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Thread: 10 Foods Banned In Other Countries - Are They Really Unsafe?

  1. #1

    10 Foods Banned In Other Countries - Are They Really Unsafe?

    The issue with these lists is that often there is something in them which is misleading or reaching. So I decided to take the list apart a bit and find out not only whether or not these foods and additives are actually banned, but also to find out why they are banned. The answers may surprise you.
    Here is the original list as reported on MSN.
    http://healthyliving.msn.com/health-...d-elsewhere#12

    Now some of these are well known. I am not going to go over food colors, rBST, BHA and BHT. Yes they are banned and just look them up if you want to know why. Those have been covered ad nauseam. That said, some of the items on this list were new to me so I went out and tried to find out some more about these bans. So here is what the research showed.

    Farm Raised Salmon – There is plenty of evidence that farm raised salmon is an ecological problem and that the fish are dyed since they eat a diet that does not contain the krill that normally cause the pink color in the flesh. However, banned? Well the list says that they are banned in Australia and New Zealand. This is NOT true. Imported farmed fish may well be banned, but both Tasmania and New Zealand have active salmon farms of their own. King Salmon is a specialty of these farms. This one appears to be false. The ban on imported farmed salmon seems at least partially designed to protect the domestic salmon industry. See for yourself here
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226667828180
    http://www.salmon.org.nz/

    U.S. Beef – In this case the article was misleading in the other way. Russia actually banned beef, pork and turkey from the United States. They were banned because America is one of the few civilized nations that allows animals to be fed a drug called ractopamine. You can read about the drug here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine And about the ban here: http://rbth.ru/business/2013/04/15/r...nada_25039.htm

    Then there is the brominated flour and the BVO in sodas. Bromine is actually a pesticide. No really. BVO is supposed to be a flame retardant. Read what the EPA has to say about it. Not shockingly it is indeed banned in lots of places. Including India. Yes, India does not think it is safe enough. Think about that one for a few minutes.

    http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/REDs/fac...s/4015fact.pdf
    This is the Snopes writeup on BVO http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/bvo.asp

    GMO Papaya is not well known but banned in the EU. I don’t knot that papaya is necessarily a problem compared to other GMOs. It was genetically modified to avoid something called the ringspot virus, not to withstand glycosphate, but it is definitely banned.

    So that is the end of the list. I hope that this has provided a few more insights into the “banned” foods and of the danger of just blindly following a list since this list has been copied everywhere, but the facts are that some of these additives are really scary and others are not so scary at all.
    http://humbugstew.com/10-foods-banne...really-unsafe/
    Last edited by angelatc; 11-28-2013 at 02:34 PM.



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  3. #2
    Olestra
    This, of course, is Proctor & Gamble's attempted non-calorific fat substitute. I'm not going to spend much time on this, because little or nothing is actually made with it any more. Olestra was a major flop for P&G; the only things (as far as I can tell) that still contain it are some fat-free potato chips. It does indeed interfere with the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, but potato chips are not a very good source of vitamins to start with. And vitamin absorption can be messed with by all kinds of things, including other vitamins (folic acid supplements can interfere with B12 absorption, just to pick one). But I can agree with the plan of not eating the stuff: I think that if you're going to eat potato chips, eat a reasonable amount of the real ones.
    http://pipeline.corante.com/archives..._education.php

  4. #3
    Brominated Vegetable Oil.




    Now, if the author had known any chemistry, this would have looked a lot more impressive. Bromine isn't just used to keep carpets from catching on fire - bromine is a hideously toxic substance that will scar you with permanent chemical burns and whose vapors will destroy your lungs. Drinking bromine is not just a bad idea; drinking bromine is guaranteed agonizing death. There, see what a little knowledge will do for you?


    But you know something? You can say the same thing for chlorine. After all, it's right next to bromine in the same column of the periodic table. And its use in World War I as a battlefield gas should be testimony enough. (They tried bromine, too, never fear). But chlorine is also the major part, by weight, of table salt. So which is it? Toxic death gas or universal table seasoning?


    Knowledge again. It's both. Elemental chlorine (and elemental bromine) are very different things than their ions (chloride and bromide), and both of those are very different things again when either one is bonded to a carbon atom. That's chemistry for you in a nutshell, knowing these differences and understanding why they happen and how to use them.


    Now that we've detoured around that mess, on to brominated vegetable oil. It's found in citrus-flavored sodas and sports drinks, at about 8 parts per million. The BuzzFeed article claims that it's linked to "major organ system damage, birth defects, growth problems, schizophrenia, and hearing loss", and sends readers to this WebMD article. But if you go there, you'll find that the only medical problems known from BVO come from two cases of people who had been consuming, over a long period, 4 to 8 liters of BVO-containing soda per day, and did indeed have reactions to all the excess bromine-containing compounds in their system. At 8 ppm, it's not easy to get to that point, but a determined lunatic will overcome such obstacles. Overall, drinking several liters of Mountain Dew per day is probably a bad idea, and not just because of the BVO content.
    https://www.metabunk.org/threads/deb...ountries.1843/

  5. #4
    Potassium Bromate.

