Back to Basics

Having written a series, “The BPA File”, in which I detailed the vast efforts made worldwide to ban bisphenol-A, a chemical in use for the last sixty years to protect food containers against spoilage and to strengthen plastic bottles against breakage, I naturally welcomed news that the Food and Drug Administration has recently concluded the claims made against it lacked “scientific information” to justify the claims that have been made against it.

In fact, it was news enough to merit an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Ask any physician about the role of chemicals in the lives of humans and you will learn that we are walking chemical machines that not only ingest the chemicals we need to live—food and liquids—but we manufacture them in our bodies to maintain our health and, at the same time, eliminate harmful chemicals on a daily basis. This is necessary because we live in a world composed of chemicals, from ordinary water to the vitamin and nutrient content of what we eat.

Ask any chemophobe—a person subject to fears about any and all chemicals—and they will begin to reel off the names of various compounds they are convinced will kill you. What they never seem to understand is that it is the dose—the amount of the chemical—that can constitute harm. In the case of the foods we eat, their processing and packaging, the dose is so small as to represent no harm whatever. Even ordinary potatoes contain arsenic!

That’s why another story caught my eye. It was from Environment Canada and said, “The government of Canada has decided that Siloxane D5 is not harmful to the environment.” This was a welcomed reversal of a 2009 assessment that questioned D5’s environmental safety. One can only hope that the U.S. government’s massive regulatory machine, in this case the EPA, gets the message that good science is essential to good decisions.

Environment Canada described D5, a material found in many consumer products, saying, “Decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5) is an odorless, colorless liquid found in a number of personal care products, including deodorants, antiperspirants, cosmetics, shampoos, and body lotions. It is used in the production of silicone polymers and may also be used as a dry-cleaning solvent and in industrial cleaning.”

One can only imagine how many chemophobes have decided not to wash themselves, use cosmetics or antiperspirants because they are convinced they will die if they do.

I picked up the phone to Karluss Thomas, the Executive Director of the Silicone Environmental health & Safety Council of North America (SEHSC) to inquire whether D5 was on some watch list in the U.S. and he noted it is on a list of some 80 compounds scheduled for review by the EPA.

Mr. Thomas noted that his trade association had filed an objection with Environment Canada regarding earlier concerns about D5 and was pleased that a first-even Board of Review had been convened by the Canadian Environment Minister. The Board, after a rigorous review of the data, completely cleared D5 of any claims regarding its safe use. Three top, independent toxicologists gave it a thorough review. The findings, he said, had “broader implications” for any comparable review here in the U.S.

The Canadian action was a teachable moment for everyone who reads or hears similar claims about any chemical or product.

I am subject to various enthusiasms and, in 2008, I wrote a series about beef and the vast network of phony consumer advocates, vegetarian types, animal rights groups and headline chasing media folks who love a good scare campaign, all trying to convince Americans that beef was bad for them.

Today, it is a smear campaign about a type of meat promoted in the media as “pink slime.” Typically, it is a pack of lies and it’s going to cost some folks their jobs and drive up the cost of beef if allowed to go unchallenged.

What is being demonized in this 21st century reincarnation of the 1989 Alar apple scare is finely textured, 95% lean beef. It is composed of small parts of beef that are still available for use after the cuts with which we are more accustomed, like sirloin, brisket, top round, flank, porterhouse, and some forty other selections, are taken.

This lean beef is routinely added to lower quality hamburger to increase its protein content and its production has long been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It actually improves the nutritional quality of a lot of cheaper hamburger.

While the media may not approve of this beef, plenty of others do. A March 29 article in The Wall Street Journal reported that after being hammered in the media for weeks, the lean beef, “is getting support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the governors of five states, who argue it has been unfairly labeled and is actually a safe, low-cost way to make ground beef leaner.”

Other supporters include food safety activists like Nancy Donley, who lost her son, Alex, to e.coli and now advocates for tougher food safety laws to prevent similar deaths. The founder of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), Donley wrote in the March 17 edition of Food Safety News about her experience learning more about the modern American meat industry and her tour of a Beef Products, Inc. (BPI) plant which produces the lean beef now under attack.

“I got to know the owners, Eldon and Regina Roth,” wrote Donley, “and was impressed by their complete commitment to the safety and wholesomeness of the meat products they produced. I was also impressed by the food safety culture they instilled throughout their company.”

The company and its owners were also the subject of a June 12, 2008 Washington Post article titled “Engineering a Safer Burger.” In profiling Eldon Roth, the Post noted that Roth, “discovered his process for separating meat from fat had the unintended effect of making the lean beef more alkaline and therefore less conducive to bacteria.”

