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Your tax dollars at work: Now FDA proposes to ban a brand of cookie?

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rgdot:
What is the responsibility here?
If I know processed meat is bad for me, researched and told by government panel or even not, but can't afford to buy non-processed/organic everybody should remain silent about it until the end of time? Will the company producing the processed version do me the favor without a push?

40hz:
^That's not what I'm saying.  :)

app103:
What is the responsibility here?
If I know processed meat is bad for me, researched and told by government panel or even not, but can't afford to buy non-processed/organic everybody should remain silent about it until the end of time? Will the company producing the processed version do me the favor without a push?
-rgdot (November 25, 2013, 05:08 PM)
--- End quote ---

Exactly! Food shopping in a modern supermarket is like trying to navigate a mine field. And it's an all day event, where you need to be well educated and read every label. And even things that should be good for you, like fresh fruits and vegetables aren't safe...loaded with unknown pesticides and preservatives, and no labels to tell you about it. And if you are educated and know what to avoid, you'll need a lot more money than you thought to avoid taking home a grocery bag full of mines.

Have you even heard of a chemical called Daminozide (aka Alar), that was once approved for use on apples, cherries, peaches, pears, Concord grapes, tomato transplants and peanut vines? It causes cancer.


How much of that stuff did you eat between 1963 and 1989? How much did you feed to your kids? How much more would you have eaten since then, if it wasn't banned?

In 1985, concern developed in the U.S. public over the use of Alar on apples, over fears that the residues of the chemical detected in apple juice and applesauce might harm people. The outcry led some manufacturers and supermarket chains to announce they would not accept Alar-treated apples.

The Natural Resources Defense Council had for years urged the EPA to ban daminozide and in a 1989 report, largely using the government's own figures, they reported that on the basis of a two-year peer reviewed study children were at "intolerable risk" from a wide variety of potentially lethal chemicals, including daminozide, that they ingest in legally permissible quantity. By their estimate "the average pre-schooler's exposure was estimated to result in a cancer risk 240 times greater than the cancer risk considered acceptable by E.P.A. following a full lifetime of exposure."[4]

In February, 1989 there was a broadcast by CBS's 60 Minutes highlighting a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council highlighting problems with Alar (daminozide).

This followed years of background work. According to Environmental Working Group:

    Prior to 1989, five separate, peer-reviewed studies of Alar and its chemical breakdown product, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH), had found a correlation between exposure to the chemicals and cancerous tumors in lab animals. In 1984 and again in 1987, the EPA classified Alar as a probable human carcinogen. In 1986, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged the EPA to ban it. Well before the 60 Minutes broadcast, public concern had already led six national grocery chains and nine major food processors to stop accepting apples treated with Alar. Washington State growers had pledged to voluntarily stop using it (although tests later revealed that many did not). Maine and Massachusetts had banned it outright.[5]

In 1989, following the CBS broadcast, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided to ban Alar on the grounds that "long-term exposure" posed "unacceptable risks to public health." However before the EPA's preliminary decision to ban all food uses of Alar went into effect, Uniroyal, the sole manufacturer of Alar, agreed in June 1989 to halt voluntarily all domestic sales of Alar for food uses.[6]
--- End quote ---


And the manufacturer of the chemical and all the growers using it cried about it when the ban was proposed, just like the bakers are crying now about the idea of removing the artificial transfats from the products they produce.

Apple growers in Washington filed a libel suit against CBS, NRDC and Fenton Communications, claiming the scare cost them $100 million.
--- End quote ---

Boo hoo! Cry me a river! Just get the poisons out of my food while you are doing it. Because I don't deserve to be poisoned for profit. Nobody does.

rgdot:
^That's not what I'm saying.  :)
-40hz (November 25, 2013, 07:48 PM)
--- End quote ---

You don't want it to be legislated or regulated by a gov? I don't want billion pages of legislation on the books either but alternatives like self-education are never enough because the means don't exist in enough cases.

J-Mac:
Sounding more and more like a candidate for the Basement.    :)

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