Food Safety

April 22, 2018

Sickening eggs and lettuce? Didn’t we pass a major law to fix food safety?

After fading from the headlines in 2015-16 when a major restaurant chain struggled with meals that sickened dozens in multiple states, big worries have erupted anew about the safety of the nation’s food. That’s because federal officials and a supersized-farmer are struggling with salmonella outbreaks tied to more than 200 million now-recalled eggs, even as growers, grocers, and eateries wrestle with dozens of E. coli illnesses linked to romaine lettuce.

The worrisome poultry products came from Rose Acre Farms’ North Carolina operation, which produces 2.3 million eggs a day from 3 million hens. Its products go to stores and restaurants in Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas, the Washington Post reported. Those eggs have been blamed for Salmonella braenderup infections that have sickened 23 people from nine states. No deaths have been reported.

Rose Acres, which has 17 facilities in eight states, has acted with “an abundance of caution,” federal officials noted, and recalled more than 200 million eggs, sold under the brand names Great Value, Country Daybreak, and Crystal Farms. Waffle House restaurants and Food Lion stores also were sold the potentially bad egg.

April 20, 2018

Trust your gut: Don’t swallow hype about ‘microbiome’ and dietary gee-whiz

by Patrick A. Malone

Trust your gut: If anyone hypes a diet to you, saying it’s beneficial because it’s somehow tailored to the makeup of your complex, prehistoric, and individual intestinal microbiome, just wink and walk off. You know better, right?

Healthnewsreview.org, the watchdog about accuracy of medical news reports, rightly has taken after the Wall Street Journal for its recent story headlined, “The Food that Helps Fight Depression.”

Writer Michael Joyce reported about the WSJ piece:

April 13, 2018

Are we back to this? Kids targeted by nicotine and sugary cereal peddlers

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Tobacco, Big Sugar, and technology may be targeting the well-being of young people faster than regulators can prevent them from heading back to the future in a bad way: Teens getting hooked on nicotine, while tots take in excess calories with super sweet breakfast cereals.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each have big take-outs, reporting on the “explosive” and “epidemic” trend, mostly by more affluent teens, of vaping with so-called e-cigarettes, notably a hot new device called the Juul.

It’s about the size of a computer flash drive, and it uses fruity-flavored liquids to deliver a jolt of nicotine — more than what users might get by puffing a pack of old-fashioned cigarettes.

March 2, 2018

Is it carbs, fats, calories, or genes in dieting? Try quality food in moderation

by Patrick A. Malone

Rigorous, reliable research on diet and nutrition is not common, so it’s worth paying close attention to the results of an $8-million, year-long study conducted at Stanford University with more than 600 test subjects. Its recommendations are filled — in a good way — with common sense and moderation.

The New York Times reported of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Nutrition Group and others, that its findings will help debunk some long-held notions about dieting — and some diet fads. Here’s the core of the newly published work’s key findings, according to the newspaper:

[P]eople who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year. The strategy worked for people whether they followed diets that were mostly low in fat or mostly low in carbohydrates. And their success did not appear to be influenced by their genetics or their insulin-response to carbohydrates, a finding that casts doubt on the increasingly popular idea that different diets should be recommended to people based on their DNA makeup or on their tolerance for carbs or fat.

January 8, 2018

‘Raw water:’ Liquid looniness

by Patrick A. Malone

The new year is bubbling with numerous reports about “raw water.” Enthusiasts are flocking to outlets — in Oregon, Maine, San Diego, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley — for unfiltered, untreated, and unsterilized H2O from springs. They’re paying dearly, for example $36.99 for a 2.5-gallon glass orb of “off the grid” Live Water from a West Coast vendor.

Devotees insist “raw water” tastes better. They contend it’s healthier when free of chemicals, like purifying chlorine and tooth- and bone-protecting fluoride, and replete with “probiotics,” bacteria and microscopic life such as algae that they claim are beneficial.

Such claims fly in the face of at least a century of public health experience and progress, a period in which science-based hygiene has helped to rid the nation of epidemics due to water-borne bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, and hepatitis A no longer flourish in water supplies, killing thousands annually as these banes once did. It goes without a thought for most Americans that they can turn the spigot at home or the office, drink freely and deeply and not end up getting deathly ill — risks that may be posed by “raw” water.

January 3, 2018

FDA caught dawdling in key duty of getting contaminated foods off shelves

by Patrick A. Malone

Watchdogs have caught the Federal Food and Drug Administration dogging one of its most basic and important tasks — getting contaminated and potentially dangerous foods off the shelves quickly.

