(NaturalNews) Health and environmental activists have filed a lawsuit to force manufacturers to disclose the ingredients of household cleaning products.
Consumers "want access to the information so they can determine the kind of chemicals that they are introducing into their homes and whether there are any risks associated with them," Keri Powell, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice.
Other lawsuit participants include the Sierra Club and the American Lung Association.
Some cleaners are required to carry hazard labels by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, while the National Institutes of Health has used industrial data to make some health and safety information on many products public. Yet beyond these key exceptions, federal law does not require manufacturers of household cleaning products to make the ingredients of those products publicly available.
Awareness and concern over these hidden ingredients is growing, perhaps best demonstrated by the recent uproar over the plastics and resin ingredient bisphenol A, which has been linked to hormonal and reproductive problems, particularly in children. Other findings of concern include studies linking cleaning products to asthma, hormonal problems and antibiotic resistance. Responding to this trend, a Senate subcommittee recently held a hearing into public toxic chemicals exposure.
Although a win in the New York case would only change the law in that state, the plaintiffs hope that a victory could help galvanize a national movement and create pressure for changes to federal legislation.
The 1971 law in question allows the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to make manufacturers disclose ingredients and any relevant safety data. It does not require such disclosure, however -- something the lawsuit hopes to change.
Manufacturers have sought to avoid new regulations through a voluntary online disclosure program. Yet environmental and health advocates have warned that these measures do not go far enough, allowing companies to hide behind vague ingredient labels such as "fragrance" or "dye."
"We must be careful about exposures for all household chemicals," Sierra Club member Joseph A. Gardella Jr. said.
Sources for this story include: www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/....
Showing posts with label ingredients. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ingredients. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Frozen yogurt is not health food
(NaturalNews) It did not even occur to me that people thought frozen yogurt was a "health food" until I spent some time in the USA. There, people line up in droves at frozen yogurt stores to buy a junk food that they're convinced is good for them. And why is it good for them, in their own minds? Because it's "yogurt."
I actually went to the trouble of visiting a line of people at a frozen yogurt store and asking several people there if they could name the ingredients in the frozen yogurt they were buying. Not one of them could. Most just said, "Yogurt." (Are you detecting a pattern here?)
Upon further investigation, I found that frozen yogurt retailers don't make it very easy for you to find out what's actually in their products in the first place. They don't print ingredients on the products they sell, and even their websites make it virtually impossible to find this information.
After some digging, I was able to find the ingredients of the vanilla yogurt powder that's used in one of the nation's most famous frozen yogurt chains. Here's what's in it:
Pure Crystalline Fructose, Dextrose, Maltodextrin, Non-fat Milk, Yogurt Powder, Micro-encapsulated Probiotic (Lactobacillus Sporogenes)
Did you catch all that? The first three ingredients are all sugars, followed by processed cow's milk. Maltodextrin, in particular, has a glycemic index so high that it's practically poison to diabetics. It's often derived from genetically-modified corn, by the way.
As you can see from the ingredients list, frozen yogurt is basically just ice cream with some yogurt powder thrown in. It's ice cream with probiotics.
That doesn't make it healthy food. It's still junk food, but with probiotic powder.
The answer? Because they want to.
Frozen yogurt shops don't deliver healthy food, but they do deliver the illusion of healthy food. And in America today, where illusion dominates reality, that's good enough!
People aren't really interested in what they're eating, you see. They just want to be convincingly persuaded that whatever they're swallowing is somehow good for them. That's sufficient evidence in their minds to go ahead and start chowing down.
It's much the same with popular religion in the USA today. Few people really believe in God even if they claim to, because if they did, they wouldn't go out and destroy their God-given bodies with alcohol, cigarettes, booze, drugs and junk food. They don't really want to authentically believe in God, you see, because that would require a whole different level of personal discipline to act in a way that honored their beliefs (and honored their body as a temple). If you destroy your health with junk food, your actions scream to the universe that you really don't follow God's will at all.
What was that part in the Bible about gluttony? I don't often quote scripture, but it's relevant here: Proverbs 23:20-21 "Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags."
