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.
It may not change the flavor in raw meat, but the list of "stuff" that goes into sausages is enormous and a lot of it is stuff that light will knock down. ie.....spices and their VOC's. .
I've had to automate enough of the units for failsafe reasons I should know. Hook them up with a PLC and some prove flow and light output sensing and you can shut an entire plant down if too many bulbs are burned out inside the unit. That is shut it down automatically. I had diverter valves on solenoids reroute brine to back-up units which would meet demand until maintenance could replace the bulbs or whatever went wrong. High voltage, ballasts, and condensation do not work well together.
You did not say anything at all. Was this a blind test?
Also "irradiation" as a savior will tend to allow poor sanitation to become acceptable if everything gets zapped. Therefore irradiation may lower quality in the end.
Most food borne illness is due to not cooking the meats. Other cases involving produce are due to a sudden ingestion of seasonal items which your gut has not really been prepared for. ie.....A cantelope which is cut, handled, cubed and then eaten in a large serving can cause an intestinal bloom of critters which were there already but in nominal numbers.
A good rule is that if you have not eaten something in six months, eat a small portion for a few days first until your gut gets balanced from sugars and starches. Enterotoxemia can kill you. It's when the normal gut flora goes wildin' due to atypical material passin thru.
Many people mistake this for food poisoning when in reality it's you poisoning yourself with your body's internal chemistry set.
Not a good career move.
If a company which faces a hundred lawsuits a day over food safety tells me they are not yet ready to jump on the irradiation bandwagon because it changes the flavor of their products and it's approvals are not concrete yet, I think I'll accept their wisdom.
By the time most folks get done fixin' up their hot dog or hamburger, there's no way anyone could detect the "subtle" differences.
Medical products such as sutures and bandages are manufactured in near-sterile plants. Then, when they're packaged and ready to ship, they're zapped by radiation.
Radiating at the end of the process is most sensible.
But seriously, multinationals spent billions for the trademark names and flavors of some of these products. The flavor is what they paid for. Just ask CocaCola, Alka Seltzer, Amoroso's rolls, and Breyers Ice Cream what's so important about flavor and texture?
Ignorant people today prefer that people die or get very sick from bacteria, rather than eat something rendered safe by "radiation."
As I posted earlier, infra-red radiation is how meat gets cooked in the first place.
You, my fried, may eat anything you want. What I get upset about, is when you try to dictate what I am allowed to eat.
I WANT to purchase, cook and serve my family irradiated and "free of bacteria" meats.
To me, this is an outstanding development!
Salmonella sucks.
I didn't know the body could produce so many shades of green.
It is a good measure for huge conglomerates in order to take a proactive step toward the posture of food safety from a litigation standpoint. I'll still buy my beef from the butcher who processes my lambs I sell locally. I get to pick out the muscling of the side of beef I want while he's still walkin. I never freeze my ribeye or New York Sirloin. I cut each steak as we need it. I have a small walk-in inside my garage. I sell lamb killed, cut, and wrapped by my state inspected butcher. It is legal here in Wisconsin. I have a small but loyal base of customers. I sell about 1000 pounds retail a year VS. 30,000 pounds live at auction. Killing, butchering and wrapping costs 30 cents a pound and that's legal and inspected.
They set up a set of weaned white rats as subjects: each subset would eat as much as it wanted and had plenty of water provided; a control subset had laboratory rat food that was used throughout the pharmecutical industry.
The rats were studied over a course of many days to chart their growth, health, maturity and deficiencies.
All of the groups fared poorly, some even virtually starving, except for the group that ate the laboratory food and the group that ate Cheerios.
About 10 years later, CR did another test on breakfast cereals: they set up panels of people, many in-house employees, and had them eat samples of each cereal and then rate them on the basis of taste, texture and appearance.
CR has changed; and not for the better.
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