Food Safety
Do you know what's in your food?
With all of the problems in our food system, it can be hard to find the information we need to make smart choices about the food we eat. Use this page to keep up to date on food safety issues, including pesticides, aspartame, flouridation, irraditation, toxic sludge, mad cow disease, and more.
shrim farmers
I vowed never to touch another Thai-farmed shrimp after attending a panel discussion recently at the SeaWeb Seafood Summit in New Orleans.
Steve Trent, the executive director of Britain’s Environmental Justice Foundation, described a multi-billion-dollar industry with a financial model that would not be viable without slave labor. “It’s the most horrific situation I have seen in more than 25 years of monitoring human rights abuses around the world,” he said.
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The industry has claimed that microwave cooking protects the nutrient content of foods. Somehow, in tasting foods that came out of a microwave oven, the texture was changed as was the flavor. Foods cooked or reheated in microwave ovens became rubbery and lacked the savory smells and layered flavors that come from cooking foods slower and longer.
Nevertheless, people bought the convenience aspect, the speed, the simplicity of heating and eating prepared foods.
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Three problems with the US food supply that is making food a source of disease rather than optimal health include: the way our food is raised; the way it's processed; and the routine use of hazardous drugs and chemicals.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world that produces and processes food in a way that defies both science and common sense.
As noted in the featured TED lecture, 86 percent of every dollar you spend at the grocery store goes toward paying for processing and marketing of the food.
Read morebpa
BPA-free isn't good enough anymore if you're trying to sell plastic sippy cups, water bottles and food containers.
The new standard may be "EA-free," which means free of not only BPA, short for bisphenol A, but also free of other chemicals that mimic the hormone estrogen.
At least that's the suggestion of a recent legal battle between a chemical company and an academic scientist with business interests in the plastics industry.
Read moresugar beets
Hemoglobin is a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout your body. While you might assume this is a uniquely human protein, it’s actually found in plants, too, including sugar beets.
Researchers from Lund University in Sweden, who note that hemoglobin from blood donations falls far short of demands, hope that this plant hemoglobin, known as leghemoglobin, may one day become a blood substitute capable of saving lives.
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There's been an ongoing debate as to whether or not organically-grown foods are healthier than conventional varieties. Some studies have confirmed that organic foods tend to contain higher levels of nutrients like vitamins and minerals, while others found the nutritional difference between them wasn't particularly impressive.
It's important to realize that nutrient content will be largely dictated by the health of the soils in which it is grown. It's unlikely for organic foods grown in depleted soils to see a significant boost in nutrients.
Read moreFood Babe
“Cereals here in the United States contain a packaging ingredient called—God, I’m paranoid." The natural-food advocate Vani Hari paused, laughing, looking at a man standing a few feet from our table in a Union Square coffee shop. He was huddled over his phone, just waiting for his coffee—or so it seemed. She lowered her voice, continuing, barely audible: "... called BHT."
Hari looked in my blank eyes. I asked, "In the plastic bags?"
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Photo Credit: Brian Chilson
Lawyers in Little Rock and Rogers have filed suit in the Western District federal court in Fayetteville against Walmart, Target and Walgreens stores for selling herbal products that an investigation in New York discovered contained little or none of the ingredients advertised on the bottle. Herbal products named in the Arkansas suits are Spring Valley brands of echinacea, St. John's Wort, gingko biloba and gingseng (sold at Walmart); Up & Up brands of gingko biloba, St. John's Wort and valerian root (Target); and Finest Nutrition brands of gingko biloba, St. John's Wort, ginseng and
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Almost exactly 80 years since its debut, the beer can remains a wildly popular vessel for America's favorite alcoholic beverage. According to the Beer Institute, cans accounted for (XLS) 53.2 percent of the beer market in 2012 (the latest year for numbers), versus 36.5 percent for bottles and 10 percent for draft. And the
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Photo Credit: ~Pawsitive~Candie_N via Compfight cc
The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) is one of the corporate front groups suing Vermont in an attempt to block the state’s GMO labeling law. The trade group is also lobbying for H.R. 4432, an anti-consumer, anti-states’ rights bill intended to preempt all state GMO labeling laws.
Why would the IDFA spend millions to defeat GMO labeling laws, including launching a lawsuit against Vermont?
Isn’t the dairy industry the “Got Milk?” people, the ones who wear milk mustaches to get
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