The Post further reported that Roth and his staff, “began working with ammonium hydroxide, a food additive already approved by federal regulators for use in processing cheese, chocolate and soda. It also exists naturally in beef. By increasing the level of it in beef, Roth hoped to reduce its acidity and create less hospitable conditions for bacteria.”

It worked! Exposing the meat to a tiny amount of ammonium hydroxide gas during processing elevates its pH and increases food safety. There are no reports of illness related to the consumption of the company’s finely textured lean beef.

In New York City, you can no longer donate food to city homeless shelters if it doesn’t have a nutritional information label. Why? In part because your donation might be too salty. No kidding:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made it impossible for Good Samaritans to donate food to government-run facilities that feed the homeless.

For what reason would he restrict free and charitable donations?

Well, you’re probably familiar with the mayor’s crusade against salt — apparently, it’s bad for you and the government should regulate how much is in your food.

Therefore, in an effort to curb the citizenry’s dirty salt habits, the Bloomberg administration has instructed all government-run shelters to turn away any donated food items that lack specific nutritional information.

Basically, the city is dissuading private citizens from being charitable.

What’s next? A ban on private donations to Toys for Tots because of the potential threat of sharp edges and small parts?

If you want to make a bunch of sandwiches in your kitchen or buy bulk food to donate to the homeless, forget it. You might have gone crazy on the salt and butter, and Bloomberg wants to make sure NY homeless are as healthy as possible when he ships them off to other cities.

Also, this from the New York Post:

Diamond insists that the institutional vendors hired by the shelters serve food that meets the rules but also tastes good; it just isn’t too salty. So, says the commissioner, the homeless really don’t need any of the synagogue’s food.

In other words, “the government has it handled, we don’t need private institutions involved.” If only bureaucrats would ever say “the private sector has it handled, we don’t need the government involved.”

Here’s a local news segment from CBS2:

PHOTOS.COM

Monsanto is the largest producer of genetically engineered seeds.

Monsanto should be named an enemy of the State. It’s definitely an enemy of the people. Instead, the company has essentially become another branch of government.

Monsanto is engaged in government-sponsored agricultural terrorism. It’s government-sponsored because there is a revolving door between the company, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and firms that lobby Congress on Monsanto’s behalf. Dow, Bayer, other chemical companies and Big Agriculture are Monsanto’s co-conspirators in agricultural terrorism.

In addition to contaminating our food supply with pesticides, hormones and genetic modifications, water supplies are being contaminated as well — even for those who live in the city far away from farmland. And anyone trying to grow crops uncontaminated by Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) frankenseeds can be slapped with a lawsuit if the prevailing winds or pollinating insects cause pollen from Monsanto-patented crops to mingle with non-Monsanto GE crops.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently listed eight ways Monsanto fails at being a good steward of food and moves over to food and environmental terrorism:

1. Promoting pesticide resistance: Monsanto’s Roundup Ready and Bt technologies lead to resistant weeds and insects that can make farming harder and reduce sustainability. The idea is, supposedly, to create crops that ward off insects and other pests. But the result has been to create insects that are pesticide-resistant. And even worse, application of systemic pesticides like Dow Chemical’s Clothianidin or GE crops that kill “pests” are behind the deaths of hundreds of thousands of honeybee colonies through colony collapse disorder. In almost every case, the EPA and/or FDA ignored science or used junk science to justify approval of the chemicals and crops.
2. Increasing herbicide use: Roundup resistance has led to greater use of herbicides, with troubling implications for biodiversity, sustainability and human health. By planting crops engineered to be resistant to herbicides, farmers are able, in theory, to keep down weeds by spraying increasing amounts of herbicides. But these toxic chemicals are finding their way into our foods and contaminating our water supplies. Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, is also linked to a decrease in the monarch butterfly population by killing the plants butterflies rely on for habitat and food. Roundup is also linked to the spread of fusarium head blight in wheat, which makes the crop unsuitable for human or animal consumption. Now we also know that use of these herbicides has created “super weeds” that have developed a resistance to Roundup. So Monsanto and Dow are combining to reintroduce the use of the herbicide 2, 4-D, one-half of the defoliant Agent Orange used in Vietnam. Agent Orange is a carcinogen that caused Hodgkin’s lymphoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia and other diseases in Vietnam veterans.
3. Spreading gene contamination: Engineered genes have a bad habit of turning up in non-GE crops. When this happens, sustainable farmers — and their customers — pay a high price. In other words, GE crops are contaminating the crops of those who want to use natural or heirloom seeds and eat and grow foods the way God intended.