Federal inspectors spot-checked several dozen recalls among 1,557 the agency conducted between 2012 and 2015, partly to see how the FDA used wider powers given to it under the Obama Administration to protect American consumers from food-borne illness.

The agency dawdled for weeks and even months, adding to delays that might increase the risks of harms to the public, said investigators under the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. As the New York Times reported:

November 10, 2017

Some straight dope on pot products, soy foods, essential oils, stem cell hype

by Patrick A. Malone

Let’s give them their just deserts and dispatch them with alacrity. In this week’s hokum alert:

The federal Food and Drug Administration couldn’t make it clearer: Companies pushing products with cannabis in them can’t make unfounded claims about their use in treating or “curing” cancer. It’s just rubbish. The agency ordered the makers of dozens of pot-containing products to stop their hype. Savvy consumers also should stop acting as if they’re stoned and giving any credibility to these claims, right?
The rightly red-faced FDA itself is walking back some of its gullibility about health claims for soy foods and their purported heart healthfulness. The Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports good nutrition, called out the agency, pointing out that recent research demonstrates at best a correlation between soy eating and good heart health. The FDA, which had allowed just a dozen claims of health benefits on food packaging, decided soy’s benefits are insufficient to stay in this glowing group (which includes Vitamin D in cutting osteoporosis risks and fruits and vegetables in cancer reductions). Just to be clear: soy isn’t harmful, it is popular (notably in Asian-based diets), and it is a sound, plant-based protein.

October 24, 2017

With obesity soaring, Americans gulled by dark chocolate myths and more

by Patrick A. Malone

Although most of our elders have preached at us from a chapel of common sense, dietary nonsense seems to rain on our heads faster than the autumn leaves. It ought to go without saying that dark chocolate really isn’t a health food. And, to repeat again something that many pregnant women ought to know already: Getting your placenta commercially prepared after your baby’s born, and eating it isn’t a great idea.

Vox, the online news site, deserves credit for debunking a long campaign by candy makers and Big Sugar to persuade consumers that dark cocoa products somehow are “superfoods” like red wine, blueberries, and avocados.

Special interests, Vox reports, have poured tens of millions of dollars into “nutrition research” that purports to show chocolate’s health benefits. The problem is the science here is less than objective and sound: “Here at Vox, we examined 100 Mars-funded health studies, and found they overwhelmingly drew glowing conclusions about cocoa and chocolate — promoting everything from chocolate’s heart health benefits to cocoa’s ability to fight disease.” The Vox story later points out:

October 4, 2017

FDA, lacking staff and budget, falls short on oversight of food processing

by Patrick A. Malone

Uncle Sam, estimating that 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States, has pledged to step up preventive and protective measures to prevent these all too common health banes. Here’s the dirty secret about that vow: The federal Food and Drug Administration lacks the staff to do so in some key ways. And it faces further cuts in its funding.

Inspectors from the federal Health and Human Services department (HHS) have audited FDA inspection data from 2011 to 2015, finding, according to the Washington Post:

Government inspectors failed to take action on one of every five serious food-safety risks identified in manufacturing facilities. … In the remaining cases, the [FDA] almost always asked food manufacturers to correct violations voluntarily. In one incident in 2013, FDA inspectors found listeria in a facility where rain dripped through holes in the ceiling onto food prep areas. While FDA asked the facility to address the problems, samples from the factory still tested positive for listeria two years later. That same year, FDA inspectors found salmonella in a facility that made ready-to-eat seafood, salads and dips. They did not send the facility a warning letter or initiate any other corrective actions.

August 11, 2017

FDA, EPA jointly offer expectant parents counsel on safer fish eating

by Patrick A. Malone

If you’re an expectant mom trying to diversify your diet and to eat healthier this summer, two federal agencies are offering evidence-based advice about seafood dining: Use a little caution with servings of certain fish like king mackerel, marlin, shark, swordfish, and bigeye tuna that tend to carry higher levels of problematic mercury.

The federal Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency have teamed up to revise their safe fish guidelines and to offer these in a handy guide to not only pregnant women but to all parents really.

The agencies say that fish can be a tasty, protein- and nutrient-rich part of Americans’ diets with grown-ups and kids encouraged to eat two to three servings or roughly 8- to 12-ounces-per-week. But fish also carry mercury traces, which “can be harmful to the brain and nervous system if a person is exposed to too much of it over time.”