Читать книгу The End of Food - Thomas F. Pawlick - Страница 9

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Those Little Extras

MARY WASHINGTON IS A PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN, with wide, innocent-looking eyes and a quiet, disarming voice. You wouldn’t think she’d scare anybody, but judging from her story in the Westsider, a Michigan newspaper, she sure made some folks nervous.

Covering the consumer beat, she’d been assigned to investigate a new supermarket phenomenon. As she told her readers:

Going to the grocery to buy meat has probably been the same routine for years: Pick your favorite pork chops, chicken, steak, etc. and prepare it at home, as usual. But what if that routine could threaten your life?

People with high blood pressure, heart problems, or allergies had better start reading the package meat labels closely, because there’s something new in chain store food most consumers aren’t aware of.

I went to the meat section of my two local grocery stores, and did some shopping around. I found that meat, especially boneless pork chops and boneless chicken, now has the words ‘seasoned,’ or ‘preseasoned’ in almost-invisible small print on the label. This disturbed me, so I went to the store butcher at [the first store] and asked what seasoning is in this meat. ¹

Adopting a deadpan tone to match her innocent demeanor, she continued:

He looked at me as if I was crazy, and asked why I was so concerned. I told him my mother has high blood pressure and if she is unaware that seasoning is in this meat, it could make her ill. Ordinary salt is actually sodium chloride—and sodium is something people with hypertension (high blood pressure) should avoid.

According to the Family Health and Medical Guide, “a reduction in sodium intake is particularly important for persons with hypertension.” Why? “Hypertension causes injury to the blood vessels, making it easier for atherosclerosis to develop. It is also the major factor in the development of stroke. In addition, hypertension makes the heart work harder, resulting in an enlarged heart, poorer function and congestive heart failure. Hypertension can result in damage to the eyes and kidneys as well.” And sodium makes hypertension worse.

Not to mention the possibility of ... whatever other unnamed “seasoning” is in this meat posing complications for persons with allergies.

I also told the man I was a reporter for the Westsider. This seemed to make him nervous. His name tag said “Ron,” but he refused to give a last name. He said he didn’t know anything about the so-called seasoned meat, because all he did was package it and set it out on the shelves.

The store manager, Melvin, also gave no last name and refused to speak on the record. ²

Mary was persistent, however, and wouldn’t give up.

I asked why a fourth of the packaged meat on the meat counter was labeled “seasoned?” He said it was because it “has flavor” in it. I asked whether sodium was the best choice for flavor, reminding him ... about people with hypertension.

Melvin said if people have special needs then they should pay more attention to the foods they eat and make better choices when choosing their groceries. He seemed anxious for me to go away.

At [her other neighborhood store], the butcher said flatly “no comment!” He was not wearing a name tag at all. The store manager said he was busy and to leave my phone number to call me later on the issue. But I told him I would wait. After an hour, he came and said he needed to make a couple of phone calls first to know the right answers to my questions. He never got back with me. I also called him and left a message, but he ignored it. ³

Since reading Mary’s story I’ve made some forays of my own, to Canadian supermarkets, and found the same sorts of labels, and the same reluctance of store employees to answer questions about them. Most often, they simply shrug and plead ignorance. In some stores most meat labels now carry seasoning “instructions,” advising shoppers to “season with pepper and or spices (No Salt).”

Why should diners suddenly need to be told—after centuries of deciding this question for themselves—how to season their meat? And why no salt?

Determined to get an answer, I followed the story up the food sales chain, from store clerk, to meat manager, to wholesale meat salesman, to a customer service agent for a meat packer in Manitoba, who at first told me “we have a lot of moisture-enhanced products going out now, because it tends to make the pork less chewy, more tender. But there is some salt in the moisture that’s going into the pork already.... It’s like a brine solution.” When I mentioned the possible effects of salt on people with hypertension, however, she changed her explanation and claimed the no salt label was there “just because salt can make pork tough. If you salt it, it will be too tough.” This explanation seemed to have more fishiness than pork about it. I’ve been putting salt on my pork chops for more than 50 years, and never noticed it making them tough.

Store employees may be reluctant to talk to reporters, or even ordinary shoppers, and customer service people may not want to alarm consumers, but the Internet tells all. Click on the Google search engine and type in the terms “pre-seasoned meat,” or “moistureenhanced meat,” and the real story comes clear. That’s what I did.

