Posted on 08/22/2003 7:26:30 AM PDT by aculeus
Warning: Reading Consumer Reports may be dangerous to your health.
Consumer Reports (CR) has helped millions of Americans select the best consumer goods available at the lowest prices and has called attention to some of the excesses of the marketplace. As a result, it has established a reputation among consumers as an honest, informative magazine. In recent years, however, CR policy appears to have been taken over by consumer and environmental activists and the magazine is dispensing advice that is not in the best interests of its readers. For example, CR recommended that consumers buy organic food instead of conventional food although it found that there were no health, nutritional, or taste differences between them and organic food cost much more (if CR had applied the same standards to food that it applies to refrigerators it would have rated conventional food a "best buy"). A pesticide danger ranking system developed by CR's parent organization, Consumers Union, was so scientifically unsound that it was severely criticized by the Society of Toxicology. While CR admitted that genetically engineered food is safe to eat, it nevertheless called for mandatory labeling, knowing full well that this will give vendors of organic food an unfair marketing advantage among many consumers.
An article titled "The Truth About Irradiated Meat" (August 2003) is the latest outrage. At first, CR correctly reports that "irradiated food is safe to eat, according to federal and world health officials," and that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that irradiating half of all ground beef, poultry, pork, and processed meat would prevent approximately one million cases of food poisoning, 8,500 hospital admissions, 6,000 grave illnesses, and 350 deaths in the U.S. each year. In their own tests, CR found that 84% of non-irradiated chicken fingers contained Listeria monocytogenes (a pathogenic microorganism responsible for several disease outbreaks last year), while the irradiated product contained none.
In spite of this, CR does everything it can to persuade consumers not to buy irradiated meat. First, they claim that irradiation does not kill all the bacteria. That's true, but the process is designed to kill the pathogenic bacteria more readily than the benign organisms. A similar situation is encountered in the pasteurization of milk, a process that kills Salmonella but not spoilage bacteria (or else milk would never spoil). Second, their taste test panel (which consisted of a grand total of two people) found an off-flavor so "subtle" that "some consumers may not notice it." If the off-flavor is so subtle, how about acknowledging that the vast majority of consumers would not recognize it — instead of planting the notion of poor taste into people's psyches? Besides, why not do a real taste test by comparing the taste of a juicy medium rare or rare hamburger with the burnt offerings obtained from having to cook non-irradiated beef to a crisp? In addition to falsely claiming that irradiated meat tastes bad, CR says that the typical irradiation dose for meat is 150 times the dose capable of killing an adult. While this may be true, it is irrelevant, since human radiation exposure from eating irradiated food is zero. Another red herring is that irradiation can't destroy the agents thought to cause Mad Cow Disease: neither does cooking (or incineration, for that matter).
And Finally, Cancer
And if these arguments aren't enough to dissuade the consumer from buying irradiated food, it's time for that old bugaboo, cancer. CR cites unpublished European studies that suggest that some of the chemicals formed in meat as a result of irradiation may cause cancer. These chemicals belong to a class of compounds called 2-alkylcyclobutanones (2-ACBs) and have been under intense study by Dr. Henry Delincee and his colleagues at the Federal Research Center of Nutrition in Karlsruhe, Germany since 1998. CR has apparently found this information in an affidavit to the U.S. Department of Agriculture from a paid consultant to Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety, two activist organizations that have led the fight against irradiated food. However, CR did not inform their readers that the consultant was condemned by Dr. Delincee for "obviously not telling the truth, thereby committing perjury" and for submitting an affidavit of "no value." Nor did CR explain that the World Health Organization, after examining the 2-ACB data, wrote that the chemicals "do not appear to pose a health risk to consumers." If CR is so concerned about cancer, they should have informed their readers that mutagens and carcinogens are also formed when meat is cooked at the high temperatures required to kill bacteria — and that the amount of these chemicals is much reduced at the lower temperatures that can be used if the meat is first irradiated. Perversely, CR is recommending that consumers buy products that are not only more risky in terms of food poisoning but also pose an increased (although extremely small) cancer risk.
CR has been able to maintain its enviable reputation for honesty and integrity by refusing to accept advertisements. However, the organizations and foundations that are providing substantial financial support to CR's parent, Consumers Union, are the same ones that are making huge contributions to groups that advocate the purchase of organic food, want to get rid of pesticides, and are against both genetically engineered food and irradiated food. In fairness to its readers, CR should divulge that the rules have changed, and that some of its opinions may result from a conflict of interest.
Joseph D. Rosen, Ph.D., is an ACSH Advisor and a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He likes his meat rare and his science well done. For more information, see ACSH's booklet on Irradiated Foods.
I do not think you need to worry about electron beam radiation from a health standpoint. It's safe. But I don't think you'll see it in the marketplace unless General Electric purchases the assets of Surebeam when they file for bankruptcy.
It does change flavor. Many of the hotdog and sausage makers have a formula change already in the pipeline in order to compensate for flavor changes should irradiation take off.
***SIGH***
Grilling said steak/hamburger/ribs produces dibenzopyrenes, long-known carcinogens.
I guess I had better hide under the bed and only eat Organic* vegetables.
Surely that cannot be what the "Study" would want me to do, would it?
There is a different Periodic Table for "Organic" elements.
Good Work, NEA.
Please propose a rational explanation for this. See my dot.sig
No.
The "Study" wants you to hide under the bed, only eat Organic* vegetables, and give everything you currently or ever will own to radical lefty organizations.
I might suggest that some of the flavor that is "lost" might be a byproduct of the bacterial decomposition that doesn't occur in irradiated meat.
I have a friend who loathes cheese, claiming that it tastes like spoiled milk.
To which I reply, "My dear, that is because cheese is spoiled milk".
Normal "light" (i.e. visible wavelengths) don't. However, the very highly energetic photons of X-rays cause the water (and other molecules) in the meat to form free radicals, which can then react to produce tiny amounts of chemicals that can change the taste (in SOME products--not all). The other form of radiation used for sterilization (electron beams) does the same kind of thing.
Now, all this sounds highly suspect, until you realize that the cooking process itself ALSO generates free radicals and forms most (if not all) of the same products.
Besides, infra-red radiation (light) is what cooks meat in the first place.
CR cites unpublished European studies ...
This fact I find to be particularly damning. I could write a report claiming the moon is cottage cheese. So long as it is unpublished, it is not peer-reviewed and thus nobody has access to criticize it (officially). In a perfect world, no unpublished research would ever be cited for that reason. I have ceased subscribing to CR several years back when their political biases started to outweigh their probity.
While irrelevant, this is also inaccurate. The mean lethal dose of total body single exposure irradiation (LD 50/30) is approximately 500 cGy. (although with modern bone marrow tranplant techniques, it may be higher). The dose of irradiation given to meat is about 450,000 cGy or about 900 times higher, not 150. But again since it is totally irrelevant, why strive for accuracy?
The meat's already dead. They're not irradiating the customers.
I hear that the cooking process exposes food to levels of thermal radiation that would kill an adult within minutes.
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