cancer link, but touches on the innate problem with pesticide-based agriculture:
... This irresponsible type of agriculture has led to increased resistance to the herbicide and the emergence of ‘superweeds’ – and thus increased sales of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which farmers have to use more and more of in order to get the same effect. For instance, according to a new report by the US Center for Food Safety, per-acre applications of Roundup on soybeans rose by a factor of 2.5 (250 per cent) between 1994 and 2006. It took until 2002 for corn farmers truly to embrace GM, but between 2002 and 2005, glyphosate use on corn rose from 0.71 to 0.96lb/acre/year – a 35 per cent increase in just three years (see also box, opposite page). Thanks to Roundup, farmers worldwide are on a chemical treadmill they are finding it increasingly difficult to get off. ...
So not only have there been indications that it's unhealthier than suspected, it's already becoming less effective. Which means it will have to be replaced later on with some other as-yet-unknown chemical, though before that, not only is Roundup application likely to be stepped up, all the old pesticides Roundup was supposed to replace are going to have to be used alongside it to pick up the slack. The wikipedia entry provides this summary, taking it that next step, direct links to references added by me:
... The first documented cases of weed resistance to glyphosate were found in Australia, involving rigid ryegrass near Orange, New South Wales.[69] Some farmers in the United States have expressed concern that weeds are now developing with glyphosate resistance, with 13 states now reporting resistance, and this poses a problem to many farmers, including cotton farmers, that are now heavily dependent on glyphosate to control weeds.[70][71] Farmers associations are now reporting 103 biotypes of weeds within 63 weed species with herbicide resistance[70][71]. This problem is likely to be exacerbated by the use of roundup-ready crops [72]. ...
This story never seems to change. Though like a partner in an abusive relationship, the pesticide industry keeps coming back and saying that really, really honey, it's different this time. And their behavior in trying to gin up sympathy for these toxins hasn't changed since the publication of Silent Spring. The 1999 book, "Toxic Deception: How the chemical industry manipulates science, bends the law and endangers your health", has more:
"The Largest Diet Experiment In History"
Published June 05, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
That's how Dr. Don Lotter describes GMOs in two new papers on genetic food crop science, as summarized by Bonnie Powell at the Ethicurean.
The first paper, The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise, covers the flawed research and scientific assumptions that have produced genetically modified food crops. In it, he points to research revealing that transgenic yields are no better than that of the crops they replaced, eliminating their main claim to usefulness. He explains how the very imprecise art of genetic engineering actually works, and highlights the total lack of oversight and caution in the roll out of these products, as well as their unwanted side effects.
But the main message is simple; transgenic seed companies have no idea what they're doing:
Melamine from Pesticide in Baby Food
Published June 04, 2009 @ 10:59AM PT
Here's another reason that industrial agricultural chemicals need more extensive testing than they get now; because even if they don't stay around as persistent organic pollutants, their breakdown products may be toxic:
... Chemists with Health Canada in Ottawa report they have yet to identify the source of the pollutant they’ve just turned up in 71 of 94 samples of infant formula. In a report of their findings, however, just published online ahead of print in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Sheryl Tittlemier and her colleagues do finger one key suspect: the insecticide cyromazine. It's legal for use on food crops and animal forage — and melamine is one of its breakdown products. ...
The article goes on to note that traces of contamination are very low, below the allowable 'safe' dosages of contaminant. And how are those determined? I refer again to Dr. Sandra Steingraber's 1997 work, "Living Downstream," emphasis mine:
... In 1993, the National Research Council concluded that the current regulatory arrangement permits pesticide levels in food that are too high for children and infants. Tolerances are insufficiently protective, according to the council's report, for two basic reasons. First, they are not based solely or even primarily on health considerations. The actual values chosen as legal limits reflect the results of field trials designed to measure the highest residue concentrations likely under normal agricultural practice.