A SPREADING TREND

A website called the Virtual Weber Bullet explained the phenomenon succinctly:

Enhanced meat is becoming more and more popular in the United States. This trend is well established with pork and poultry and is spreading to beef products.…

Enhanced meat can be defined as fresh, whole muscle meat that has been injected with a solution of water and other ingredients that may include salt, phosphates, antioxidants, and flavorings. Regular meat can be defined as fresh, whole muscle meat that has not been injected or marinated.…

The problem isn’t so much enhanced meat as a concept, but that it’s becoming more difficult to buy certain fresh meat products in their regular versions–and fresh, natural, conventional meat is what most barbeque enthusiasts are looking for. Fresh pork is the best example of this trend. In some supermarkets, most fresh pork products, including spare and loin back ribs, butts, picnics and loins, are available only as an enhanced pork product. The same cuts of meat are not offered in their regular versions. ⁴

You and I, in short, have no choice. The choice has been made for us.

Whether we like it or not, we are obliged to accept whatever the meat packer and supermarket chain have decided is the way our meat ought to be flavored. Matters of personal taste are ignored. Like clothes off a discount department store rack, “one size fits all,” and we can take it or leave it. If you like your meat with less pepper or salt than the chain has decided you should have, too bad. Big Brother knows best. Learn to love it.

And if your doctor has put you on a low- or no-salt diet due to high blood pressure or risk of heart disease, no matter. The corporate chain store has decreed that you must eat salt–or stop eating meat altogether. And bugger your health.

Die, or become a vegetarian.

There are, of course, some merits to the idea of being vegetarian. The majority Hindu population of India have been vegetarian for centuries and seem none the worse for it. They get their protein from other sources. But, damn it all, I’d like such a thing to be my choice, not the decision of some crew of corporate suits sitting in a boardroom somewhere with their accountants and advertising men and making up my mind for me! I’ll wager most Americans and Canadians, if they’d take the trouble to stop and think about it, would agree.

The fact is, I like pork chops. I like them flavored to my own taste, not to someone else’s. And I don’t want to be forced to stop eating them altogether if I should unexpectedly develop heart problems. And what about those other ingredients, “phosphates, antioxidants and flavorings”? What if I’m allergic to one of them? Will it even be listed on the package label to warn me? Under the current supermarket regime, not likely.

And why are meat packers and supermarket chains switching to “enhanced” meats? The Virtual Weber Bullet site gives a number of reasons, but the most persuasive (given the added expense and complication for the packer of installing injection heads, pressure controls, filters, flexible needle mounts, and separate shut-off controls for each injection needle used in the enhancement process) seems to be “increased profitability”:

By “adding value” to meat by enhancing it, meat producers can charge more for their products and achieve higher profits. Also, by solving the problems of color retention and purge, enhanced meat facilitates the trend toward case-ready meat—meat that is butchered and packaged at the meat packing plant so that it’s ready for display and sale in retail stores. Case-ready meat is more profitable for meat producers and for retailers, and it represents the future of meat in America—and the demise of your local butcher. ⁵

Nor is meat the only food product in which salt might be an issue. For decades, fast food retailers like McDonald’s have served french fries with a liberal dose of sodium chloride. But recently, the international chain has adopted a new stance, agreeing to remove large quantities of salt from its products in Britain, including from the oil its fries are prepared in.⁶ Each serving of burgers, ketchup, or fries will have up to 23 percent less salt than in the past.

WITCHES’ BREW

Moisture-enhanced and pre-seasoned meat products may seem a highhanded, profit-motivated intrusion on consumer independence, irritating to anyone who values his or her gastronomical autonomy. But, compared to what else is out there, they are relatively benign.

A mere pinch of salt, so to speak.

Today’s mass-market foods contain far worse, with the general rule being that the more highly processed the food product, the wider the variety of hard-to-pronounce compounds inside it. In actuality, what we are increasingly being forced to accept as “normal” fare includes a witches’ brew that would make Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, cackling over their cauldron of “double, double toil and trouble,” blanche.

The list of additives, pollutants, adulterants, and poisons is so long, and due to so many different causes, that no single explanation can cover them, or rank their importance. Perhaps the best method is the one Hollywood uses to list the stars in a multi-star epic–alphabetical order. Here are some of the “star” ingredients in the stuff that is becoming our food.

ACRYLAMIDE The organic chemical compound acrylamide, a derivative of acrylic acid (CH₂=CHCOOH) used industrially to make adhesives and textiles, wasn’t thought of as a problem in food until April 2002. That year, Swedish scientists studying a group of tunnel workers who had been accidentally exposed to the compound on the job, revealed that they’d found high acrylamide levels not only in the red blood cells of the exposed workers, but also in people who hadn’t been exposed.

The source for the latter group was traced to their food.⁷

Because acrylamide had been identified earlier by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a probable cancer-causing agent, the Swedish results caused an international stir, and a hunt for an explanation of how the chemical got into the food chain.

The hunt didn’t take long. Acrylamide was found in varying levels in potato chips, French fries, crackers, breakfast cereals, and other processed foods whose manufacture includes heating, especially frying or baking. Scientists deduced they were formed by the amino acid asparagine and glucose sugar during the heating process.

