#Dairy industry Fights FDAÂ##s Proposed New Drug Testing for Milk How could there possibly be antibiotics in my milk?
The dairy industry is butting heads with the FDA over the agencys plan to increase testing for antibiotics in milk.
Food safety advocates are concerned about overuse of drugs in dairy cows (and increased antibiotic resistance in humans),
which led to the meat residues may also result in drug residues in milk.##More from the Times:
if it had been tested by the F. D. A. Agri-Mark must ensure that all of our milk sales, cheese,
butter and other products are in no danger of recall, #the letter said. Consumer safety cant be a priority for an industry that is against testing
#New Traceability Rule Represents Major Adjustment for U s. Food industry Where does your food come from?
In response to a new federal food safety law and growing consumer interest, vast amounts of new data are being generated about the complicated path that food takes from field to supermarket shelf.
A provision of the federal food safety law passed last year requires that all players in the countrys food supply chain be able to quickly trace from
whom they received a food product and to whom they sent it. Theyll have to maintain that information in digital form,
The one step forward, one step back#traceability requirement#for processed food and produce#is designed to make it easier for the Food
and swiftly remove it from the food supply. The new requirement represents a major adjustment for some parts of the nations food system,
as the government imposes standards and electronic record-keeping on an industry where small players still rely on handshakes and paper invoices.
The FDA has had trouble quickly pinpointing the source of national outbreaks of food-borne illness a task complicated by a lengthy food supply chain where tomatoes might change hands five times from farm to store.
Many in the food business already are using traceability technology, mostly relying on bar codes that can be affixed after harvesting to a piece of fruit or a crate.
which covers food other than meat, poultry and egg products. They are competing to develop the tracking technology
#said David Acheson, former assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA. Somebody is probably going to make a bundle of money out of this.#
Paul Chang, who leads the traceability initiative at IBM, said the company is basically taking the tracking system it uses for the pharmaceutical industry
and adopting it to the food business. He said traceability helps not only with safety but also allows companies to hold their partners along the chain accountable for moving food quickly
and avoiding spoilage. Its about allowing people to make more intelligent decisions by providing accurate
instrumented data, #he said. Segments of the food industry have been required since 2005 to be able to trace one step forward, one step back,
#but not farms or restaurants. But according to a 2009 investigation by the Department of health and Human Servicess inspector general, most food facilities surveyed did not meet those requirements
and 25 percent didnt even know about the law. The need for better traceability became clear after a national outbreak of salmonella illness in spring 2008 that sickened more than 1, 300 people across the country.
Initially, investigators at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified tomatoes as the culprit
and warned the public against consuming them. But more than a month later, FDA investigators correctly identified the source of the outbreak as peppers from Mexico.
The delay was partly because of the chaotic record-keeping of the growers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers,
While the traceability system will improve the tools available to the FDA, Acheson cautioned that tracking an outbreak will still take time.
#In some cases, companies are going beyond the federal requirement and making a portion of the traceability information available to consumers,
who are interested increasingly in the way food is produced. Harvestmark, based in California, has developed a two-dimensional bar code sticker that can be placed on individual fruits and vegetables or packaging.
and enter the number from the sticker to learn the path the food has taken and other information the farmer chooses to share,
With very high-profile food recalls, cellphones and iphones, people have been trained that they can access information very quickly.
Not only does the technology provide information about the food, but it also allows the consumer to send a comment to the farmer,
Its about using technology to put people back in touch with the people who grow their food.#
prompting fears for food security as the insect is vital for pollinating many major crops. However UK scientists insisted that the decline of bees is due to a number of factors, such as disease or a lack of suitable food sources in the countryside,
and more research is needed before blaming pesticides. Neonicotinoids have been used widely for at least the last ten years.
and nectar and this is affecting bees. Research carried out by scientists at the US Department of agricultures Bee Research Laboratory,
#Time Running Out For Many Bird Species in Turkey The White-Headed Duck is threatened among many fowl.
One-seventh of the European population of the white-headed duck exists in Turkey spending winters in Lake Burdur in the Mediterranean region.
and its Human Nutrition Centre, looked at the quality of 88 different milks in supermarkets across North East England at varying times of year over a two-year period.
