N.O.R.F Posted January 19, 2004 Just say alhamdullillah that you have something to eat and pray for the ones that don't have any.. what makes u think we dont? becuz theres a discussion on eating freid chicken? give me a break,,,,,,, dont judge bro! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
QUANTUM LEAP Posted January 19, 2004 Could these foods be giving us cancer? Acrylamide is a chemical used in the manufacture of plastics and the treatment of water. It is also carcinogenic. But what nobody knew until recently was that it occurs at dangerously high levels in baked and fried foods such as chips, crisps and breakfast cereals. So should we worry? Jenni Russell investigates a food scare that could revolutionise the way we eat Thursday August 15, 2002 The Guardian Frankly, I've had enough of alarmist stories about food. For the past 14 years I have dutifully imposed every successive food fad and contradictory piece of dietary advice on my household, and my energy for it is more or less exhausted. We were vegetarian, until assured that babies needed meat; red-meat-eaters, until BSE sent us back to chicken in a panic; redmeat-avoiders, until my pale and listless children were diagnosed as iron-deficient; fish enthusiasts, until the discovery of dioxins in fish, and the solemn warnings that no one should eat fatty fish more than twice a week. We drank less tea, because it was full of caffeine, before being told to drink more of it, because it was full of antioxidants. Surely it was healthy to eat fruit and vegetables? Yes, provided they didn't come from the store I had been going to for the past three years, where the delicious flavours were perhaps due to the fact that 80% of the products were contaminated with pesticides. So when I read newspaper reports this spring that Swedish scientists had discovered a probable carcinogen called acrylamide in baked and fried food, I turned the page hastily and hoped the story would disappear. Which it did - for a couple of months. There were no health warnings on crisp packets; the biscuit companies were still in business. Then the World Health Organisation announced that it was convening an unprecedented and urgent meeting of leading food scientists to discuss the Swedish findings. One of the British scientists who attended, Professor Peter Farmer of Leicester University, warned that this was not just another food scare. "The risk is unknown, but it could be on a par with tobacco." I started to pay attention. Acrylamide is a genotoxic carcinogen that causes damage to the nervous system, and is listed as "probably" carcinogenic to humans. A chemical used in the manufacture of plastics, it is also present in tobacco smoke, and is used in the treatment of drinking water. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers it potentially so dangerous that it has fixed the safe level for human consumption at almost zero. The maximum permissible level of acrylamide in American drinking water is 0.5 parts per billion, or 0.5 micrograms per litre. Now the Swedish scientists had discovered something that no one had ever suspected: that acrylamide was present in some baked and fried foods, and at levels that made nonsense of the limitations on water. A large portion of chips from one local fast-food company contained at least 300 times the amount of acrylamide permitted in a single glass, while one sample of McDonald's chips had double that amount. Crisps contained acrylamide in even higher concentrations. But it wasn't just fried food that was a problem. Some crispbreads, cereals and biscuits had much higher levels than some kinds of chip. And acrylamide was present, although at much lower levels, in all breads. The average figures for some of the products tested, in micrograms per kilogram, were: soft bread, 50; rye bread, 89; cornflakes, 53; Rice Krispies, 247; popcorn, 416; chips, 450; crackers, 547; crisps, 1,200, and Ryvita, 1,200 to 1,800. Cooked meat had far lower levels: fried chicken contained 39, and meatballs 64. But raw and boiled foods had no traces of the chemical. The discovery had come about by chance. Five years earlier, workers building a tunnel in the south of Sweden had suffered neurological damage from exposure, after an accident, to the acrylamide being used in the process. A Swedish university group that was studying the men in the aftermath of the accident was startled to find inexplicably high levels of acrylamide in the blood of its control group. Dr Margareta Tornqvist, who was leading the study, investigated dozens of possibilities before testing food. The results were totally unexpected and, when they were published, Sweden went into shock. The media were dominated by the news, and shares in one crisp manufacturer immediately fell almost 15%. The news had a powerful impact, because the tunnel-poisoning scandal meant that everyone in the country was already aware of acrylamide's harmful potential. The Food Standards Agency in Britain says that the revelation poses an entirely new and global problem. Most food scares are about contamination. There is no frame of reference for dealing with a cancer-causing chemical which is produced during