How to Shop the Dirty Dozen & Clean Fifteen
(Health Secrets) Ingredients commonly found in up to 80 percent of all pre-packaged foods on grocers shelves in the U.S. have been banned in other countries, says the new book Rich Food, Poor Food. As alarming as such information is, our food safety outlook becomes even bleaker when we consider even more banned and toxic food items.
Toxic banned ingredients in our packaged foods
Authors Mira and Jason Calton provide a list of banned ingredients which they term “Banned Bad Boys” in their book, and they list the countries which have banned them. Among the items is Olestra – commonly used in low/no-fat snack foods and known to cause serious gastrointestinal issues. Olestra has been banned in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Still worse is brominated vegetable oil, a substance which has been banned in more than 100 countries, but is found in Mountain Dew and Fresca, products of the Coca Cola and Pepsi corporations. As the authors state, brominated vegetable oil “has been linked to basically every form of thyroid disease – from cancer to autoimmune diseases – known to man.”
Other dangerous items listed include food colorings such as yellow #5 and yellow #6, dyes used to make processed macaroni & cheese dinners visually appealing. These dyes are made from coal tar, an active ingredient in lice shampoo, which has been linked to allergies, ADHD, and cancer in animals.
More banned and toxic items in our foods
The toxic banned ingredients listed in the book, horrible as they are, are but part of the bad news when it comes to food items most Americans regularly consume. Here is a partial list of some other toxic ingredients and unsafe food items:
Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a synthetic chemical used to make plastic drinking bottles, baby bottles and storage containers, as well as the lining of food and drink cans. It can leech into foods, particularly from high heat, acidity in the food, and prolonged storage. Currently BPA is found in virtually all canned goods and most baby bottles sold in the US. BPA mimics estrogen and can offset the delicate hormonal balance in the developing child, and is blamed for the age of puberty in young girls being lowered to as young as seven years old. In 2010, Canada became the first country to ban BPA.
Increasing numbers of countries are banning the sale and/or cultivation of GM crops. Some of the GM crops are engineered to produce their own pesticides, and research has shown that these genes are passed on to humans for several generations after consumption. Other crops are engineered to withstand heavy applications of the toxic pesticide Roundup.
Thanks in part to GM engineering, US produce contains extremely high levels of pesticides as well as herbicides such as Roundup and other glyphosphates. Researchers in Europe have found that Roundup has serious toxic effects due to inert ingredients that amplify the toxicity of Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate. As a result, Roundup is banned in nearly every European country.
Due to growth stimulators such as ractopamine as well as antibiotics which are added to our meats, over 160 countries say “no” to U.S. meats.
Chemical fertilizers are yet another widespread problem. From 1990 to 1995, 600 different companies from 44 states sent a whopping 270,000,000 pounds of toxic waste to both fertilizer companies and farms. The waste was not treated to remove toxic substances including arsenic and dioxins.
Sadly, greed and cash are kings in the US, and our government is too often for sale to the highest bidder. This explains why we have a Monsanto insider over our food safety, much like we have a Merck insider over our medicines.
For more information:
http://www.naturalnews.com/035504_BPA_puberty_chemicals.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/030343_BPA_toxic_chemicals.html
http://vegnews.com/articles/page.do?pageId=5537&catId=1
http://www.examiner.com/article/what-countries-have-banned-gmo-crops