CDC researchers released a new -- and disturbing -- report on foodborne diseases. Credit: CDC Press Office

Foodborne disease outbreaks linked to imported food rose in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, with close to half of the outbreaks implicating food imported from areas that had no prior association with outbreaks, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a report released on Wednesday.

While billions of dollars are spent each year on national security and public safety in the United States each year, there has been little progress by the Homeland Security Department, the Health and Human Services Department and others charged with the safety and well-being of American citizens to protect the U.S. food supply and imports.

Imported food makes up a substantial and growing portion of the U.S. food supply and, considering the health and safety concerns of keeping American’s safe, Washington insiders seem oblivious to that part of protecting American citizens, according to the March 14, 2011 Public Safety Examiner report.

To ensure imported food safety, federal agencies must focus their resources on high risk foods and coordinate efforts, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office.

The report, submitted to the US Congress and obtained by the Public Safety Examiner assesses how the Department of Homeland Security’s  Customs and Border Protection (Border Patrol), the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service are addressing challenges in overseeing the safety of imported food.

“It’s too early to say if the recent numbers represent a trend, but CDC officials are analyzing information from 2011 and will continue to monitor for these outbreaks in the future,” said Hannah Gould, Ph.D., an epidemiologist in CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases and the lead author of the study.

US agriculture generates more than $1.5 trillion per year in economic activity and provides an abundant food supply for Americans and others. There are continuing concerns about the vulnerability of US agriculture to the deliberate introduction of animal and plant diseases by those wishing to harm American citizens, according to the CDC researchers.

“The big problem is money be spent to monitor food products being imported into the United States. So far, the budget for food safety is minimal when compared to other government programs. For example, politicians push for vaccinating millions of Americans against what they characterize as a deadly flu epidemic, yet they do not seem concerned over a very real threat to all Americans — contaminated food,” said political strategist Mike Baker.

CDC experts reviewed outbreaks reported to CDC’s Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System from 2005-2010 for implicated foods that were imported into the United States. During that five-year period, 39 outbreaks and 2,348 illnesses were linked to imported food from 15 countries. Of those outbreaks, nearly half (17) occurred in 2009 and 2010. Overall, fish (17 outbreaks) were the most common source of implicated imported foodborne disease outbreaks, followed by spices (six outbreaks including five from fresh or dried peppers). Nearly 45 percent of the imported foods causing outbreaks came from Asia.

“As our food supply becomes more global, people are eating foods from all over the world, potentially exposing them to germs from all corners of the world, too,” Gould said.

A direct threat to the health of millions worldwide is being hyped by the media, continuing the anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-illness agenda of environmental organizations to ban BPA, a chemical that protects against food-borne disease and increases the safe use of all plastic containers.

From January through June 2011, I wrote and posted a six-part series called “The BPA File” that anyone can read on the blog I created for the series. Thoroughly research and documented, it was written because of my concern that this particular effort to ban the chemical would, like the ban on DDT, cause millions to die.

On February 16, Matthew Glans, the Midwest Director of The Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, posted a commentary on its “Somewhat Reasonable” blog, “Media Biggest Proponent for BPA Ban.” My research files are filled with hundreds of examples of this and one need only Google “BPA” to find thousands of references to the chemical with the single theme of banning it.

As Glans points out and my series confirms, “Chemical BPA is a chemical used in plastics for many consumer products. Amongst other uses, BPA (is) most commonly used in hardened plastics and as part of the safety liner for food and beverage cans.”  (Emphasis added)

BPA is an acronym for Bisphenol-A and it has been in use for more than six decades, tested hundreds of times, and never found to post a threat to health, but rather as an essential packaging element to protect it.

Glans quotes an article by Business and Media Institute’s Julia Seymour who wrote that the “Fear of chemicals and ‘toxins’ is rampant among the so-called ‘environmental’ left. Unfortunately, that phobia infects national media coverage as well. For more than a decade, the Left has been on the attack against BPA, a product that is commonly found in plastics and other products.”

Ms. Seymour noted that “The Food and Drug Administration has a deadline of March 31 to respond to a petition by the National Resources Defense Council—an environmental group—that seeks to ban BPA. NRDC argues that the FDA should ban BPA on the basis that it causes harm to humans.”

If you read my BPA series, you will learn that BPA has been tested here and in other nations and has been found to pose no health threat whatever.

