Filed under: Food and it's Impact on Our Health
Health Tip of the Week
The average American is in the form of added sugars – the majority of which comes from high fructose corn syrup HFCS. As scientists learn more about the problems associated with HFCS, more consumers are seeking products with traditional fruit sugars or sucrose table sugar. The ever powerful corn lobby and its associated industry trade groups have responded by launching an aggressive advertising campaign claiming HFCS is as safe as its natural competitors. But new studies confirm previous studies and indicate a diet high in fructose, as compared to glucose, gained more of the dangerous belly fat that has been linked to a higher risk for heart attack and stroke.
Filed under: Going Green; How and Why...
From the Organic Consumers Association;
Sustainability Tip of the Week
The local food movement is gaining enough popularity to capture the interest of big business. Some of the biggest corporate food companies are looking for ways to greenwash their products. Although it sure beats sourcing their crops from overseas and is a step in the right direction, the following marketing claims can be misleading since the actual processing of these often factory-farm grown products may be anything but local:
–Frito-Lay North America owned by PepsiCo is trying to portray Lay’s potato chips as a local food in the regions where the potatoes are grown.
–ConAgra is trying to say that because Hunt’s canned tomatoes are mostly grown within 120 miles of its processing plant in Oakdale, California, that makes them "local" for Oakdale, and maybe even Californians.
–Kraft is trying to figure out whether people in Wisconsin will buy more pickles if they know the cucumbers that go into a jar of Claussen’s are grown there.
Filed under: Basics, Going Green; How and Why..., In The Kitchen with Millie- How To's
I have worked at several natural foods kitchens over the years who refused to use microwaves. They considered then unnatural, dangerous, harmful to food.
I disagree. Microwaves are a great way to cut down on energy use and heat in the kitchen. That’s because its energy goes straight into heating the food, not the air or a pan which surrounds it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not cooking tender greens in there, nor trying to bake weird microwavable brownies, or food in plastic bags (yecchhh)..
But a microwave is awesome for; melting chocolate, heating up a cup of water for tea (then the mug is warm, too!), softening butter or coconut oil. It is also great for getting a baking potato or sweet potato piping hot to then finish in the oven. Same for winter squashes, or eggplant for Baba Ganoush. But never for cooking broccoli, tender greens, cooking meats.
Filed under: Food and it's Impact on Our Health
ScienceDaily (May 20, 2009) — Doctors have issued a warning about excessive cola consumption after noticing an increase in the number of patients suffering from muscle problems, according to the June issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.
“We are consuming more soft drinks than ever before and a number of health issues have already been identified including tooth problems, bone demineralization and the development of metabolic syndrome and diabetes” says Dr Moses Elisaf from the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Ioannina, Greece.
“Evidence is increasing to suggest that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which the blood potassium levels fall, causing an adverse effect on vital muscle functions.”
A research review carried out by Dr Elisaf and his colleagues has shown that symptoms can range from mild weakness to profound paralysis. Luckily all the patients studied made a rapid and full recovery after they stopped drinking cola and took oral or intravenous potassium.
The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine liters of cola a day.
They included two pregnant women who were admitted with low potassium levels.
The first, a 21 year-old woman, was consuming up to three liters of cola a day and complained of fatigue, appetite loss and persistent vomiting. An electrocardiogram also revealed she had a heart blockage, while blood tests showed she had low potassium levels.
The second also had low potassium levels and was suffering from increasing muscular weakness. It turned out she had been drinking up to seven liters of cola a day for the last 10 months.
In a commentary on the paper, Dr Clifford Packer from the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Centre in Ohio relates the strange case of the ostrich farmer who returned from the Australian outback with muscle weakness. He had been drinking four litres of cola a day for the last three years and drank up to 10 liters a day when he was in the outback, causing a rapid reduction in his potassium levels.
He also relates a puzzling case he saw in his own clinical practice, which was solved when the patient turned up at his office with a two-litre bottle of cola in the basket of his electric scooter. It turned out he routinely drank up to four litres a day. He refused to stop drinking cola, but halved his consumption and the muscle weakness he had been complaining of improved.
In 2007 the worldwide annual consumption of soft drinks reached 552 billion litres, the equivalent of just under 83 litres per person per year, and this is projected to increase to 95 litres per person per year by 2012. However the figure has already reached an average of 212 litres per person per year in the United States.
It appears that hypokalaemia can be caused by excessive consumption of three of the most common ingredients in cola drinks – glucose, fructose and caffeine.
“The individual role of each of these ingredients in the pathophysiology of cola-induced hypokalaemia has not been determined and may vary in different patients” says Dr Elisaf.
“However in most of the cases we looked at for our review, caffeine intoxication was thought to play the most important role. This has been borne out by case studies that focus on other products that contain high levels of caffeine but no glucose or fructose.
“Despite this, caffeine free cola products can also cause hypokalaemia because the fructose they contain can cause diarrhea.”
The authors argue that in an era when portion sizes are becoming bigger and bigger, the excessive consumption of cola products has real public health implications.
“Although most patients recover when they stop drinking cola and take potassium supplements, cola-induced chronic hypokalaemia can make them more susceptible to potentially fatal complications, such as an irregular heartbeat” says Dr Elisaf.