    The article helpfully tells us this is "Derived from the same harmful chemical as brominated vegetable oil". But here we are again: bromate is different from bromide is different than bromine, and so on. If we're going to play the "made from the same atoms" game, well, strychnine and heroin are derived from the same harmful chemicals as the essential amino acids and B vitamins. Those harmful chemicals, in case you're wondering, are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And to get into the BuzzFeed spirit of the thing, maybe I should mention that carbon is found in every single poisonous plant on earth, hydrogen is the harmful chemical that blew up the Hindenburg, oxygen is responsible for every death by fire around the world, and nitrogen will asphyxiate you if you try to breathe it (and is a key component of all military explosives). There, that wasn't hard - as Samuel Johnson said, a man might write such stuff forever, if only he would give over his mind to it.


    Now, back to potassium bromate. The article says, "Only problem is, it’s linked to kidney damage, cancer, and nervous system damage". And you'll probably fall over when I say this, but that statement is largely correct. Sort of. But let's look at "linked to", because that's an important phrase here.


    Potassium bromate was found (in a two-year rat study) to have a variety of bad effects. This occurred at the two highest doses, and the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL) was 6.1 mg of bromate per kilo body weight per day. It's worth noting that a study in male mice took them up to nearly ten times that amount, though, with little or no effect, which gives you some idea of how hard it is to be a toxicologist. Whether humans are more like mice or more like rats in this situation is unknown.


    I'm not going to do the whole allometric scaling thing here, because no matter how you do it, the numbers come out crazy. Bromate is used in some (but not all) bread flour at 15 to 30 parts per million, and if the bread is actually baked properly, there's none left in the finished product. But for illustration, let's have someone eating uncooked bread dough at the highest level, just to get the full bromate experience. A 75-kilo human (and many of us are more than that) would have to take in 457 mg of bromate per day to get to the first adverse level seen in rats, which would be. . .15 kilos (about 33 pounds) of bread dough per day, a level I can safely say is unlikely to be reached. Hell, eating 33 pounds of anything isn't going to work out, much as my fourteen-year-old son tries to prove me wrong. You'd need to keep that up for decades, too, since that two year study represents a significant amount of a rat's lifespan.

  6. #5
    Number Seven: Synthetic Growth Hormones. These are the ones given to cattle, not the ones athletes give to themselves. The article says that they can "give humans breast, colon, and prostate cancer", which, g
    iven what's actually known about these substances, is a wildly irresponsible claim.


    The article sends you to a perfectly reasonable site at the American Cancer Society, which is the sort of link that might make a BuzzFeed reader think that it must then be about, well, what kinds of cancer these things give you. But have a look. What you find is (first off) this is not an issue for eating beef. Bovine growth hormone (BGH) is given to dairy cattle to increase milk production. OK, so what about drinking milk?


    Here you go: for one, BGH levels in the milk of treated cows are not higher than in untreated ones. Secondly, BGH is not active as a growth hormone in humans - it's selective for the cow receptor, not the human one. The controversy in this area comes from the way that growth hormone treatment in cows tends to increase levels of another hormone, IGF-1, in the milk. That increase still seems to be within the natural range of variability for IGF-1 in regular cows, but there is a slight change.


    The links between IGF-1 and cancer have indeed been the subject of a lot of work. Higher levels of circulating IGF-1 in the bloodstream have (in some studies) been linked to increased risk of cancer, but I should add that other studies have failed to find this effect, so it's still unclear what's going on. I can also add, from my own experiences in drug discovery, that all of the multiple attempts to treat cancer by blocking IGF-1 signaling have been complete failures, and that might also cause one to question the overall linkage a bit.


    But does drinking milk from BGH-treated cows increase the levels of circulating IGF-1 at all? No head-to-head study has been run, but adults who drink milk in general seem to have slightly higher levels. The same effect, though, was seen in people who drink soymilk, which (needless to say) does not have recombinant cow hormones in it. No one knows to what extent ingested IGF-1 might be absorbed into the bloodstream - you'd expect it to be digested like any other protein, but exceptions are known.


    But look at the numbers. According to that ACA web summary, even if the protein were not degraded at all, and if it were completely absorbed (both of which are extremely unrealistic top-of-the-range assumptions), and even if the person drinking it were an infant, and taking in 1.6 quarts a day of BGH-derived cow milk with the maximum elevated levels of IGF-1 that have been seen, the milk would still contribute less than 1% of the IGF-1 in the bloodstream compared to what's being made in the human body naturally.

  7. #6
    The government says their safe. That should be good enough.

  8. #7
    I would eat any US beef , I eat no farmed fish , and I would eat any papaya.

  9. #8
    Chlorine, Bromine and Fluorine will wreck your thyroid. That is why it is good to take Iodine, I prefer Nascent atomic Iodine over Lugols. Iodine actually detoxifies your body from the other Halides that your thyroid is sucking up.

    One of the reasons I started this thread in October hoping to make people aware of the need for Iodine.
    http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...hy-You-Need-It

    Iodine in Our Diets for Good Health
    http://www.sonomacountygazette.com/c...icle-2078.html

    Avoid This If You Want To Keep Your Thyroid Healthy
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mer..._b_472953.html

    Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can't Live Without It
    http://www.amazon.com/Iodine-Need-Ca.../dp/0966088239

    The extrathyronine actions of iodine as antioxidant, apoptotic, and differentiation factor in various tissues
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23607319

    Orthoiodosupplementation: Iodine Sufficiency Of The Whole Human Body
    http://www.optimox.com/pics/Iodine/IOD-02/IOD_02.htm
    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner



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