“Meanwhile,” said Ms. Seymour, “the media have exaggerated the threat of BPA for years. On the Feb. 25, 2010, CBS ‘Early Show’ broadcast, Katie Lee crossed the line from hype into outright falsehood when she said of BPA: ‘And that’s been shown to cause liver disease, heart failure, all sorts of things.”

“The Business & Media Institute analyzed ABC, CBS, and NBC reports as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal that discussed BPA from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2011.”

Incredibly, Canada, Japan, Denmark and France have banned the use of BPA for several products, including baby bottles. To date, “the FDA has been unwilling to declare BPA unsafe.” There’s a reason for that. Its history and the many tests of BPA have found it to be entirely safe.

Let’s understand a fundamental determination of what is toxic or not.

PHOTOS.COM

At West Hoke Elementary School, preschoolers are being forced to supplement their homemade lunches with meals provided by their school.

Imagine a world in which the decisions you make for your children are irrelevant. It’s a world in which the state, rather than the parents, determines what your child must eat for lunch.

Parents in Hoke County, N.C., are experiencing it firsthand, according to Civitas Institute. At West Hoke Elementary School, preschoolers are being forced to supplement their homemade lunches with meals provided by their school because a government inspector has determined the lunches they bring from home don’t meet Federal guidelines.

One mother, who asked not to be identified, told Civitas that she made her daughter a lunch that contained a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips (that’s reasonably healthful, if you leave out the chips). A state inspector assessing the pre-K program at the school said the girl also needed a vegetable, so the inspector ordered a full school lunch tray for her. So while the 4-year-old was still allowed to eat her home lunch, she was forced to take a helping of processed, chemical-laden chicken nuggets, dead milk, a fruit and a vegetable to supplement her sack lunch.

According to Civitas:

The government inspector was from the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised program at the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The program gives schools a grade based on standards that include USDA (Department of Agriculture) meal guidelines enforced by the N.C. Division of Early Childhood Development.

The nutrition standards for pre-K lunch require milk, two servings of fruit or vegetable, bread or grains and a meat or meat alternative. The school didn’t receive a high grade from the January assessment because the home-made lunches didn’t meet those guidelines.

The mother said she sent a note to her child’s teacher asking that her child not be required to eat anything that doesn’t come out of her lunch box. But the school continues to require her to take a school meal, even after she complained to cafeteria workers.

She then sent a statement to State Representative G.L. Pridgen (R-Robeson) detailing her complaint. Pridgen says he was shocked to hear it. Pridgen has since learned this is a nationwide practice based on Federal guidelines, according to Civitas.

Contrary to popular belief, the USDA is not interested the health of Americans. If it were, it wouldn’t be making war on raw milk sellers and organic food producers and the natural supplement industry, nor would it allow Monsanto free reign to contaminate crops with genetically modified organisms or food processors like General Mills to make specious claims on the health benefits of their foods.

There was a time when full tables signified prosperity and thick waistlines were considered attractive. The ability to eat one’s fill was what separated the gentry from the peasant making do with a few crusts and salted leftovers. Fat was in because it represented leisure and wealth. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming.

Then feudalism went the way of the dodo, agriculture was revolutionized and starvation went extinct in the West. Between the widespread availability of cheap food and social welfare programs covering everything from soup kitchens to food stamps, it became hard to starve. Not only was the availability of food no longer associated with prosperity, but even the poor had begun to eat so well that fat began to carry working class and lower class associations.

Fat was no longer wealth, instead conscientious fitness became a mark of prosperity. The laden table made way for micro portions and exotic but barely edible foods. Thin was in on the plate and the waistline.

In Third World countries where feudalism never ended and the agriculture revolution never mattered, the values often never flipped. Instead of anorexia, teenage girls suffer from being force fed to make them more marriageable. The wealthy are fat and the feasts at the top never end.

In the West, weight stands in for class, at a time when explicit classism has become politically incorrect. When Europeans sneer at how fat Americans are, and American coastal elites sneer at the rest of the country for being fat, it’s a class putdown that dressed up longstanding contempt in the colors of the welfare state.

Just because the left and its class warfare worldview, which pretends to be concerned about the plight of the underclass, dominates Western societies does not mean that it is not classist. The left is elitist and its underclass protectionism creates a new wave feudalism with a vast government funded upper and middle class dedicated to caring for the underclass, subsidizing it, caring for it and taxing it to pay for all those services.

