DailyDirt: Food — What You See Is Not Always What You Get
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
These days, it actually takes some effort to find food at the grocery store that contains fewer than five ingredients. Processed foods contain so many ingredients that it might be better to just avoid them altogether. But even when you think you’re getting “whole foods,” they may actually contain hidden ingredients. When did food get so complicated? Here are a few things that will make you think twice before you decide to eat something.
- Potentially harmful ingredients that have been banned in other countries around the world are still legal in the U.S. What’s worse is that many food companies have already reformulated their products to be safer for the foreign market, but they continue to sell Americans the “original” versions. [url]
- Olive oil, milk, honey, and saffron are the most commonly adulterated foods. The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention has created a database of more than a thousand cases of food adulteration from 1980-2010, noting what the foods were mixed with, and providing links to press reports and scientific papers on each case. [url]
- Some people choose to eat organic food because they think it’s more nutritious, but studies seem to suggest that the health benefits are minimal. Buy organic if you have deep pockets, want to avoid ingesting small amounts of pesticides, and want to support more environmentally friendly agriculture, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s necessarily more nutritious. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: adulterated, food, healthy, ingredients, nutritious, organic
Comments on “DailyDirt: Food — What You See Is Not Always What You Get”
I only eat inorganic foods...
Salt tastes great.
I don’t think most people eat organic foods because they believe they’re more nutritious but because they don’t want to eat the harmful additives that are present in many non-organic foods.
Re: Re:
Did you not read the linked article?
Only…
People are wrong.
Organic food contains more poisons than non-organic.
Bacteria and other decease from organic fertilizers, and poisons from fungus and that the plants themselves produce when stressed or harmed.
Properly handled conventional farming methods have the potential to be better than organic in all possible ways.
I’m not saying this is done. There is no market for it today. That market i dominated by the “organic”.
If there was a market for environmentally friendly and poison free food, that’s what we would get. Now we get organic. Organic is not environmentally friendly and poison free. It’s “natural” and free from synthetic poisons. Plenty of natural poisons in it. And the natural way of growing it is not necessarily the most environmentally friendly way.
Re: Re:
“Properly handled conventional farming methods have the potential to be better than organic in all possible ways.”
“If there was a market for environmentally friendly and poison free food, that’s what we would get”
Nice try Monsanto rep
“Potentially harmful ingredients that have been banned in other countries around the world are still legal in the U.S.”
Yeah, those commie socialists over there in the EU doing all their freedom hating banning of yummy ingredients. Thank goodness the good ol’ us of a does not force detailed identification of all ingredients in the food you eat. Otherwise food producers might have to work a little harder and get less profit – oh the horror.
Bans
Actually the bans work both ways. Sometimes the US is slow to approve some ingredient or drug that has been approved in Europe. Thalidomide was banned in the US while being approved in many countries.
Regulatory approvals and bans follow statutory procedures and are (allegedly) based on scientific evidence. One confusing problem is most people do not understand that “dose makes the poison” or almost all substances can be poisonous under certain circumstances. Substances normally consider poisons generally are toxic at very small amounts – teaspoon of arsenic or thallium is toxic to an adult many times over but the same amount of sugar is not.
The real question is not “Is it toxic?” but “How much is needed to kill someone?”. Related is how much is in food products if one eats a reasonable amount.
Re: Bans
No, the question is “is it toxic?”, because what doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. Sometimes it “just” messes with your thinking processes, or screws up your immune system a little to give you allergies or neurological problems. Or gives a 9 year old girl large boobs, or reduces men’s sperm count. And things can affect different people different ways.
Personally, I seem to have an adverse reaction to GMO tomatoes. Not heirloom tomatoes, just the GMO ones. I was told flat out by a poster on an Ars entry about Monsanto & their GMO products that I was wrong to want labeling on all GMO foods, it should be okay to sell GMO tomatoes without a label because it is believed that they only adversely affect a very, very small percentage of the people who eat them and it cost to much to label everything for just a few people. By “adversely affect”, I assume he meant anaphylactic shock, which can kill you, which is what happens to me, but really, we have no idea how these things affect anyone in the long term, and the general population should not put up with being set up as a corporation’s guinea pigs.
File this under the "I want my time back dept"
I just read three great articles that I want to believe, but did not give one reference to any study or research that was talked about in the content. Truth is things like GMO are not all bad, things like Hydrogenated oils are. Let me help sell my point with two universities that back their points with research.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/transfats/
http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmpe080e/Spring05/projects/gmo/index.htm
Your welcome…