the normal cooking process, and which appears in foods that most people eat every day. Dozens of foods haven't yet been tested, so no one can yet be sure which pose the greatest risks. Research is urgently needed into how and why acrylamide is formed. The WHO has recommended the creation of an international network to conduct research, and the EU commissioner in charge of food has been asked to start coordinating a European response. In the interim, it is the Swedes who are still leading the way. In the past few weeks, Tornqvist has found that grated, microwaved potatoes contain acrylamide levels that are higher than that of most chips. And vegetables - not part of the original tests - are producing acrylamide at high levels, too. Frying spinach produces 112 micrograms per kilogram, and fried beetroot produces one of the highest levels - 890. Leif Busk, the head of research at Sweden's National Food Administration, says it is clear that the crucial factors in the formation of acrylamide are heat and time. Boiled food is completely safe. But once food is heated at temperatures above 120C, acrylamide can start to form, and the longer the cooking process, the higher the acrylamide count. Well-cooked toast has twice the acrylamide of lightly toasted bread. When oven chips are briefly cooked, they contain 301 micrograms; overcooked, they contain an astonishing 1,104. Busk and his team are developing a hypothesis that may explain what is happening. From the start, the scientists were intrigued that the same kinds of foods were producing a wide range of results. Fourteen different types of crisp produced results ranging from 330-2,300 micrograms per kilogram. Some cereals scored less than 340; others more than 1,400. Busk thinks the answer may lie in sugars, and in what happens to them when they are cooked. All carbohydrates form sugars when they are broken down by heat, but different kinds of carbohydrate produce different types of sugar, and some may form acrylamide much more easily than others. The precise chemical composition of a potato, or any other vegetable or cereal, will be influenced by its variety, the soil in which it is grown, and how it is fertilised. The sugar theory would explain why beetroot, which is high in carbohydrate, forms far more acrylamide than spinach, which is relatively low. It also offers the hope that farmers and manufacturers might, in time, be able to identify and produce low-acrylamide food. That's crucial, because no one involved in food safety or nutritional research holds out much hope that consumers will change their eating habits if a crylamide is proved to be dangerous. Spokesmen at WHO and America's Centre for Science in the Public Interest point out wearily that although a third of all cancers are already assumed to be caused by diet, two decades of advice on healthy eating have produced only marginal improvements in our eating habits, while obesity and cancer rates are still rising. But should any concerned consumer care about acrylamide? Do all the figures on intake add up to real personal risk? Everyone agrees that there needs to be more understanding of precisely how acrylamide affects the human body, and until there is, the FSA refuse to offer any estimates. But while Swedish scientists await permission to conduct controlled trials on humans, they have made extrapolations based on that standard human substitute, the rat. They calculate that in Sweden the average intake of acrylamide from all sources is 70 micrograms per day, which translates as one microgram per kilo of body weight per day. At that level, they calculate that one person in 100 will be killed by acrylamide, or to put it another way, that 6,000 deaths a year in Britain could be ascribed to it. One in 100? I told Busk that, at those odds, it didn't seem worth telling my children that they had to give up a lifetime of delicious chips, not to mention fried beetroot. He had several serious responses to that. First, countries will have average intakes much higher than Sweden's, with correspondingly higher risks. In Sweden, most potatoes are boiled or baked, and it's rare to find someone who eats chips or crisps every day. In Ireland or Scotland, for example, that is commonplace. Second, dietary analysis shows children and teenagers to be the highest consumers of cereals, snacks and fried foods, and with that, acrylamide. Not only will their intake of the "probable" carcinogen be relatively higher than that of adults, but they are more likely to be damaged by it, because their cells are dividing more rapidly, and acrylamide is known to affect dividing cells. A single 40g packet of crisps per day could, for instance, take a child over the one microgram per kilo per day on which the average risk is calculated - and that is before they have eaten anything else. Third, Busk points out, their research indicates that acrylamide is 1,000 times more dangerous than the majority of carcinogens found in food. Every single time you consume it, your DNA is being damaged, and every increase in the dose is an increase in risk. If you don't care about limiting acrylamide intake over a lifetime, then it is perverse to