Will this chemical “starlet” just breaking onto the scene prove a truly dangerous contaminant? The scientific jury is still out. Although acrylamide in high doses has been proven to cause genetic mutations in mice that lead to cancer, the level of the chemical in the average human’s body at present is less than that in the lab mice. As the Washington Post reported:

So far, officials say, they have not found acrylamide risks great enough to recommend that consumers avoid any groups of food or specific products. It remains uncertain whether people consume enough acrylamide in their food for it to be harmful, and whether the substance–which causes cancer in laboratory animals at high doses–is similarly hazardous to people, they said. But Terry C. Troxell of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition said yesterday, at a two-day advisory committee meeting on acrylamide, that the agency agreed with the WHO’s conclusion that the discovery of acrylamide in many foods is a major concern and needs to be aggressively researched.…

Troxell and other speakers stressed that ... its presence must be treated seriously. ⁸

ADDITIVES (COMMON) Unlike acrylamide, which was not deliberately–or in most cases even knowingly–introduced in foods, there is a long list of chemicals in what we eat which have been put there on purpose. Most of these additives, though not all, are there legally. That is, the manufacturers who put them there are not breaking any laws when they do so. These compounds include antioxidants intended to prevent food from going rancid, chelating agents put in to prevent discoloration, emulsifiers to keep water and oils mixed together, thickening agents, and flavor enhancers. There are hundreds of them, far too numerous to mention here, and as food manufacturers continue to experiment with new processes, more are being added every year.

In the U.S., the federal Food and Drug Administration is charged with regulating additives and assuring they are not dangerous. The laws and regulations the FDA goes by, however, are full of loopholes, as are the testing processes supposed to assess safety. For example, any additives that were considered safe by the FDA or USDA before the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was amended in 1958 are exempt from regulation.

That is, if scientists working with the facts and testing processes available in 1938—three years before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor—thought a substance safe, then it is deemed safe for all time, regardless of what present-day research may have to say about it. Among these exempt-from-examination items are sodium nitrite (see below) and potassium nitrite, which are used to preserve cold-cuts and lunch meats.

At its “Chemical Cuisine” website (www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm), the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has posted a list of 73 common additives, rating them according to safety and describing their possible side effects. Anyone interested in the safety of the food they eat can download the list, print it out, and take it with them to the supermarket. You may have to squint a bit to read the fine print on some processed food labels, and not all labels on the shelf provide a comprehensive list of ingredients, but at least you can look up what is there and compare it with the CSPI’s rankings.

For example, under sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, you’ll find this entry:

Meat processors love sodium nitrite because it stabilizes the red color in cured meat (without nitrite, hot dogs and bacon would look gray) and gives a characteristic flavor. Sodium nitrate is used in dry cured meat, because it slowly breaks down into nitrite. Adding nitrite to food can lead to the formation of small amounts of potent cancer-causing chemicals (nitrosamines), particularly in fried bacon.

Several studies have linked consumption of cured meat and nitrite by children, pregnant women, and adults with various types of cancer. Although those studies have not yet proven that eating nitrite in bacon, sausage, and ham causes cancer in humans, pregnant women would be prudent to avoid those products.

The meat industry justifies its use of nitrite and nitrate by claiming that it prevents the growth of bacteria that cause botulism poisoning. That’s true, but freezing and refrigeration could also do that, and the USDA has developed a safe method of using lactic-acid- producing bacteria.” ⁹

The CSPI website also has pretty harsh words for most artificial food colorings and artificial flavorings, as well as for the sugar substitute aspartame, the flour “improver” potassium bromate, and various sulfites.

Among the various food colorings that have made it into the news media in recent years are Tartrazine (E102), Sunset Yellow (E110), and Ponceau 4R (E124), dyes used to impart the typically orange-red hue to Indian dishes such as chicken tikka masala, served in Indian tandoori restaurants around the world. The three coloring agents, if taken over extended periods, are believed to be linked to hyperactivity in children, as well as to a list of other serious ailments, including asthma and cancer. As the British newspaper The Guardian noted:

Random tests ordered by Trading Standards officers in Surrey suggest 57 percent of Indian restaurants in the county use “illegal and potentially dangerous” levels of dyes to give the sauce its distinctive orange-red hue.…

Out of 102 curry houses sampled, only 44 were using the colorings within legal limits. ¹⁰

ANTIBIOTICS Most of us think of antibiotics—biochemical substances produced by benign microorganisms that can inhibit or destroy harmful bacteria— as one of our best defenses against disease. After Alexander Fleming first isolated penicillin (produced by the mold penicillium) in 1928, and other scientists developed it for use as an antibacterial agent in 1941, the very word antibiotic became almost synonymous with “life saver.”