“In addition, excessive consumption of any kind of cola can lead to a range of health problems including fatigue, loss of productivity and muscular symptoms that vary from mild weakness to profound paralysis.
“We believe that further studies are needed to establish how much is too much when it comes to the daily consumption of cola drinks.”
Dr Packer agrees that the problem needs to be addressed.
“Cola drinks need to be added to the physician’s checklist of drugs and substances that can cause hypokalaemia” he says.
“And the soft drink industry needs to promote safe and moderate use of its products for all age groups, reduce serving sizes and pay heed to the rising call for healthier drinks.”
Filed under: Environmental Issues
Big business is gearing up to fight the use of green technology by developing countries seeking to reduce carbon emissions
- Mark Weisbrot
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 May 2009 19.00 BST
The battle over intellectual property rights is likely to be one of the most important of this century. It has enormous economic, social and political implications in a wide range of areas, from medicine to the arts and culture – anything where the public interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge runs up against those whose income derives from monopolizing it.
Now it appears that international efforts to slow the pace of worldwide climate disruption could also run up against powerful interests who advocate a fundamentalist conception of intellectual property
According to Inside US Trade, the US chamber of commerce is gearing up for a fight to limit the access of developing countries to environmentally sound technologies (ESTs). They fear that international climate change negotiations, taking place under the auspices of the United Nations, will erode the position of corporations holding patents on existing and future technologies.
Developing countries such as Brazil, India and China have indicated that if – as expected in the next few years – they are going to have to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, they should be able to license some of the most efficient available technologies for doing so.
Big business is worried about this, because they prefer that patent rights have absolute supremacy. They want to make sure that climate change talks don’t erode the power that they have gained through the World Trade Organization.
The WTO is widely misunderstood and misrepresented as an organization designed to promote free trade. In fact, some of its most economically important rules promote the opposite: the costliest forms of protectionism in the world.
The WTO’s rules on intellectual property (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property, or Trips) are the most glaring example. These are designed to extend and enforce US-style patent and copyright law throughout the world.
Patents are monopolies, a restriction on trade that creates inefficiency in exactly the same way that tariffs, quotas or other trade barriers do. The economic argument for relaxing patent rules is therefore the same as that for removing trade barriers, only times 50 or 100 or even 1,000 – since the average tariff on manufactured or agricultural goods is quite small compared to the amount by which patent monopolies raise the price of a pharmaceutical drug.
These restrictions cost US consumers an estimated $220bn a year compared to competitive pricing – many times the gains from trade liberalization that we could even hope to get from a successful completion of the current Doha round of negotiations in the WTO that began in 2001 in Qatar.
It took years of struggle by non-governmental organizations to loosen the big pharmaceutical companies’ stranglehold on the WTO, to the point where the organization’s 2001 Declaration on Trips and Public Health reaffirmed the rights of member countries to produce generic versions of patented drugs in order to promote public health.
But this was just a first step, and seven years later these rights have been applied almost exclusively to anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of Aids, in just a handful of developing countries. The power of the pharmaceutical companies, with their governments in the United States and Europe as advocates, still keeps life-saving medicines priced out of reach for hundreds of millions of the world’s poor.
The legal procedure that has been used – although very infrequently – to allow for the production of generic drugs for the treatment of Aids is called a compulsory license. This means that a government can legally authorize the production of a generic version of a drug that is currently under patent, provided that this is done for public health purposes. A royalty is paid to the patent holder, but this is generally not very expensive.
Developing countries such as Brazil, India and China want to make sure that such possibilities are open for new environmentally sound technologies, eg in the areas of renewable energy, that might enable them to meet future targets for reducing carbon emissions. A Brazilian official noted that his country had only issued one compulsory license, for the anti-Aids drug Efavirenz, produced by Merck.
But big business doesn’t want to take any chances. Today they are launching a new coalition called the Innovation, Development and Employment Alliance (Idea). (You’ve got to love the Orwellian touch of those marketing consultants). Members include General Electric, Microsoft and Sunrise Solar. They will reportedly also be concerned with intellectual property claims in the areas of healthcare and renewable energy.
For the intellectual property fundamentalists, the income claims of patent holders are property rights, seen as analogous to a homeowner’s right to her house. But the framers of the US constitution (article I, section 8) didn’t it see that way, and neither, for the most part, have US courts.
Our legal system has long taken into account that protection for patent and copyright monopolies must reflect an important tradeoff between rewarding innovation and creativity, on the one hand, and allowing for the dissemination of knowledge and the development of new technologies.
The WTO rules, driven by the protectionist interests of powerful corporations, have gone far to advance the fundamentalist view of intellectual property, at the expense of the world’s economy and public health. Now our corporations fear that negotiators at the United Nations, under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, might not share these fundamentalist views, especially when the future of the planet is at stake.
Ten years ago environmentalists played a major role in exposing the built-in prejudice of WTO rules, which tend to strengthen commercial interests against environmental regulation. A tipping point was reached when they helped organize large-scale protests that shut down the WTO negotiations in Seattle in 1999, raising alarm bells and building opposition worldwide.
Environmental awareness and a sense of urgency with regard to climate change are much more broadly shared today. The Obama administration should take note of this and place itself squarely on the side of promoting the spread of environmentally sound technologies.
