You Are What You Eat
I can still picture in my mind a bumper sticker during Thanksgiving with a turkey carrying a sign: You ares what you eats. For those who actually missed this joke…you don’t want to become a turkey, do you?
There have been fruit alerts. The Great Alar Scare of 1989 tarnished the reputation of red apples. Alar, or daminozide, a plant growth regulator and apple color enhancer, is a carcinogen. But you need to drink 5000 gallons of apple juice per day to get close to laboratory animal effects. Alar was taken off the market anyway, and, in some ways, is symptomatic of public overreaction, later shown in airport security and the bird flu. More recently in 2007, Europe went through a period when pesticides on a variety of fruits caused some concern.
There was the North American E. coli outbreak of 2006 in lettuce and spinach. There are safe ones and the deadly 0157:H7. I sterilized this microorganism with a tunable laser for my PhD dissertation. Scarily enough, just washing these vegetables might not help, as the bacteria could be inside the plant. Three died and several hundred were hospitalized. Generally, the problem comes from irrigation water contaminated with animal feces.
Remember Mad Cow Disease? I was in London during the height of this crisis, and gave their cattle industry a vote of confidence by consuming what must have been the largest hamburger I had ever seen in my life.
Castleberry Food Company’s chili recall resulted in my wife finding four cans of it at home, so she returned them to Costco, to learn that she was credited for six, so we must have eaten two cans. Somehow, we managed to avoid botulism. Good thing I don’t consume pet foods, for that scandal resulted in at least 16 dead dogs and cats and a trace to the bustling Chinese city of Xuzhou…and wheat gluten.
What is wheat gluten? When you wash dough made from wheat flour, the starch is rinsed away, leaving something called gluten. Yes, gluten was first used in ancient China. This noodle-like tendon is popular for macrobiotic diets as a meat substitute.
Wheat gluten is a perfectly safe food base. The danger comes when melamine is accidentally or purposefully added to supposedly increase the protein content. Melamine is an organic base with a molecular formula of C3H6N6, and is used to combine with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, which you have no doubt used as a plastic dish, countertop, glue, fertilizer or flame retardant. Yes, you have also eaten some of it, as melamine was patented as a feed for cattle to provide non-protein nitrogen. In 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed to remove this compound as a test for meat and poultry because “it is no longer considered a residue of concern.” Melamine-contaminated feed has subsequently been detected in pork, chicken, fish and shrimp, which were cleared for human consumption. The bottom line, evidently, is that melamine in small doses does not harm us. The largest melamine factory in the world, at 120,000 tons/year became operational last year on Hainan Island off the Chinese Mainland. So, if anything, you will ingest more melamine in the future.
Diethylene glycol (DG) is a particularly troublesome chemical. Remember when cats used to lick antifreeze and die? That was ethylene glycol. Now a bittering agent is added to this chemical, which is still used. But DG has recently made the news as counterfeit glycerin (G, a natural byproduct from soapmaking) because DC is cheaper than G, and companies in China have substituted small amounts (up to 5%) of DC for G to cut costs, for used in toothpaste. No one dies if the toothpaste is not eaten. However, added to cold medicine, several hundred have succumbed in Panama. There have also reportedly been mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and India.
Did you know that Colgate fluoride toothpaste contains: sodium monofluorosphosphate, hydrated silica, propylene glycol (this is okay, but diethylene is not), tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium saccharin, pentasodium triphosphate, sodium lauryl sulfate, carrageenan (from seaweed), a host of flavors with exotic names, sodium hydroxide and calcium peroxide? On this note, have you taken a close look at some of the processed chips sold in bags? First, those chemicals make no sense at all, so don’t bother.
Which brings us, then, to any import from China. The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned 28 imports in June of 2007—17 were from China. My first knee-jerk reaction harkens back to conspiracy and the American Japanese in World War II and American Muslims in the War of Terror. Is there something about China that brings out an inherent paranoia? Chinese recalls ranged from hammocks to toys to jewelry to tires to toothpaste to medical drugs to, of course, food. Seems like lobbyists were having a field day trying to knock out the competition, and Federal officials were only too accommodating. Well, there are no safety standards, apparently, on these imports, and, my gosh, we need to protect our pets. (More recently, there have been other incidents of lax supervision over product manufacture in China, so, without doubt, some of this concern has been warranted.)
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The Dow Jones Industrials slipped 34 to 8438, while Orient markets were up and European mixed. As predicted yesterday, the House did pass that cap and trade bill 219-212. The American Clean Energy and Security Act calls for the U.S. to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Gold dropped $2/toz to $940 and oil eased below $70/barrel.
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Tropical Depression Nangka eased into China not that far from Hong Kong and has dissipated. Finally, there is a disturbance just east of Yucatan, and is expected to move north into the Gulf of Mexico.
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