Not anymore. Thanks in large part to the modern, corporate food industry, antibiotics are now on the list of dangers to human health. How this happened makes a kind of modern morality tale.

As most of us learned in high school biology class, bacteria are very small, incredibly numerous, and reproduce at a rate that makes rabbits look like they’re practicing celibacy. In 24 hours, the offspring of a single Escherichia coli bacterium could outnumber the entire human population of the earth—and a certain number of that population of bugs will mutate.

All living things can mutate—experience a change in the character of one of their genes, or a change in the sequence of base pairs in a DNA molecule, which can then be passed on to their descendants. In large animals, like humans, mutations aren’t all that frequent, but in a population of millions upon millions of bacteria, reproducing at whirlwind speed, there’s “a whole lotta mutate’n goin’ on,” and each mutation can be passed on to millions of individuals within hours.

Antibiotics work by attacking bacteria in a variety of ways, such as breaking down cell walls or interfering with some vital step in the bacteria’s metabolism. However, when an antibiotic attacks a bacterial colony, it doesn’t always wipe that colony out. Some bacteria survive, either because they already had a genetic trait that blocked the antibiotic (called intrinsic resistance), or because they developed one while under attack (acquired resistance). These resistant bacteria can then go on reproducing, creating a resistant population. In general, the weaker the antibiotic attack, the more bacterial survivors there are—and the bigger the new, resistant population.

The best way to deliberately create a large, resistant population of harmful bacteria—if we are crazy enough to want to do this–would be to make many, many weak attacks on that species of bacteria with low doses of antibiotics. After each attack, there would be a fair portion of resistant survivors, and if the attacks are widespread enough, resistant bugs will soon be popping up everywhere.

This is exactly what our food production system is doing.

When a cow, pig or chicken “catches cold,” that is, develops a mild bacterial infection, its milk or meat production goes slightly down while its body uses energy to fight the infection off naturally. In the old days of family farms with relatively small numbers of stock, nobody thought much of it. Only when a cow or sheep became significantly ill was medication used. But today’s corporate factory-farm systems can’t tolerate such minor blips. Maximizing profit is the name of the game, and nothing can be permitted to decrease production, not even a little bit.

Rather than wait for an animal to “catch cold,” and suffer even a minor slowdown in milk production or weight gain, preventive doses of antibiotics are put into healthy animals’ feed, as a sort of insurance against possible infection. The preventive doses, of course, are lower than those used to treat a full-blown, active infection. They are low, so-called “maintenance” doses—and their use has become more and more common, virtually guaranteeing that resistant bacteria strains will be popping up everywhere.

Of course, modern stock-raising methods aren’t the only cause of the problem. Over-prescription of antibiotics by doctors treating human patients has also contributed to the development of drug resistance. But at least the doctors are treating actual sickness. The stockmen who feed perfectly healthy animals “growth-promoting” antibiotics are not.

As Michael Khoo of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported recently:

About 13 million pounds [of antibiotics] a year are fed to chickens, cows, and pigs to make them grow faster or to compensate for unsanitary conditions. That’s about four times the amount used to treat sick people.

Why is the use in animals a threat to public health? Because the overuse of drugs on factory farms creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are difficult to treat. These bacteria can make food-poisoning episodes last longer or recovery from surgery less certain. As bacteria become more resistant, people can no longer be sure that prescribed drugs will actually work. ¹¹

The potential scale of the problem becomes clear when we look at some individual microbes. For example, the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae has become resistant to penicillin, and is

the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia (about 500,000 cases in the U.S. per year), is a major cause of bacterial meningitis (about 6,000 cases in the U.S. per year), causes about one-third of the cases of ear infection (about six million cases in the U.S. per year), and causes about 55,000 cases of bacteremia [bacteria in the blood, or “blood poisoning”] in the U.S. per year. ¹²

The worst of the resistant bacteria strains are those that are immune to many different antibiotics, the so-called “superbugs.” More than 90 percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria are now penicillin-resistant, and many of them are also resistant to methicillin, nafcillin, oxacillin, and cloxacillin, as well as other antibiotics.¹³S. aureus is the second most common cause of skin and wound infections, of bacteremia, and of lower respiratory infections. Some 40 percent of such infections are now due to multi-resistant strains. S. aureus blood poisoning “can be fatal within 12 hours.”¹⁴

There are now also multi-resistant strains of Salmonella–a common cause of food poisoning,¹⁵ and Escherichia coli, which is a major cause of diarrheal illness in children in the U.S. In severe cases of E. coli infection, dehydration can occur, “especially among children, in whom mortality may be quite high.”¹⁶