But its also more proof that the best way to feed your body the nutrients it needs isnt through supplementation,
but through your diet. How can you feed your bones? Well you may be surprised at the foods with the highest percentages of calcium#More and more people are rethinking the tried and true calcium supplementation after finding that it could increase heart attack risk significantly.
But that doesnt mean that you dont still need to have calcium in your diet.
It all comes back to a whole foods diet with foods loaded with calcium like figs (506 mg per serving), sesame seeds (88 mg), flaxseeds (255 mg), almonds (266 mg),
and tofu (372 mg). Youll notice that none of these food choices include dairy, a pleasant surprise.
The official recommendation for Americans is 1, 000 mg/day from ages 19 to 50 and 1, 200 mg/day after that.
#Genetically Modified Chickens Developed Than Cannot Transmit Bird flu Scientists develop GM chickens that do not spread bird flu.
British scientists have developed genetically modified (GM) chickens that cannot transmit bird flu infections#a step that in future could reduce the risk of avian flu spreading
while the transgenic chickens still got sick and died when they were exposed to H5n1 bird flu,
they didnt transmit the virus to other chickens they came into contact with. Preventing virus transmission in chickens should reduce the economic impact of the disease
and reduce the risk posed to people,##said Laurence Tiley, of Cambridges department of veterinary medicine, one of the lead researchers on the study.
ECONOMIC AND FOOD SECURITY THREAT In Southeast asia, China and parts of Africa, bird flu is already a major economic and food security issue,
told a joint briefing the GM chickens could offer a way to improve economic and food security in parts of the world where bird flu is a major threat,
but said using them would probably add slightly to farming costs. Countries like China are interested in the possibility of genetic modification to protect their poultry stocks and people#
To breed their GM chickens, the researchers introduced a new gene into them that manufactures a small decoy#molecule that mimics an important control element of the bird flu virus. The replication machinery of the virus is tricked into recognizing the decoy molecule instead of the viral genes
After producing the modified chickens, they infected 10 of them and 10 normal chickens with H5n1 bird flu.
Like the normal chickens, the transgenic birds became sick with the virus, but they did not transmit the infection on to other chickens kept in the same pen with them
#even if those chickens were normal, non-transgenic birds. The study was published in Science. The researchers said they now plan to work on trying to make chickens that are fully resistant to bird flu rather than just blocking bird-to-bird transmission.
Via Reuters Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati k
#Genetically modified crops That Glow Green When Stressed Genetically altered Arabdopsis Thaliana plant, with green fluorescent protein (GFP) inserted near the on/off switches for anoxia and drought genes.
Cells expressing those genes glow green under a blue light (as shown. A group of University of Tennessee plant scientists has modified genetically tobacco plants
so that the plants will give off a phosphorescent green glow #when plant immune systems are under stress#as might be caused by plant pathogens, drought, insects, etc.
#Is Eating Insects the Answer to Reducing our Food Footprint? Flickr user avlxyz tries an insect at Chiang Mai bazaar Hungry for a grasshopper taco?
Well, probably not. But the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO) thinks it is time for an end to the Eewww!#
#response to the thought of eating insects. The FAO reports that there are more than1000 edible insect species. Insects can provide protein in the diet at a much lower environmental cost than traditional livestock, such as cows, pigs, or sheep.
The FAO started the push to improve the image of edible insects at a workshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand,
For example, in May 2010, the FAO launched a program in Laos featuring celebrity chefs competing to whip up the tastiest insect dishes.
The cold-blooded creatures require less feed to produce proteins. For example, a cricket can produce the protein equivalent of cows with six times less feed.
Furthermore, insects can often feed on organic waste matter. Moreover insects are considered already delicacies in many cultures,
and the practice of eating insects goes back millenia. The Eewww-factor is learned a behavior reflecting our recent sensibilities about hygiene
and health (quite ignoring the fact that we are all eating bugs already in foods meeting prescribed contamination limits).
But insects which are raised properly, harvested and prepared present no risks to health. Quite the contrary:
Of course, no campaign to market a new food trend can get around the fundamental question: how do they taste?
