April 2007 Archives
According to an article in The Washington Post, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to grocery recalls and disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest grocery product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.
The FDA seems to be incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the U.S. food supply. Grocery consumers should brace themselves for more grocery recalls in the coming weeks. Particularly troubling is the realization that there is no reasonable solutions for change on the table.
The scope of the recent grocery store recall of pet food demonstrates the vulnerability of the system. Pet food contaminated dogs, cats and now pork. Last week a California pork producer was notified by California health officials that hogs on their farm had probably consumed feed laced with melamine, the same chemical that forced the grocery store recalls of pet food. Pork from the animals raised on the farm has been recalled.
Most of us have taken the American food supply for granted, so the string of contaminations and recalls in the past year have become disturbing. Contaminated foods have included peanut butter carrying salmonella and spinach harboring E. coli. With each outbreak of foodborne illness, the government had ostensibly launched investigations to figure out what was contaminating the food and how it got there.
According to a story published Monday in The Washington Post, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known all along about festering contamination problems in these very industries. The newspaper obtained documents showing the FDA had evidence of the problems but had taken only limited actions to address them.
A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing to address the food contaminations.
Read more:
The Washington Post
The Denver Post
As the nation moves to significantly reduce trans fat consumption, the American Heart Association is launching "Face The Fats," an educational campaign to teach consumers how to minimize trans fat in their diet, while avoiding the unintended health consequence of defaulting to more saturated fat. The campaign features an "edutainment" Web site where the Bad Fats Brothers - named Sat and Trans - come to life, an interactive fat calculator and recipes developed by celebrity chef Alton Brown.
Among the campaign's top priorities is to encourage replacement of trans fat-laden partially hydrogenated vegetable oils with oils high in unsaturated fats - monounsaturated and polyunsaturated - as stated in today's Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. The journal includes the proceedings of a trans fat conference that the American Heart Association convened to better understand the challenges the country faces as it moves to oils without trans fat.
Trans fat has received a lot of well-deserved scrutiny - at the same time, while it's critical that we continue to push aggressively to minimize its consumption, trans fat is just one part of the "big fat picture,"said Robert H. Eckel, M.D., immediate past president of the American Heart Association, chair of its trans fat task force and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center at Denver.
It's equally important that we avoid increasing saturated fat in its place. Both trans and saturated fats raise LDLs, the bad cholesterol, and increase the risk of developing heart disease.
On average, American adults consume approximately 2.2 percent of total calories from trans fat and four to five times as much saturated fat a day far more than the limits recommended by the American Heart Association. To help consumers better understand the recommended fat limits and make smarter choices, the new campaign features a personalized tool, My Fats Translator, the campaign's new Website. Users can input their age, gender, height, weight and level of physical activity into the simple calculator tool, and in return receive their personal daily limits for total fat, saturated fat and trans fat consumption.
Our bodies need some fat, but it's clear that many of us consume a lot more than we need. And all too often we load up on fats that aren't very good for us, passing up more healthful varieties,said campaign spokesperson and celebrity chef Alton Brown, who developed recipes that also are featured on http://www.americanheart.org/FaceTheFats .
I'm taking part in this campaign because I want to help people to make better food decisions whether in the market, their kitchens or in restaurants.
The American Heart Association's campaign helps break down complex fat information, focusing initially on the bad fats and healthier alternatives. It's important for consumers to eat all fats in moderation, and eat foods with the "bad" fats as treats only - once in a while - rather than often.
BAD fats: Trans and Saturated
Trans fat is found in many foods, but especially in commercial baked goods (doughnuts, pastries, muffins, cakes, pie crusts, biscuits and cookies), fried foods (French fries, fried chicken, breaded chicken nuggets and breaded fish), snack foods (crackers), and other foods made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, vegetable shortening, or hard margarine. (Soft margarines typically do not contain trans fat.)
Saturated fat occurs naturally in many foods. The saturated fat we eat comes primarily from animal sources, including beef, lamb, pork, poultry with skin, beef fat, lard and cream, butter, cheese, and other dairy products made from whole or reduced-fat (2 percent) milk. These foods also contain cholesterol. Some plant foods, such as palm oil, palm kernel oil and coconut oil, also contain saturated fat.
BETTER fats: Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats
Monounsaturated fat include olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, avocados, and many nuts and seeds.
Polyunsaturated fat include a number of vegetable oils (soybean oil, corn oil, safflower oil and sunflower oil), fatty fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring and trout) and some nuts and seeds.
Calories from fats:
Regardless of the type of fat, all fats have the same number of calories -- every 1 gram of fat contains 9 calories. "Trans fat-free" doesn't automatically mean "healthy: Foods marked "trans fat-free" may still contain saturated fat, the other bad fat, and be high in calories.
In 2006, the American Heart Association updated its Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations, advising consumers to limit their consumption of trans fat to no more than 1 percent of daily caloric intake. The association also encourages removal of trans fat from packaged goods and foods prepared in restaurants and bakeries, and supports related local regulatory efforts, provided that the availability of healthier alternatives and practical guidance to food service establishments are taken into consideration. The association believes in a comprehensive phased-in approach to the replacement of industrially produced trans fat to ensure that a sufficient supply of healthier alternative oils and shortenings are available to restaurants and bakeries to prevent the substitution with unhealthy alternatives.
Read more:
American Heart Association
American Heart Association - Face The Fats
A new study reports that consuming less salt will not only lower blood pressure, but may reduce the risk of heart disease overall.
Low-salt diets have been shown to lower blood pressure, so a link to overall heart health seems logical.
The study, published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, reports that even in people whose blood pressure was not excessively high, less salt could have big impact on the heart.
Specifically, researchers found that reducing the amount of salt in the diet can lower the risk of total cardiovascular disease by 25 percent to 30 percent in those following a low-salt diet.
Lead researcher Nancy Cook said:
Dietary intake of sodium among Americans is excessively high.Cook, who is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, added,
Our study suggests that reducing the level of salt in the diet would lead to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
Sodium is known to affect blood pressure levels, particularly among people with high blood pressure, according to Cook.
Among hypertensive individuals, lowering sodium is pretty well established to lower blood pressure,she said. Now it looks like reducing sodium also has an effect on cardiovascular disease.
In the study, researchers examined people from two trials that analyzed the effect of reduced salt consumption on blood pressure.
All the participants in the trials had "high-normal" blood pressure which is sometimes called "pre-hypertension" were at increased risk of developing heart disease.
The first Trial of Hypertension Prevention, completed in 1990, consisted of 744 people; the second trial had 2,382 participants, which ended in 1995.
People in both trials reduced their salt intake by about 25 percent to 35 percent. Each trial also included a control group that did not reduce salt intake.
The researchers found that those who reduced their salt intake were 25 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease 10 to 15 years after the trials ended. There was also a 20 percent lower death rate from cardiovascular disease among those who cut their salt consumption.
Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center and a nationally renowned authority on nutrition, weight control, and the prevention of chronic disease said,
Our food supply makes meaningful reductions in salt intake all but impossibly difficult for most people. The salt we shake onto our food contributes far less to most diets than salt processed into foods. Even foods we would never think of as salty, such as breakfast cereals, cookies, and even some soft drinks, often contain copious additions of sodium.
This study, according to the authors, is the first and only study of sufficient size and duration to assess the effects of a low salt diet on cardiovascular problems.
Common high-sodium culprits include pickles, olives, luncheon meats, convenience foods like boxed or frozen meals and side dishes, soups, sauces and restaurant meals.
Read package labels and look for foods that have no added salt or are reduced in sodium.
Read more: Cutting down on salt, visit the American Heart Association
Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School