Second, the safety margins supposedly ensured by tolerances assume adult eating habits. However, children eat far fewer types of food in proportionally greater quantities. A nonnursing infant consumes fifteen times more pears than the average adult, for example. And pears, as we have seen, are one of the most heavily sprayed fruits on the market. Children also differ sharply in their ability to activate, detoxify, and excrete contaminants. Finally, childhood exposures to pesticides may lead to greater risks of cancer and immune dysfunction than exposures later in life.
... Rachel Carson once remarked how strange it was to live in an age where carcinogens were a basic element of our system of food production. This is still a strange notion. ...
Just, remember that every single time you hear someone talking about contamination being less than the legal limit.
Those limits, as Steingraber points out in her book, don't account for cross-chemical interations any more than they're really set with health concerns in mind. Nor, as she says, is there anywhere in the world a control group of humans who haven't been heavily exposed to industrial contaminants that our bodies didn't evolve to deal with. She describes our carcinogen-heavy lifestyle as a large, uncontrolled experiment on all of us.
And the chemical industries still don't want to have to prove that their products are safe before they go in our food, in our children's food, or wind up in high concentrations in breast milk.
Just eat it anyway, they say. Just try it. What could possibly go wrong?
Reckless jerks, the lot of them.
(Photo credit: whitneybee on Flickr.)
Buckle Up! The Final Push for Food Safety is On!
Published May 30, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
This is it! We've got a food safety bill, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (FSEA), and it will soon be introduced by Henry Waxman. He's posted a draft on his website and my lawyer friends are already combing through its 120-pages to figure out if it's "the change we need." But one thing seems certain: IF a food safety bill passes this year (and I think it will), it's going to be this one. We've got the next week or so to figure out what is in it, and what we want to see changed. We'll learn a bit at a June 3 hearing in the Energy and Commerce Committee, and soon after that, the bill will be marked up by the committee (i.e. they'll make all the changes they want to make in it). Then the committee will vote on it. If they've done a good job compromising and making deals in the mark up, it should pass. And it will most likely pass the full House as well. From there the Senate will take it up, and who knows what is going to happen there (or when it will happen). But it's up to us to make sure that the House passes the best bill possible so that the Senate can have the best possible starting point.
So what does the bill include?
The good: The bill gives the FDA the authority to call for mandatory recalls. It also calls for increased inspections by the FDA for all food facilities (factories and warehouses, but not farms or restaurants). Currently these places get inspected about once a decade. The bill increases the frequency to every 6 mos to 4 years, depending on risk.
The not so good: The bill assesses "user fees" of $1000 per food facility to pay for the cost of increased inspection. While this is what is politically feasible at the moment, it's not ideal. I'd rather that the FDA didn't get funded by the people it regulates. Also, why is the woman who sells jam at my farmer's market required to pay the same amount as General Mills or Kraft? Note that farms and restaurants do NOT have to pay these user fees.
The missing: There is no current requirement for microbial testing for pathogens and reporting of results to the FDA. Umm... Congress? Wanna fix that?
If you want to make sure that the final bill is written to our liking and not to the lobbyists' liking, please call your member of Congress and voice your opinions. You can also look up members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and give them a call. You can email your own member of Congress, but make sure you call the others. Typically they don't read emails that come from outside their districts.
Light Supper by Hurricane Lamp
Published May 28, 2009 @ 03:59PM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- Why global warming means more killer storms.
- How gardeners can help food pantries with their surplus produce.
- The bisphenol A in polycarbonate containers "has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans."
- LaVidaLocavore: Dear The USDA, Wendell Berry is relatively harmless. As the food industry is now coming out in favor of safety regulations, it makes the effectiveness of those regulations immediately suspect.
- Civil Eats: Maybe cooptation of language doesn't have to be a one way street. A review of the diary of an urban farmer. Time vs. geography - a chef's meditation on local food.
- The Green Fork: An encouraging update on the success of Farm-To-School programs. The new movie, Fresh, by Ana Joanes, will hopefully make it vastly more difficult for the food industry to convince people that sustainable food advocates want to starve them.