The creamy belly tasted like scrambled eggs, while the thorax/lung area was a bit spongey. The shell is pretty tasteless and not edible anyway.#
#Not convinced? Well, at least for those of us in parts of the world where simply meeting our minimal nutritional demands is not the major issue,
there is always theweekday vegetarian diet as an alternative. grasshopper taco 1000 edible insect via Treehugger Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati T
#Chicago Combats Food Deserts and Childhood Obesity One Seed at a time Chicagoans that vote for their favorite seeds, get free seeds to plant in their gardens.
It seems like an oxymoron that childhood obesity could occur in food deserts, but in much of the country thats exactly whats happened.
Food deserts, often located in impoverished urban environments, are areas where residents have little access to fresh fruits
and vegetables because there are no grocery stores or farmers markets nearby. Such areas are plagued often with quickie marts where families feed themselves the processed junk thats available
and make these infamous food deserts a thing of the past#Neighborspace, Chicagos land trust of community gardens,
Its about working from seed to table#in order to break up food deserts and fight childhood obesity all in the same breath.
community gardens and balconies across the City will be linked together in a season-long celebration of urban gardening and local eating.#
when policies present difficult, costly or time-consuming obstacles to innovative and holistic projects and neighborhood food security.
but a British study has found that couples with children eat a less healthy diet than those who have none.
Researchers used data from a British government survey of 7, 014 families who recorded their food purchases in a diary over two-week periods in 2003 and 2004.
The higher-income families ate more meat, more fresh fruit and more vegetables than others.
Age influenced the consumption of fats and sugar, both of which declined among older households. But perhaps most surprising
found that households without children were healthier eaters. Even after controlling for income, age and other factors, compared with a household with children,
Having children in the house also reduced the demand for meat, and increased the consumption of dairy products, cereal and potatoes.
#said an author of the study, Richard Tiffin, a professor of economics at the University of Reading in England.
the social dynamic in a household with children makes the diet on average more unhealthy.##Via New york times Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati c
#Underground Dining â#Gourmet Pop-up Restaurants that Operate Illegally a Growing Trend Underground dining growing in popularity.
about 65 gourmands dined by candlelight at The Wild Kitchen, an event presented by the group foragesf.
One after another, courses arrived from the kitchen: fish soup, duck fat potatoes, fusilli con cinghiale (pasta with wild boar.
With each bite and sigh of delight, the crowd eagerly participated in a crime#a scrumptious one,
gourmet pop-up restaurants that operate outside the system of health department licenses and inspections. Food lovers have attended these clandestine feasts for years,
but the general publics growing appetite for adventurous eating has caused the popularity of these events to rise
and could produce a new generation of culinary stars. Unless they get busted first. Theyre renegade restaurants,#said Alison Bing, food writer and San francisco Lonely Planet guidebook author,
who has tracked the phenomenon. People are willing to pay for a unique experience.##Being illicit is part of the excitement,
As the groups name implies, the dishes contained ingredients#mushrooms, leafy greens and seaweed#that were gathered in the wild.
Mr. Rabins described foraging as collecting food that wont run away.##The exception was the wild boar,
After many hours of cooking, it tasted like pulled pork. Mr. Rabins, whose first name, Iso, means seashore#in Japanese#My parents were said hippies,
He has taped segments for two coming Travel Channel programs, Bizarre Foods#and The Wild Within,#where he prepared roadkill raccoon.#(
which promotes the dinners and a monthly Underground Market. Attracting some 2, 500 fans, the market allows home cooks to sell their creations#from fresh baked fruit tarts to savory meat dishes#an idea that runs afoul of health codes.
At the first market in December 2009, city health department inspectors arrived. I was terrified, #Mr. Rabins said.
The restaurants, however, are not as easily legalized, since the meals are prepared not in inspected, commercial kitchens,
and because ingredients that are foraged are subjected not to government safety regulations. People are taking a risk.
well investigate,#said Richard Lee, manager of restaurant inspectors for the San francisco Department of public health. But Mr. Lee said he knew of no cases where diners had become ill at the events.
Ms. Bing, who has attended underground dinners said she had mixed feelings about the lack of health department oversight.
As a food journalist, she considers inspection scores essential when covering restaurants, and she raised possible concerns about fair wages and compliance with environmental laws.