What people want in America today is junk food, junk news, junk knowledge and junk beliefs. They don't really believe much of anything except those simple spoon-fed beliefs that happen to coincide with the self-destructive lifestyle they wanted to pursue anyway. Life is an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-smoke, all-you-can-drink orgy! So let's call it "reduced-calorie" dessert and get on with it, shall we?
People pick their beliefs, in other words, to try to justify their actions. Any belief that contradicts their short-term desires will be modified, pushed aside or simply overwritten with some other belief that allows them the excuse to pursue immediate satisfaction. The false belief that "frozen yogurt is health food" serves this purpose nicely.
It was the Greek philosopher Socrates who famously said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." My modern version of this quote in the realm of health is, "An unexamined diet is not worth eating."
And yet people almost never examine what they eat. They chew and swallow blindly, giving less thought to what they put inside their bodies than the clothes they wear outside their bodies.
Actually, they choose their foods from the perspective of entertainment. What taste and texture will be entertaining right now? What will give my taste buds pleasure in this instant, regardless of the lifelong effects of this substance on my body?
What sugars, fats or chemical taste enhancers can I place on my tongue in this instant that will provide some level of sensory experience to my brain and remind me that I'm still alive?
That's the real essence of it, you see. People are sleepwalking through our world half dead, and what they really seek is just stimulation to remind them that they aren't dead yet. Almost any stimulation will do: The loud blaring of speakers at a rock concert, the sexual foreplay with a new partner, the rush of an abused prescription drug, the thrill of a horror movie, the sensory engrossment of a violent video game, the stimulant kick of a Coca-Cola... it hardly matters as long as something is being felt through the numbness of emotional trauma that typifies human experience in our modern world.
The numbed-up, dumbed-down metrosexual seeker of experience is actually a biological stimulation machine with a tiny unit of consciousness tacked on top that's seeking a heavy hit of just about anything to remind himself that he still exists. "I feel, therefore I am," to bastardize Descartes' famous utterance.
But what do we really feel when we pursue a life of delusional junk foods and other false stimulation? We only feel further numbed from reality; numbed from our own bodies, numbed to our spirituality and numbed to the consciousness that would give our lives purpose rather than processed probiotic powder.
In pursuing a life of junk consumption, what becomes frozen is not merely our yogurt but our entire experience of life. Frozen yogurt is perhaps the perfect food metaphor for what's happening in American culture today: The mass consumption of a self-destructive lie that offers a brief moment of satisfaction followed by a lifetime of disease.
I actually went to the trouble of visiting a line of people at a frozen yogurt store and asking several people there if they could name the ingredients in the frozen yogurt they were buying. Not one of them could. Most just said, "Yogurt." (Are you detecting a pattern here?)
Upon further investigation, I found that frozen yogurt retailers don't make it very easy for you to find out what's actually in their products in the first place. They don't print ingredients on the products they sell, and even their websites make it virtually impossible to find this information.
After some digging, I was able to find the ingredients of the vanilla yogurt powder that's used in one of the nation's most famous frozen yogurt chains. Here's what's in it:
Pure Crystalline Fructose, Dextrose, Maltodextrin, Non-fat Milk, Yogurt Powder, Micro-encapsulated Probiotic (Lactobacillus Sporogenes)
Did you catch all that? The first three ingredients are all sugars, followed by processed cow's milk. Maltodextrin, in particular, has a glycemic index so high that it's practically poison to diabetics. It's often derived from genetically-modified corn, by the way.
As you can see from the ingredients list, frozen yogurt is basically just ice cream with some yogurt powder thrown in. It's ice cream with probiotics.
That doesn't make it healthy food. It's still junk food, but with probiotic powder.
The illusion of healthy food
If I throw probiotics on a pizza, it doesn't turn the pizza into healthy cuisine. If I slap probiotics on a cheeseburger, it doesn't make it a healthy cheeseburger. So why do so many people believe that mixing in a little probiotic powder with ice cream suddenly makes it a "health food?"The answer? Because they want to.
Frozen yogurt shops don't deliver healthy food, but they do deliver the illusion of healthy food. And in America today, where illusion dominates reality, that's good enough!