More recently, scientists have reported a new strain of an ancient scourge: syphilis. This sexually transmitted disease, which can cause dementia, paralysis, and death, is caused by a microbe called Treponema pallidum, and until recently was easily cured by a few oral doses of the antibiotic azithromycin. The new strain is resistant to azithromycin, and is showing up in increasing numbers in syphilis patients. Incidence of syphilis itself has increased by more than 19 percent in the U.S. between the years 2000 and 2003.¹⁷

By constantly administering “sub-therapeutic” doses of antibiotics (that is, doses below the level needed to cure an actual infection) to the animals on farms, in feedlots, and in transport trucks carrying them to the slaughterhouses, meat producers create millions of resistant bacteria, with populations scattered all over the continent. Small residues of antibiotics may also end up in the meat sold in stores, which means we can be dosed with them when we eat the meat, leading to the creation of resistant bacteria in our own bodies.

So serious is the problem of drug-resistant bacteria that the European Union banned the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in meat and milk production in 1998. Such influential groups as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have called for major reductions in the use of such antibiotics in North America, but few producers have listened.

In fact, when the McDonald’s fast food chain, responding to heavy consumer pressure, decided in June 2003 to ban meats produced with growth-promoting antibiotics, a storm of protest arose from the company’s suppliers, some of whom claimed banning non-therapeutic antibiotic use would cause “a dramatic increase in animal disease”¹⁸ — in other words, that not giving medicine to healthy animals would make them sick.

Yet continuing the practice may have contributed to what scientists call the “nightmare scenario,” recently announced in the U.S. As the wire services reported in July 2002:

Medical experts have long described it as the nightmare scenario of antibiotic resistance: the day when Staphylococcus aureus, cause of some of the most common and troublesome infections to inflict man, becomes resistant to the antibiotic arsenal’s weapon of last resort, vancomycin.

The nightmare scenario has arrived.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has announced the first confirmed case of vancomycin-resistant staph aureus—known in the medical world as VRSA—found last month in a Michigan man.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” Dr. Donald Low, microbiologistin- chief at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital says of the confirmation. “It’s ominous.” ¹⁹

Low worried that the day is fast arriving when common infections like S. aureus won’t be treatable with any antibiotics at all. That was the situation before penicillin was discovered. In those days, “many surgical procedures which now routinely save lives would have been too dangerous because of the risk of infection.”²⁰

Some scientists, seeing how slowly society is responding to the situation, believe most antibiotics will soon be useless, and research will have to turn to the relatively untested (in the West) use of bacteria-killing viruses called bacteriophages, or to chemical agents, as our only means of disease control—a high price to pay for a few more pounds of milk or meat, and a few more cents of financial profit.

There is also the possibility that antibiotic residues in food might cause allergic reactions in some people. A study presented to the European Respiratory Society’s annual conference in 2003 reported that giving children an antibiotic before six months of age more than doubles the risk they will have asthma before their seventh birthdays. Babies who take antibiotics are also more likely to develop allergies to pets, ragweed, grass, and dust mites.²¹

Recently, the British Soil Association reported that people on diets involving high egg consumption may be in danger from lasalocid, an antibiotic commonly used by poultry farmers.²² Residues of the drug were found in 12 percent of egg samples tested by the U.K. Veterinary Medicines Directorate. Although there are no reports of human illness induced by lasalocid, “similar drugs have been reported to cause severe illness, including paralysis and increased breathing and heart rates, and death in livestock such as cattle, turkeys and sheep. Lasalocid, commercially produced since 1977, has also accidentally poisoned dogs.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires a specified period between the time of animal medication and time of slaughter, which is supposed to minimize the likelihood of such reactions, but the possibility remains.

ARSENIC Well-known in its pure, inorganic form as a deadly poison (Lucrezia Borgia was alleged to carry it in a hollow ring, ready to tip into a victim’s wine when he wasn’t looking), the semimetallic element arsenic (As), in its less-toxic organic form, occurs naturally in food, water, and in the environment. The human body can tolerate a minimal amount of the organic variety, but exposure to too much of it over a long term has been associated with “cancer of the bladder, lungs, skin, kidney, nasal passages, liver, and prostate, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”²³ It has also been associated with “cardiovascular, pulmonary, immunologic, neurologic, and endocrine problems.”²⁴

Arsenic is a government-approved feed supplement used by poultry farmers to prevent parasite infections in chickens. The amount of arsenic found in young broiler chickens may be three to four times higher than that in other poultry, according to USDA researchers. How much arsenic residue in chicken meat is too much for a human to safely ingest?

The answer is, nobody really knows. But we’re eating it.