In the meantime, they say they are following the same food preparation rules of any clean restaurant.
and had limited professional cooking experience before this venture. His passion for foraged food, like city snails to make escargot,
seems more of a personal calling. It really changes the way you view the natural environment,
#he said. Via New york times Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati s
#Study: Alarming Decline in Bumblebees Found in U s a bumblebee gathers pollen from a sunflower. Four previously abundant species of bumblebee are close to disappearing in the United states,
#Pepsico is Betting Consumers Want to â Snackifyâ##Drinks Tropolis Because healthy food just isnt cool enough for todays youth,
the folks at Pepsico will soon be rolling out snackified,#amped-up to the extreme!##pureed fruit in the form of something called Tropolis.
From the Wall street journal: Tropolis, an 80-calorie fruit puree, which comes in brightly colored pouches,
Pepsicos Tropicana unit is rolling out apple, grape and cherry Tropolis pouches in test markets in the Midwest next month, at $2. 49 to $3. 49 for a four-pack.
Pepsis CEO, who probably makes more in a week than everyone reading this post will make in a year,
We see the emerging opportunity to snackify beverages and drinkify snacks as the next frontier in food and beverage convenience.#
#A professor of nutrition at New york University uses fewer made-up buzz words in her assessment of the product.
They start out with real food, so lets give them credit for applesauce and mashed-up bananas,
#but the rest of it is sugar, #she tells the Journal. Kids would be better off eating an apple or a banana.#
#Via consumerist Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati b
#Amazon remains on top for customer satisfaction while Apple drops out of the top 5 Amazon remains on top for customer satisfaction.
Amazon remains on top with customer satisfaction as Apple s online store slid out of the top five,
according to an online retailer study by Foresee. In fact, Apple had its lowest score in four years,
and nutrition this year. 1. Junk food is as addictive as heroin. A study was released just showing that over a period of five days consuming junk food,
your brain becomes desensitized to the euphoria of junk food and sugar and needs more and more of it.
The same pattern happens with drug use, specifically heroin. NO WONDER people have trouble losing weight.
These are ALSO the same foods that have created the obesity epidemic in this country. 2. Top foods keeping your ass wide.
The best friends of obesity are french fries, potato chips and soda. Most of you are rolling your eyes saying#duh,
And I have to agree on the french fries and soda. That was my go to #when I was a size 22.
3. Genetically modified foods (GMOS) lead to obesity. Yup, we have fat rats. In a long-term study, rats that were feed genetically modified corn became obese compared to rats that were fed natural corn.
With all this information about GMOS in our diet. I think it s time to label them
and encourage food companies to reformulate and stay away. 4. Sunscreen can actually accelerate cancer cells. Wow, this was shocking,
In my experience about 85%of weight loss is related all diet and this study backs that claim up.
so it s better but sometimes not so much. 9. Genetically modified food leads to cancer.
They specifically tested the rats on GM corn and soy. Buy organic and GMO free. 10.
#Chicken farms turn to oregano as a substitute for antibiotics Chickens at Bell & Evans eat feed laced with oregano oil.
Anyone visiting Bell & Evans these days will notice the smell of oregano wafting for Scott Sechler s office.
The smell is so strong that visitors will wonder whether Sechler has quit the production of chicken and gone into the pizza business.
Oregano lies loose in trays and tied into bunches on tabletops and counters, and a big, blue drum that held oregano oil stands in the corner.
have tried you ever oregano tea?##Mr. Sechler asked, mashing leaves between his broad fingers. Off and on over the last three years or so, his chickens have been eating a specially milled diet laced with oregano oil and a touch of cinnamon.
Mr. Sechler swears by the concoction as a way to fight off bacterial diseases that plague meat
and poultry producers without resorting to antibiotics, which some experts say can be detrimental to the humans who eat the meat.
Products at Bell & Evans, based in this town about 30 miles east of Harrisburg, have long been free of antibiotics,
contributing to the company s financial success as consumers have demanded purer foods. But Mr. Sechler said that nothing he had used as a substitute in the past worked as well as oregano oil.
I have worried a bit about how I m going to sound talking about this, #he said. But I really do think we re on to something here.#
#Skeptics of herbal medicines abound, as any quick Internet search demonstrates. Oil of oregano is a perennial one,
advertised as a cure for just about everything, #said Scott Gavura, a pharmacist in Toronto who writes for the Web site Science-Based Medicine.
