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Our new on-line store with over 1,000 products, all from suppliers with a good reputation of on-line trading, is fully equipped for secure encrypted on-line transactions.
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Food
Labelling
Not all
countries have the same standards when it comes to food, so it is
important, not only to list the constituents of foods but also where
they came from.
Some countries have poor quality
controls.
In 2008 six Chinese babies died and approximately 600,000 more were
effected by melamine (an industrial chemical additive) added to milk
to boost the apparent protein content. This had a massive flow on
effect because the contaminated milk was also powdered, used in
manufacturing within China and exported worldwide as a raw material.
Update 23rd January 2012.
A friend of ours left for China, two days ago, to spend the New Year there. Her
friends there, in China, asked if she could bring over six cans of baby formula in her luggage
because no-one trusts the baby formulas in China, two years after the contamination!
The contaminated
powdered milk was used to make a variety of food products here and in
the USA. When the alarm was raised, their foods were already at
supermarkets ready to go onto
supermarket shelves - many were popular trusted brands. The public had
no way of telling if these products contained contaminated Chinese milk
products because there was no such labelling requirement.
Toxic smog over London in 1952
killed 12,000 people. Those toxins dissolved in rain and found their
way into the food chain. Radioactive dust from the Chernobyl disaster
preciptated out in rain over several Scandinavian countries and the UK
in the same manner. It can still be traced today, 20 years later, as
high levels of radiation in pastures (and therefore local milk and
meat).
Others countries have problems
with toxic contamination from industrial waste disposal and air
pollution. In Siberia, millions of
hectares of land are radioactively contaminated after the Chernobyl
disaster and will remain so for at least 250,000 years. India and Japan
have areas contaminated by industrial chemicals. Names like Chernobyl,
Bhopal and Mimimata are words no-one wants to see on food labels.
There are three categories of
contaminants:
Who can you trust?
While some contaminants are poisons, others are more insidious. They
can be very slow acting, taking years to show any effects, like asbestos
causing Mesothelioma. Canada still exports vast quantities of asbestos to India,
while it's use within Canada is considered so dangerous that it's use is banned.
From a consumer's point of view, you have to ask, if a country has such double
standards in one area, where else is it applying those double standards?
An asbestos worker handles asbestos from Canada in a factory in Hydrabad, India. It will be made into sheets of asbestos-cement roofing, the most common roofing material in much of India.
If it is acceptable to export a deadly substance that you refuse to use at home
to a country where it is being misused and they have almost no safe handling
practices, will the same disregard be applied to your other products?
Canada is not a poor third world country. Until now, like me, you would have been
quite comfortable buying something with "Made in Canada" on the label but you have
to wonder, if they turn a blind eye in one direction, where else will they do it -
what exactly is in this Canadian produced product?
Often these types of contaminants might only effect the immune system after long
periods of exposure like some of the organo-phosphates used in pest and weed control.
The body's immune system was designed to detect infections, destroy the pathgens and
repair itself. Aids, alipecia, and HIV are also examples where our own immune system
attacks our body's cells.
There
are cells to detect invaders and alert the B lymphocytes to make marker proteins (shown in
brown above) that lock onto the antigen (invader), as markers to distinguish these cells for
destruction, as shown in the illustration above. T lymphocytes (the killer cells) seek out these
marker proteins and destroy the marked cells. Long after the infection is over, B lymphocytes
keep producing the marker proteins so that the body is immune to any further invasions by the
same antigen. Vaccines work by introducing a dead or harmless version of the antigen, causing
the immune system to respond as if there was a serious infection.
Some
chemicals can mimic these markers and the immune system begins to attack healthy tissue, like
we see in Alipecia cases. Others can slow down the immune system, leaving the body defenceless
or alter the growth behaviours of healthy cells creating cancers. The concentrations of these
chemicals required to produce these effects can be alarmingly small, making them extremely
toxic in the environment.
In the 1960s, when
initial testing indicated that an organo phosphate defoliant was safe to use, the US military
decided to defoliate the jungles and crops of Vietnam. Their strategy was to reduce the cover
for their enemies and force villagers into the cities to prevent them offering assistance to
the Vietcong. The defoliant was shipped into Vietnam in barrels marked with Orange bands, so
became known as Agent Orange. During the Vietnam war, in Operation Ranch Hand, the US military
sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of this defoliant in Vietnam, often at 50 times the
concentration used back home in agriculture for weed control. By the end of the war 12% of the
total area of South Vietnam had been sprayed.
Unfortunately what the biologists
didn't realise, was that the defoliant contained Dioxin, which is an organo-phosphate toxin -
considered the most toxic man-made compound ever invented.
When both Vietnamese and returned servicemen from the Vietnam War
started to report strange illnesses and an unusually high incidence of uncommon cancers and birth
defects amongst their children, alarm bells rang but it took many years before the symptoms became
obvious enough to point to a common link. US Food and Drug Administration researcher Jacquiline Varrett
proved that only one part per trillion caused birth defects in embryos. When it was diluted 1 million
times, it was as still as toxic as Thalidomide (a supposedly harmless sedative prescribed to pregnant
mothers in the 1950s, to combat morning sickness. It later proved to cause serious birth defects)
The main reagent in Agent Orange, 245-T is banned
in some countries but sold here as a weed killer, under the name "Round Up". Other agricultural
insecticides are also suspected of similar side effects and many are banned in some countries
but not in others. This is why it is important for consumers to be informed where the product
comes from. Many manufacturers dodge this by adding a comment like "Packaged in
Australia" or "made from local and imported ingredients".
I don't want to know where it was packaged - I want to know what was packaged!
And what sort of ingredients - melamine contaminated milk from china, dioxin rich fish from the Mekong
river?
Food additives
We have become so engrossed in perfect looking food that producers are compelled to add additional substances to enhance the
colour or flavour. Apples are sprayed with wax and polished, yellow dye is added to biscuits and cakes so they look more
appealing. Even chooks are fed special feed with artificial additives to give orange-yellow yolks to their eggs. we keep
so many, so close together, that they could infect each other, so we dose them up with antibiotics. A biologist was telling
me that today, if a turkey escaped from a turkey farm, it could not survive in the wild any more. They have such a low
immunity that they would probably die from contact with other birds.
Manufacturers cannot fit all the information onto their product labels in many cases. Then there is the problem of protecting
secret formulas from their competition. There is no simple answer that will satisfy the consumer and the manufacturer. To
accommodate both, we sue a numeric system for additives. Additives are given a number and those numbers are listed on the food
labelling. It is supposed to keep us, the consumer informed but how many of us take the additives codes booklet to our supermarket?
The numbers can vary from country to country and some countries regard it compulsory to list certain additives, while others rely
on the manufacturers discretion (a real worry when you think of Canada and their asbestos exports!)
Below is a list of links where you can find the codes for the various food additives:
Australian authorities are only testing about 5% of produce coming into Australia and they are
not testing for a range of chemicals that we know have been used in other countries but are toxins,
banned here. So there is real grounds for concern and we need to ensure our consumers are protected
from this sort of exposure. 
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