BOVINE GROWTH HORMONE (BGH) Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH, also known as recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST) is a hormone produced naturally in the pituitary glands of cows, which promotes both growth and milk production. Scientists can also genetically alter bacteria to produce BGH, permitting commercial laboratories to make massive, concentrated amounts of the substance, and sell it to farmers as a drug. Because BGH occurs naturally, and small residues have always been present in meat and milk, it hasn’t been thought necessary to examine the effects of artificially produced or administered BGH, or to consider what might happen if larger-than-normal amounts should enter the food chain.

BGH is also denatured (viz., its function is changed) by the heat used in cooking meat or processing milk, and can be digested by the enzymes in the human gastrointestinal tract, giving scientists an additional reason to assume that it could have no effect if it enters our food supply.

However, a growing number of scientists and consumer activists believe such assumptions of safety are dangerously complacent, to the point of recklessness.

The most obvious reason for unease is the possible threat posed by BGH’s effect on yet another hormone–called Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-I)—which is found in both cows and humans. IGF-I is extremely important because it appears to act as a sort of biochemical regulator or mediator that determines cellular response to various other growth hormones in various parts of the body. Abnormal increases or decreases in IGF-I can alter how the human body reacts not only to IGF-I itself, but how it reacts to the other hormones as well.

IGF-I is a potent “mitogen,” or substance which stimulates cell division and boosts growth. Ominously, this can include not only the division and growth of normal, healthy cells, but also of cancer cells. As a survey of recent research on the subject by the Joint World Health Organization (WHO)/UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) noted, Insulin-like Growth Factors are important mitogens in many types of malignancies.²⁵

“Not surprisingly,” the WHO/FAO authors add, “most of the cancers that IGF-I is associated with occur in tissues where IGF-I normally plays an important growth role, including the mammary, cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous systems, the skeleton and the intestinal tract.”²⁶

In other words, IGF-I may be a cause of potentially fatal cancers all over the body, but especially in the breast, colon, and smooth muscles. Says the report: “IGFs have been shown to be involved in breast cancer.... In the skeletal system, IGF-I has been associated with osteosarcoma (bone cancer). The tumor seems to strike children with the most rapidly growing bones.... IGF-I has also been implicated in lung cancer.... Five of eight human colorectal cancer cell lines were responsive to IGF-I.”²⁷

According to the report authors, “the weight of evidence indicates that rBST use [namely, BGH administered to cows] does increase IGF- I levels in milk, substantially.”²⁸ And the IGF-I in that milk, when ingested by humans “survives digestion.”²⁹

BGH’s potential for increasing the presence of possibly cancer-causing IGF-I in milk and milk products has prompted the European Union to refuse approval for its use by European dairy farmers and to ban importation of dairy products from countries that use it. Canada has a similar policy. The U.S., under the Bush administration, has pursued an aggressive policy of threats and trade pressure to force the EU and Canada to accept BGH-laced products, but as of this writing the EU and Canada have resisted U.S. pressure.

The effects of BGH on IGF-I, however, are not the only reason why critics oppose its use. Cows that are regularly dosed with BGH also exhibit an increased susceptibility to one of the age-old plagues of dairy farmers: mastitis–a painful disease that affects cows’ udders. The WHO/FAO report notes that in various trials of BGH-treated cows, mastitis incidence increased at rates varying from 50 to 76 percent, and that cases of rBST-associated mastitis “appear to be harder to treat than ‘normal’ mastitis.”³⁰ That is, that to cure the affected cows, higher doses of antibiotics are required. Says the WHO/FAO report:

Both increased incidence of mastitis and more severe or longer-lasting cases of mastitis can lead to greater antibiotic use. In the Vermont study ... there were more than seven times as many cases of mastitis in rBST-treated cows compared to controls, while the average length of antibiotic treatment was almost six times as long, leading to a 43-fold increase in the total duration of antibiotic treatment for rBST-treated cows, compared to controls. In the study of 15 commercial herds that found a 47 percent overall increase in mastitis in rBST-treated cows, antibiotic treatment doubled in rBST-treated cows compared to controls. ³¹

In other words, a mastitis near-epidemic—prompted by greedy corporate dairy producers hoping to increase milk production and boost their accountants’ bottom lines—requires those same dairymen to administer yet-heavier doses of the very antibiotics that could potentially create an alarming number of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, resistant not just to mastitis, but to a potential myriad human and bovine diseases (see Antibiotics, above).

At the same time, greater use of antibiotics in cattle is of concern “because of residues, which some authorities believe may cause adverse (i.e. allergenic) reactions.”³²

BROMATE AND BROMINATED DIPHENYL ETHERS (BDEs) The chemical element bromine (Br) is found in a variety of compounds, including bromates (salts or esters of bromic acid, HbrO) and brominated diphenyl ethers (BDEs).

Early in 2004, a leading soft drink manufacturer was forced to withdraw its line of “pure” bottled drinking water from the British market when it was found to contain illegal amounts of bromate–which has been linked in studies with increased cancer risks.³³ More than 500,000 bottles had to be recalled, and not long afterward it was discovered that the bottled water had originally come from ordinary tap water, sourced from the company’s factory in Kent.