But there isn t any evidence, there are too many unanswered questions and the only proponents for it are the ones producing it.#
At the same time, consumers are growing increasingly sophisticated about the content of the foods that they eat.
Data on sales of antibiotic-free meat is hard to come by, but the sales are a tiny fraction of the overall meat market.
Sales in the United states of organic meat, poultry and fish, which by law must be raised without antibiotics, totaled $538 million in 2011, according to the Organic Trade Association.
By comparison, sales of all beef that year were $79 billion. Still retailers like Costco, Whole Foods and Trader Joe s,
as well as some restaurant chains, complain that they cannot get enough antibiotic-free meat. Noodles & Company, a fast-growing chain of more than 300 restaurants, recently added antibiotic-free pork to the choices of ingredients that customers can add to their made-to-order pastas.
It ensured its supply by ordering cuts of meat that were not in relatively high demand
and by committing in advance to buy a year s worth, said Dan Fogarty, its executive vice president for marketing.
We re deliberately voting with our pocketbooks##he said. In a nationwide telephone survey of 1, 000 adults in March, more than 60 percent told the Consumer Reports National Research center that they would be willing to pay at least 5 cents a pound more for meat raised without antibiotics.
Before, it was kind of a nice little business, and while it s still microscopic in the grand scheme of things, we re seeing acceptance from retailers across the country, not just in California and on the East Coast,#said Stephen Mcdonnell, founder and chief executive of Applegate, an organic and natural
meats company. Mr. Mcdonnell said a confluence of trends from heightened interest in whole and natural foods to growing concerns about medical problems like diabetes,
obesity and glutenallergies, were contributing to the demand for antibiotic-free meat. There is growing concern among health care experts and policy makers about antibiotic resistance and the rise of superbugs,
#bacteria that are impervious to one or more antibiotics. Those bacteria can be passed on to consumers,
who eat meat infected with them and then cannot be treated. In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 25 national health organizations and advocacy groups issued a statement on antibiotics that
among other things, called for limiting the use of medically important human antibiotics in food animals#and supporting the use of such antibiotics in animals only for those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health.#
#In 2011, there were several prominent recalls involving bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics, including more than 60 million pounds of ground beef contaminated withsalmonella Typhimurium
and about 36 million pounds of ground turkey spoiled with salmonella Heidelberg. Consumer Reports released a study last month that found the bacteria Yersinia enterocolitica in 69 percent of 198 pork chop
and ground pork samples bought at stores around the country. Some of the bacteria were resistant to one or more antibiotics.
Analysis of Food and Drug Administration data by the Center for Science in the Public interest found that 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United states are used in animals.
The majority of those antibiotics are used to spur growth or prevent infections from spreading in the crowded conditions in
The oregano oil product Mr. Sechler uses, By-O-Reg Plus, is made by a Dutch company, Ropapharm International.
A test of oregano oil on four small farms in Maine, which was financed by a $9, 914 grant from the Agriculture department,
studied the effectiveness of oregano oil on 18 mice infected with staph bacteria. Six mice were given oregano oil,
and half survived for the full 30 days of the treatment. Six received carvacrol, regarded by many experts to be the antibacterial component in oregano, in olive oil,
and none of them survived longer than 21 days. Six other mice received only olive oil and died within three days.
which was underwritten by a company, North american Herb and Spice, and presented at a meeting of the American College of Nutrition in 2001,
was repeated and all those findings were corroborated, Dr. Preuss said. Dr. Preuss said he had applied to the National institutes of health for financing of a larger study, with no luck so far.
After hearing about Bell & Evans s use of oregano oil, Bob Ruth, the president of Country View Family Farms, a Pennsylvania-based company, decided to test it on some of his pigs.
Mr. Ruth and Mr. Sechler warned that using oregano oil to control bacterial infection also requires maintaining high standards of sanitation in barns where animals are sheltered,
and a good nutrition program. After a chicken flock leaves a barn at Bell & Evans for slaughter, for instance,
You can t just replace antibiotics with oregano oil and expect it to work, #Mr. Sechler said.
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