Food Safety
OCA's Food Safety Resource Center
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.
News
International Herald Tribune - France
LONDON People could be infected with the human form of mad cow disease for more than 50 years without developing the illness, which means the size of a potential epidemic may be underestimated, British scientists said Friday. About 160 people have been diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Cases of the fatal disease have also been reported in France, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan and the United States.
Estimates have varied widely of how many people are likely to develop the brain illness caused by eating meat products contaminated with bovine Read more
Estimates have varied widely of how many people are likely to develop the brain illness caused by eating meat products contaminated with bovine Read more
News
June 21, 2006
WASHINGTON - June 21 - Hurricane season has only been underway for three weeks, but our lawmakers in Washington are already unleashing their own form of damage to our nation's coasts. The House Committee on Resources is today marking up a domestic energy production bill (H.R. 4761), which includes a pollution-promoting provision that would permit oil and gas platforms to be converted to offshore fish farms.
Known as "Rigs to Reef," this section would allow energy companies to avoid paying the costs of removing their rigs if the Secretary of Interior allows the rigs to be abandoned Read more
Known as "Rigs to Reef," this section would allow energy companies to avoid paying the costs of removing their rigs if the Secretary of Interior allows the rigs to be abandoned Read more
News
June 21, 2006
What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
A sample of muscle grown without an artificial scaffold. (Photo: Wired / Tissue Read more
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
A sample of muscle grown without an artificial scaffold. (Photo: Wired / Tissue Read more
News
June 20, 2006
This week, the Senate Appropriations committee will work on the 2007 budget for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They are starting with the budget bill that already passed the House earlier this spring. The bill contains a key provision that prohibits the USDA from allowing the import of poultry products processed in the People's Republic of China.
Please call 202-224-3121 or email your Senators today on this committee to urge them to keep this provision of the House bill that would stop USDA from allowing the import of processed poultry from China.
Why?
Read more
Please call 202-224-3121 or email your Senators today on this committee to urge them to keep this provision of the House bill that would stop USDA from allowing the import of processed poultry from China.
Why?
Read more
News
June 15, 2006
Think pork. Sizzling bacon and breakfast sausage. Juicy chops and ribs and robust holiday hams.
The pork capital of the planet is this tiny town in the Cape Fear River basin, not far from the South Carolina border. Spending a few days in Tar Heel and the surrounding area - dotted with hog farms, cornfields and the occasional Confederate flag - is like stepping back in time. This is a place where progress has slowed to a crawl.
Tar Heel's raison d'être (and the employment anchor for much of the region) is the mammoth plant of the Smithfield Packing Company, a million- Read more
The pork capital of the planet is this tiny town in the Cape Fear River basin, not far from the South Carolina border. Spending a few days in Tar Heel and the surrounding area - dotted with hog farms, cornfields and the occasional Confederate flag - is like stepping back in time. This is a place where progress has slowed to a crawl.
Tar Heel's raison d'être (and the employment anchor for much of the region) is the mammoth plant of the Smithfield Packing Company, a million- Read more
News
June 14, 2006
Lauren Foster, writing today a the Financial Times webpage, reported that, "Yum Brands http://www.yum.com/ , operator of KFC http://www.kfc.com/ , is facing a class-action lawsuit over the chicken fast-food chain's use of artery-clogging trans fat for frying foods.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b53142f4-fb41-11da-b4d0-0000779e2340.html
"The Center for Science in the Public Interest http://www.cspinet. Read more
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b53142f4-fb41-11da-b4d0-0000779e2340.html
"The Center for Science in the Public Interest http://www.cspinet. Read more
News
June 14, 2006
The small scientific world of prion researchers -- the scientists who investigate "transmissible spongiform encephalopathies" (TSE) such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans -- is abuzz. That's because the two confirmed cases of US mad cow disease in Texas and Alabama are an "atypical" strain different from the British strain. This really should not be surprising. Sheldon Rampton and I reported in 1997 that very strong evidence of an "atypical" TSE disease in US cattle goes back to the 1985 work of Dr. Richard Marsh, the researcher to whom we dedicated Read more
News
Washington Post
CHICAGO -- The nation's largest doctors group is pushing for new warning labels. Only these labels aren't for drugs _ they're for food.
The American Medical Association voted Tuesday to urge the government to require high-salt foods to be labeled and also vowed to push the food industry to drastically cut the amount of salt in restaurant and processed foods. The goal would be 50 percent less salt within a decade.
Americans eat almost twice the amount of salt they should, and that contributes to high blood pressure and heart problems, the AMA says.
Labels with Read more
The American Medical Association voted Tuesday to urge the government to require high-salt foods to be labeled and also vowed to push the food industry to drastically cut the amount of salt in restaurant and processed foods. The goal would be 50 percent less salt within a decade.
Americans eat almost twice the amount of salt they should, and that contributes to high blood pressure and heart problems, the AMA says.
Labels with Read more
News
June 12, 2006
I was describing the raw foods diet to someone the other day, and they remarked, "Well I'm not sure I want to do that. I don't want to do something so extreme," and I said, "What do you mean extreme? You think the raw foods diet is extreme?" Then it hit me: Most people think that the processed food diet -- loaded with chemicals, additives, preservatives, artificial plastic fats and milled grains that are depleted of nutrients -- is normal. In this article, we're going to explore what's normal versus extreme when it comes to food. And on that topic, I have a very different opinion than the Read more
News
June 7, 2006
Dear Consumer,
Do you know which seven dangerous food ingredients to watch out for in your groceries? These are the "deadly seven," as I call them, and they can directly promote heart disease, migraines, obesity, outrageous food cravings, osteoporosis, diabetes and even birth defects.
The top three most dangerous ingredients I've found in my research are:
1) Sodium nitrite -- causes cancer, found in processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, sausage. Used to make meats appear red (a color fixer chemical).
2) Hydrogenated oils -- causes heart disease Read more
Do you know which seven dangerous food ingredients to watch out for in your groceries? These are the "deadly seven," as I call them, and they can directly promote heart disease, migraines, obesity, outrageous food cravings, osteoporosis, diabetes and even birth defects.
The top three most dangerous ingredients I've found in my research are:
1) Sodium nitrite -- causes cancer, found in processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, sausage. Used to make meats appear red (a color fixer chemical).
2) Hydrogenated oils -- causes heart disease Read more
Pages
for Food SafetyDownloads
Videos
Scientific Studies