Brominated diphenyl ethers (BDEs), commonly used as fire retardants in the foam used for furniture cushions, were reported turning up in rising proportions in the eggs of Great Lakes herring gulls in 2004, according to the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) of Environment Canada. Concentrations of the chemical, the CWS reported, had been doubling every three years since the early 1980s, and could be as dangerous as the highly toxic PCBs, which were banned in the 1970s. Said the Toronto Globe and Mail:

The structure of brominated compounds closely resembles that of PCBs, prompting scientists to suspect that the two have similar biological effects. “There is no reason to believe that these things will be any different than the PCBs,” said Ross Nystrom, an adjunct chemistry professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who has worked on the research project. “They look the same. They’ve got the same kinds of chemicals in them, and so far most of the research seems to be saying they behave the same.” ³⁴

In the past, birds contaminated with PCBs have had offspring with severe birth defects, “including extra limbs, malformed eyes and deformed beaks. Research on children suggests PCBs diminish intelligence.” ³⁵

Are the BDEs detected in wild gulls likely to turn up in the eggs of domestic poultry, or at some other point in the food chain leading to humans?

No one knows.

DIOXIN One of the legacies of the decades-long American attack on Vietnam was the effect of the Dow Chemical Company herbicide Agent Orange on the environment and people of Vietnam, and upon the U.S. servicemen and -women accidentally exposed to it. Visitors to Vietnam today can tour museum exhibits of the grossly malformed victims of the U.S. campaign to deny Vietcong guerrillas the cover of forests and farms by chemically destroying the tree and crop cover of the entire nation. Thousands of crippled children, and horridly malformed fetuses, were part of the effort to “destroy this place in order to save it” from what then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later admitted was a tragically exaggerated, and mistaken, fear of “falling dominos.”

Now the same substance that destroyed the lives and happiness of so many Vietnamese children and so many American veterans has turned up in the North American food supply—dioxin, known to biochemists as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD).

Medically, dioxin is described as: “a toxic, cancer-causing chemical. Initial exposure to this agent can produce chloracne [generalized acne], liver injury, and peripheral neuropathy [muscle weakness, impaired reflexes, and numbness, stinging and burning sensations].³⁶ It has been branded as a cause of severe birth defects. Long-term exposure to the substance can weaken the human immune system and cause cancerous tumors.³⁷

North Americans, of course, are not being sprayed by the infamous Agent Orange, but they are subject to a never-ending barrage of dioxin, produced as a byproduct of numerous industrial manufacturing processes. Once released into the environment, dioxin tends to concentrate in certain food products, especially meat and other animal products such as eggs.

Canadian newspaper readers were shocked in 2002 by reports that dioxin—forbidden by law in any food sold in Canada—had been detected in foods imported from the U.S. in quantities up to 18 times higher than internationally accepted limits. “Eight out of 10 samples of pork, beef, and cheese contained chemical byproducts known as dioxins, even though the law stipulates that no such chemicals should be present in food sold in Canada,” said the report.³⁸

The World Health Organization (WHO) says dioxin levels in meat and animal byproducts must not exceed three parts per trillion for each gram of fat, if health and safety are to be maintained. But samples tested by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) found that a batch of eggs imported from the U.S. had dioxin levels of more than 90 parts per trillion—some 18 times higher than the limit set out by the WHO.

“By comparison, the dioxin content in a sample of Canadian eggs was 20 parts per trillion”³⁹ CFIA tested beef had dioxin levels of 23 parts per trillion, while cheese samples registered 12 parts per trillion.

Dioxin is also present in most fish caught by sport fishermen in North America, concentrating especially in the fatty tissues of salmon, trout, carp, and catfish. The danger posed is serious enough that some government departments, like the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, publish annual guides for fishermen, warning them away from badly polluted areas and estimating how much fish they can safely eat from various lakes.⁴⁰ Dioxin is also one of a mix of toxins found increasingly in farmed salmon, which recent studies have found are more contaminated than wild salmon.⁴¹

Only a few months after the alarming CFIA report, the U.S.-based Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a warning to North American women, that they should “cut back their consumption of red meat, poultry and whole milk to reduce their exposure to dioxin.”⁴² According to this warning, dioxin “can build up in the body and, in their childbearing years, harm their babies.”⁴³

“Because the risks posed by the amount of dioxins found in foods have yet to be determined, we are recommending simple, prudent steps to reduce dioxin exposure while data are gathered that will clarify the risks,” said Robert Lawrence, associate dean of the school of public health of Johns Hopkins University and chairman of the IOM committee that issued the warning.⁴⁴

At the time of the advisory, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that 150 kilograms of dioxins were released into the atmosphere in the U.S. in 2001, up from from 100 kg a year earlier.