People aren't really interested in what they're eating, you see. They just want to be convincingly persuaded that whatever they're swallowing is somehow good for them. That's sufficient evidence in their minds to go ahead and start chowing down.
It's much the same with popular religion in the USA today. Few people really believe in God even if they claim to, because if they did, they wouldn't go out and destroy their God-given bodies with alcohol, cigarettes, booze, drugs and junk food. They don't really want to authentically believe in God, you see, because that would require a whole different level of personal discipline to act in a way that honored their beliefs (and honored their body as a temple). If you destroy your health with junk food, your actions scream to the universe that you really don't follow God's will at all.
What was that part in the Bible about gluttony? I don't often quote scripture, but it's relevant here: Proverbs 23:20-21 "Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags."
What people want in America today is junk food, junk news, junk knowledge and junk beliefs. They don't really believe much of anything except those simple spoon-fed beliefs that happen to coincide with the self-destructive lifestyle they wanted to pursue anyway. Life is an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-smoke, all-you-can-drink orgy! So let's call it "reduced-calorie" dessert and get on with it, shall we?
People pick their beliefs, in other words, to try to justify their actions. Any belief that contradicts their short-term desires will be modified, pushed aside or simply overwritten with some other belief that allows them the excuse to pursue immediate satisfaction. The false belief that "frozen yogurt is health food" serves this purpose nicely.
Why would you swallow something if you don't know what's in it?
Most people, by the way, don't even examine what they eat in the first place. They just shovel it down without a thought.It was the Greek philosopher Socrates who famously said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." My modern version of this quote in the realm of health is, "An unexamined diet is not worth eating."
And yet people almost never examine what they eat. They chew and swallow blindly, giving less thought to what they put inside their bodies than the clothes they wear outside their bodies.
Actually, they choose their foods from the perspective of entertainment. What taste and texture will be entertaining right now? What will give my taste buds pleasure in this instant, regardless of the lifelong effects of this substance on my body?
What sugars, fats or chemical taste enhancers can I place on my tongue in this instant that will provide some level of sensory experience to my brain and remind me that I'm still alive?
That's the real essence of it, you see. People are sleepwalking through our world half dead, and what they really seek is just stimulation to remind them that they aren't dead yet. Almost any stimulation will do: The loud blaring of speakers at a rock concert, the sexual foreplay with a new partner, the rush of an abused prescription drug, the thrill of a horror movie, the sensory engrossment of a violent video game, the stimulant kick of a Coca-Cola... it hardly matters as long as something is being felt through the numbness of emotional trauma that typifies human experience in our modern world.
The numbed-up, dumbed-down metrosexual seeker of experience is actually a biological stimulation machine with a tiny unit of consciousness tacked on top that's seeking a heavy hit of just about anything to remind himself that he still exists. "I feel, therefore I am," to bastardize Descartes' famous utterance.
But what do we really feel when we pursue a life of delusional junk foods and other false stimulation? We only feel further numbed from reality; numbed from our own bodies, numbed to our spirituality and numbed to the consciousness that would give our lives purpose rather than processed probiotic powder.
In pursuing a life of junk consumption, what becomes frozen is not merely our yogurt but our entire experience of life. Frozen yogurt is perhaps the perfect food metaphor for what's happening in American culture today: The mass consumption of a self-destructive lie that offers a brief moment of satisfaction followed by a lifetime of disease.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Choking on Hot Dogs? It's not the shape, it's the ingredients
(NaturalNews) The American Academy of Pediatrics is making headlines this week with a bizarre recommendation that hot dogs should be re-shaped to make them less of a choking hazard for children. But there's no mention of all the cancer-causing chemical ingredients that actually go into the hot dogs. Pediatric physicians are apparently more concerned about the shapethan the ingredients. And they apparently have no concern about the truth that hot dogs contain cancer-causing ingredients.
Hot dogs contain sodium nitrite, of course -- a cancer-causing ingredient that's been widely linked to pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer. People who eat hot dogs and other processed meats have a 67% increased risk of pancreatic cancer(http://www.naturalnews.com/007024.html).
Processed meats no doubt contribute to a large number of childhood cancers. According to the National Cancer Institute, over 1,500 children die each year in the United States from childhood cancer (http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/...).