The obesity concern trolling is a combination of classism and nanny statism that brings to mind the days when their ideological forebears thought that the way to deal with the poor was to sterilize those who seemed less capable than the rest to improve the breed. There is something equally Darwinian in the sneers aimed at Paula Deen. The breed being culled while the elites try to teach their less evolved cousins to survive by eating their arugula.

The nanny state is built on a technocratic confidence in the ability to create one size fits all solutions, overlaying that on a map of the current medical wisdom leads to the creation of single standards, which often have less to do with health than they do with the status symbols of the leisure class. 19th century popularized medicine created so many of these fads that some of them are still around today. The 20th century created even more.

Death though is not only inevitable, but it cannot be dodged with a one size fits all standard.

What is the government’s number one function? Some might say national security or maintaining a sound infrastructure, but for New York Mayor and legendary super-nanny Michael Bloomberg, the government’s highest duty is to… make sure the people have ready access to salad… or something like that:

Speaking on the government’s role in diet and health last week, Bloomberg told the UN General Assembly, “There are powers only governments can exercise, policies only governments can mandate and enforce and results only governments can achieve. To halt the worldwide epidemic of non-communicable diseases, governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option. That is ultimately government’s highest duty.”

Earlier in his address Bloomberg lauded the past dietary efforts of NYC, “In 2009 we enacted the first restriction on cholesterol-free artificial trans fat in the city’s food service establishments. Our licensing of street green card producer/vendors has greatly increased the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods with high rates of diet related diseases. And we’ve led a national salt reduction initiative and engaged 28 food manufacturers, supermarkets and restaurant chains to voluntarily commit to reducing excessive amounts of sodium in their products.”

This isn’t surprising. After all, upon being elected to office Bloomberg took an oath to “honor, protect and defend the dietary guidelines set forth by the USDA.”

According to Bloomberg, government’s biggest responsibility is to make sure you eat your veggies, and your biggest responsibility is to make Obama successful. These can be simultaneously achieved by eating your peas literally and figuratively.

While watching a television commercial for some prescription medication, have you ever wondered why something it states may kill you or cause serious side effects ever was permitted to be marketed to the public?

For decades I have taken a full range of vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements every morning. I don’t get head colds or any unwanted side affects. In my seventh decade, I enjoy exceptional good health. An annual physical check up is always the same. I am fine.

Millions of Americans benefit from a daily regimen of vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements. Athletes use whey protein powders. Body builders take amino acids. Others augment food products that lack sufficient nutritional value. Their health and wellness is now threatened by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Banning Health!

On the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend, the FDA published a 47-page document that would ban all nutritional and supplemental ingredients by requiring them to file documentation involving multi-million-dollar testing and the regulations would be retroactive to 1994!

This will destroy the manufacturers of these products because most are small companies that could not afford such costs. It’s not like there is a vast body of information that demonstrates any threat to health from vitamins and minerals. Quite the contrary. There is ample information on their benefits. There are libraries filled with books devoted to this.

Who would benefit from such regulation of the natural supplement industry? Big Pharma. The same pharmaceutical companies that have a long record of putting forth FDA-approved medications that later prove to be lethal are looking to use the regulatory powers of FDA to literally increase levels of illness.

In the same way Obamacare has been demonstrated to not only be unconstitutional, but also a threat to the health of millions—especially senior citizens—this callous administration now threatens to remove from the shelves of stores that sell nutritional supplements, from pharmacies, and from supermarkets and other outlets, the vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements on which millions depend for wellness.

This constitutes a criminal conspiracy and Congress, which has ceded its law-making authority to the FDA, must hear from everyone in order to stop this assault on everyone’s health.

Frank Murray, the former editor of Better Nutrition, Great Life, and Let’s Live, is the author and co-author of fifty books on health and nutrition. They include Natural Supplements for Diabetes, Health Benefits Derived from Sweet Orange, and 100 Super Supplements for a Longer Life. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

One of Murray’s books, Sunshine and Vitamin D, notes that “With the hundreds of clinical trials published on Vitamin D in recent years—I read one study with 132 references—it is obvious that the ‘sunshine vitamin’ no longer has to play second fiddle to the other vitamins.” The same can be said for vitamins A, B, C, and E. All have amply demonstrated their value. Add to them, zink, potassium, selenium, and other mineral supplements. All those prostate advertisements are about herbal supplements!

The Obama administration that has made obesity its pet project is also famous for photos of the President eating every kind of fast food. It is rank hypocrisy, but the proposed FDA ban is literally life threatening.