In short, this deadly substance, which so devastated the population of Vietnam, is now present to such an extent in American and Canadian foods that women who plan to have children in future are advised to avoid eating meat, eggs, and dairy products altogether.

GENETIC MATERIAL (IN GENETICALLY MODIFIED, OR GM, FOODS) When the first genetically modified (GM) food products began to appear on the market, a skeptical public immediately branded them “Frankenfoods,” and reacted with suspicion. This reflex was ridiculed by the foods’ corporate manufacturers as emotional and unscientific, but there is good cause to think that hesitation to accept the starry-eyed predictions of GM foods’ most enthusiastic boosters may be no more than prudent common sense.

After nuclear power, the most controversial scientific advance of the twentieth century has been genetic engineering. Whole libraries have already been written on the subject, and as the twenty-first century began, it seemed the controversy was likely only to deepen.

The term genetic engineering refers to the manipulation of any genetic material, such as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), for practical uses. Normally, this involves introducing foreign genes into microorganisms so as to change their genetic code—and thus their basic nature.

First modeled in 1953 by British scientist Francis Crick and the American J. D. Watson, the “double helix” structure of the DNA molecule is the basic building block of the chromosomes contained in the nuclei of living cells, and carry within them the biochemical hereditary information–the codes–that determine the structure and function of most living creatures. Those codes consist of individual genes, segments of DNA that specify particular traits such as (in you and me) hair color, sex, body build, and so forth.

As anyone knows who has read Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century novel Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, or even seen the host of Hollywood productions based on it (my personal favorite is the 1931 Boris Karloff version), playing around with the basic stuff of life can get messy, resulting in things the players never expected, much less intended– and genes are, in every sense of the expression, the basic stuff of life.

Obviously, GM techniques hold enormous promise, particularly in medicine where they may eventually lead to cures for some of humankind’s worst physical and mental afflictions. Applied in the field of agriculture, they hold just as much promise—and terrible dangers. The latter come under two headings: 1) the effects of GM foods on human health and, 2) the effects of GM crops on their surrounding environments.

The plain truth is, no one yet knows what those effects might be. And it’s equally plain that far too many of the corporate players, who see quick fortunes to be made in GM crops and their applications, are unconcerned with such questions. There is a rush, like the blind, pellmell stampede of the nineteenth-century Gold Rush, to grab patents and exploit them to the maximum, fast-tracking GM varieties onto an unsuspecting market before anyone has time to evaluate them, and to reap the short-term, maximum financial benefit regardless of long-term consequences—the consequences you and I, and our children, will eventually pay.

The question is not whether GM varieties should be developed, but whether they should be developed responsibly, with adequate pretesting and evaluation of their environmental, market, and social impacts, or whether they should be introduced willy-nilly, recklessly, with no view toward any future more distant than the next fiscal quarter and no consideration beyond the potential financial bonanzas of greedy corporate CEOs. As the infamous Enron scandal, and others similar to it, ought to have demonstrated beyond question, the first concern of our modern corporate elite is hardly the public good.

The potential impact of GM foods on human health is largely unknown, but we do have some early indicators. A national advertisement published in 1999 by the Turning Point Project, titled “Unlabeled, untested.…and you’re eating it,” noted that “while there have been no tests so far conclusively establishing that genetically engineered foods are harmful to humans, the potential dangers are significant enough to mandate long-term independent testing of GE food products before release into supermarkets.”⁴⁵

The ad listed areas of concern:

Toxicity. According to some FDA scientists, the genetic engineering of food may bring “some undesirable effects such as increased levels of known naturally occurring toxicants, appearance of new, not previously identified toxicants, increased capability of concentrating toxic substances from the environment (e.g. pesticides or heavy metals), and undesirable alterations in the levels of nutrients.” In other words, scientists from the FDA itself suspect that genetic engineering could make foods toxic.

Allergic reaction. FDA scientists also warn that genetically engineered foods could “produce a new protein allergen” or “enhance the synthesis of existing plant food allergens.” And a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that when a gene from a Brazil nut was engineered into soybeans, people allergic to nuts had serious reactions. Without labeling, people with certain food allergies will not be able to know if they might be harmed by the food they’re eating.

Antibiotic resistance. Many GE foods are modified with antibiotic resistant genes; people who eat them may become more susceptible to bacterial infections. Commenting on this problem, the British Medical Association said that antibiotic resistance is “one of the major public health threats that will be faced in the twenty-first century.”

Cancer. European scientists have also found that dairy products from animals treated with bovine growth hormone (rBGH) contain an insulin-like growth factor that may increase the risk of breast cancer, as well as prostate and colon cancer.