How many children actually die from choking on hot dogs, anyway? I'll bet you it's a fraction of the number of children who die from leukemia or brain cancer each year.
That the AAP would be so concerned about the shape of hot dogs while remaining silent about the health harm caused by hot dog ingredients isn't all that surprising, actually: These are physicians who often focus on treating children with yet more chemicals such as ADHD drugs, antibiotics and antidepressants. One such pediatrician just got arrested for sexually assaulting over one hundred children in his medical practice (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/wor...).
Of course, that whacko doesn't represent all pediatricians. Most pediatric physicians are caring human beings who really want to help children. And that's where this advice about changing the shape of hot dogs comes from: These doctors genuinely want to prevent children from choking on these processed meat products.
So what should the new shape be... rectangular? Should hot dogs be made into long rectangle shapes so they resemble pink lumber? It would certainly prevent them from rolling out of the buns, wouldn't it?
Then again, we might have to redesign the buns, too. Square hot dogs, you see, don't fit right in round buns. So we'd have to recalibrate the entire chain of processed junk food just to prevent children from choking on the dogs.
Personally, I think we should engage a little truth in advertising and just mandate that hot dogs be reshaped into fleshy cancer tumors. That way, you really know what you're eating. If these dogs resembled the diseased animals they're sometimes made from, choking would no longer be a problem at all because no one would eat them in the first place!
Check out my mystery meat macrophotography to see actual pictures of hot dogs, salami and other processed meatsup close and personal: http://www.naturalnews.com/PhotoTou...
What's really in hot dogs
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 60 percent of all infant choking emergency room visits are caused by food. Another one-third are caused by non-food items such as coins, buttons and marbles, and 9 percent of choking incidents are caused by "undetermined" objects. As in, "What the heck does little Joey have in his mouth?"If he's choking on a hot dog, then what he has in his mouth should be quite frightening: Ground-up bits of meat scraps gathered from thousands of different carcasses from animals that were pumped full of hormones, fed chicken litter as part of their diet, treated inhumanely and slaughtered in a highly fearful environment that releases even more "terror" hormones into the meat at the moment of death.
On top of all that, there are the chemical additive ingredients that cause cancer and other diseases. Here are the ingredients for Oscar Meyer hot dogs:
MECHANICALLY SEPARATED TURKEY, PORK, MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN, WATER, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF SALT, FLAVOR, SODIUM LACTATE, CORN SYRUP, DEXTROSE, SODIUM PHOSPHATES, SODIUM DIACETATE, SODIUM ASCORBATE, SODIUM NITRITE.
Yumm! Sodium nitrite and corn syrup! Just what every little boy needs to grow up big and strong (and diabetic). And you just gotta love "mechanically separated turkey," pork and chicken. This is a technical-sounding term for a process that used to be called "mechanically reclaimed meat" (MRM).
As described on Wikipedia:
"Mechanically recovered/reclaimed meat (MRM), is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing beef, pork, turkey or chicken bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. Mechanically separated meat has been used in certain meat and meat products since the late 1960s. This product can be contrasted with meat extracted by advanced meat recovery systems. The most common use of MSM is into hotdogs."
Did you know that spinal cords go into the MRM machines, too? Yumm... spinal cord juice! As Wikipedia explains:
"Concerns were raised ...when the BSE epidemic, otherwise known as Mad-Cow Disease, was discovered in the United Kingdom in 1986. Since bits of the spinal cord (the part most likely to be carrying BSE) often got mixed in with the rest of the meat; products using mechanically separated meat taken from the carcasses of bovines were at higher risk for transmitting BSE to humans." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechan...)
Today, however, mechanically-separated beef isn't allowed in hot dogs, but turkey, pork and chicken certainly is.
What's a little pig spine in your food, anyway? How about some bird brain? Or some turkey tendon juice?
Lick it up, suckers! If you're eating hot dogs, you're basically eating animal juice paste. MRM machines are essentiallyanimals juicers that extract protein paste from carcasses. Combined with a little corn syrup, sodium nitrite and other chemicals, you get hot dogs!
Are you choking yet?
If not, just view the mystery meat macrophotography here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/PhotoTou...
Sources for this story include
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandst...
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