worry about pesticides, or dioxins in fish. In the end, though, can the acrylamide issue be so urgent, when all that has happened is the exposure of a risk which has always been there? Plenty of people think that the issue is being overblown, and not all of them are representatives of the food industry. Dr Walter Willett, a food scientist at Harvard, thinks the Swedes have made their research public at far too early a stage. He wants to see more hard evidence, an abandon ment of extrapolations from animal studies, and a recognition that there's no need to be deeply concerned, because we have been eating this way for thousands of years. On this last point he, and many other critics, may be wrong. The techniques of grilling, baking and frying may have been around for ever, but in most societies they were never used as frequently as they are now. Forty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that all traditional societies boiled their everyday food. Roasting and frying were reserved for celebrations, guests, and the upper classes. And when I think back to the limited experience of my own childhood, I can see how drastically cooking habits have changed. My mother fried all her rice, sauteed vegetables and baked lasagnes, but my English grandparents (born 1899) boiled practically everything they ate. They lived on porridge, mashed potatoes, boiled beef and boiled ham, and even Sunday roasts were effectively steamed in covered dishes. If they had a frying pan, I never saw it, and their acrylamide intake was probably limited to toast, and a cracker with the cheese. Where does that leave the rest of us? So many questions are still unanswered. More foods need to be tested, including the staples consumed in the rest of the world, while researchers point out that no one knows enough about cooking patterns at home. Britain's FSA has so far advised people not to change their diets. I'm not going to wait for them to change their minds; I have stopped buying my children crisps, or crispbreads, and will severely ration chips, but bread is too delicious and too nutritious to be abandoned. I'll still bake potatoes, because the water inside them apparently means that the interior is steamed at 100C, but I ought to discard the crisp, carcinogenic skin. Meanwhile, I predict that the first person to publish the Awfully Boring Acrylamide Cookbook, or How To Make Boiled Food Fashionable, Interesting and Delicious, will find themselves with a mini hit on their hands in 2003. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted January 20, 2004 ^^^damnnnnn next time u get a take away and think of getting a drink aswell, read the below: Thank you for your enquiry regarding our Lucozade and Ribena range of products. As a business we are extremely sensitive to the cultural needs of our consumers and try to address issues as and when they are brought to our attention. Unfortunately any changes we might decide to make cannot happen overnight as we need to ensure that our products meet the high quality and safety standards expected by consumers. Lucozade and Ribena are non-alcoholic drinks as defined by EU legislation. Some of our products do however contain a trace amount of alcohol which is widely used in soft drinks as a carrying agent for flavourings. Alcohol is authorised for use under EU law for this purpose and only tiny amounts of it have to be used. This concentration is so low that it can have no intoxicating effect. By comparison, foods like fruit juices and bread can also contain trace amounts of alcohol due to natural fermentation. The Food Labelling Regulations 1996 do not require alcohol used in this way to be identified separately on the label ? the word "flavourings" may be used to indicate the presence of low levels of flavouring-related ingredients. One of the reasons for this is that food and drink labels would rapidly become unreadable if every flavour component was labelled individually - a flavouring might contain up to 50 different components, each present in minute amounts. Lucozade · Lucozade Energy original, lemon, tropical and citrus clear flavours contain trace amounts of alcohol from the carrying agent for flavourings used. The amount in the product is less than 0.1%. However, because of these trace amounts we state that Lucozade Energy is not alcohol/alcohol derivative free. Alcohol is not added to Lucozade Energy sparkling orange glucose drink. · Alcohol is not added to any of the Lucozade Sport drinks range, with the exception of the Lucozade Sport pink grapefruit variety and the Lucozade Sport Hydroactive range, where it is found in trace amounts (less than 0.1%) due to the flavourings used. · We carefully check all our ingredients with our suppliers and to the best of our knowledge, no animal derived products are used in any Lucozade Energy and Lucozade Sports drinks (attached). Ribena The majority of the Ribena range and, in particular, Ribena blackcurrant variants (original, light, toothkind concentrates (squash) and ready to drink products) do not contain any added alcohol or animal derived ingredients. Only a small proportion of the range contain either of such ingredients, as listed (attached). The alcohol which is used as a carrier for the flavourings is ethanol or ethyl alcohol. The amount of alcohol present in the final products are minute (less than 0.1%). This concentration is so low that it can have no intoxicating effect. Thank you for taking the time to contact us. Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any further enquiries Yours sincerely Consumer Relations Products containing trace amounts of alcohol (Contains alcohol in trace amounts as a carrier for flavourings or vitamin / minerals) Lucozade Energy Traditional Sparkling Glucose Drink Lucozade Energy Sparkling Lemon Flavour Glucose Flavour Lucozade Energy Sparkling Tropical Glucose Drink Lucozade Energy Sparkling Lemon & Lime Flavour Drink Lucozade Solstis Sparkling Glucose Drink Lucozade Sport Orange Energy Bar Lucozade Sport Pink Grapefruit Flavour Isotonic Drink Still Lucozade Sport Hydration Drink Citrus Fruits Flavour Lucozade Sport Hydration Drink Summer Fruits Flavour Ribena Blackcurrant & Cranberry Juice Drink Concentrate Ribena Toothkind No Added Sugar Summer Fruits Juice Drink Concentrate Ribena Blackcurrant & Cranberry Juice Drink Ready to Drink Ribena Toothkind Orange Tropical Juice Drink Ready to Drink C-Vit Multivitamin No Added Sugar Blackcurrant Juice Drink Concentrate Products which are not described as 'animal free' (Animal free products do not contain any ingredients derived from meat or fish e.g. fish gelatine) Ribena Toothkind No Added Sugar Summer Fruits Juice Drink Concentrate Ribena Apple Juice Drink Ready to Drink Ribena Blackcurrant & Cranberry Juice Drink Ready to Drink Ribena Blackcurrant & Cranberry Juice Drink Concentrate C-Vit Multivitamin No Added Sugar Blackcurrant Juice Drink Concentrate Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
QUANTUM LEAP Posted January 20, 2004 Interesting Northener.... HEALTH AND THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since junk food is destroying our health and killing us all, how is it possible that this information is being kept from most people in this country? I can give you the main reason in one word -- MONEY. Huge conglomerates will stand to lose huge amounts of money when the people of this country wake up and see what's happening to them and why. Because people WILL wake up. As PT Barnum said, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time." Sooner or later, the truth will out. Millions of people are not going to keep on dying from ailments whose cause is known. That's ridiculous. It’s not just ridiculous. It's outrageous. And, in fact, it's downright criminal! Right now, the gigantic conglomerates are riding high. Even with the Enron and Wall Street scandals, the prevailing philosophy controlling this country is that business is a sacred cow, and must not be criticized, let alone controlled. Since our government is bought and paid for by huge political contributions, no changes in this situation will originate from that quarter. The scientific community is also bought and paid for by huge business interests. The bulk of medical research is paid for by the pharmaceutical corporations, which are looking for new drugs, not for ways to help you and me to be healthier. No changes will come from that quarter any time soon. The reason is that health is not the business of the drug companies. Drugs that they can patent is their business. Face it. Your health is your business. Nobody else's. And if junk food is destroying your health, whose fault is that? You're the one who’s eating it! Would you expect some doctor or some other expert to hold your hand, sit down at the table with you and tell you what to eat and what not to eat? Now, it is true that in a well-regulated society, we would get lots of help from the experts. For example, we would have lots of scientific research done on the findings of Weston A. Price and Denis Burkitt. . Doctors would learn about their findings in medical school. The public health authorities would be trained to protect us from the disastrous effects of junk food, just as they are now trained to protect us from infectious diseases. In fact, in a well-regulated society, many kinds of junk food that are now permitted would be outlawed. Hydrogenated fat is one example. The stuff is dead like Vaseline. No living creature except us will eat it. That's why it won't spoil. It won't support life. And in our bodies, it clogs our arteries. Yet tons of it is used in our food. Refined sugar and refined starch are two other junk foods that should be banned altogether. But, as it stands now, when it comes to choosing what to eat, we're on our own. We have to educate ourselves. Those institutions in our society that would normally be responsible for protecting us are not protecting us from junk food. They can't. They don't have the money to do that. They don't have the legal authorization to do it. And, furthermore, since we, the general public, haven't been educated to know what we should and should not eat, we would not permit our public health authorities to dictate to us in these areas anyway. The attitude of most people would be, "I like my junk food, and nobody is going to tell me what I'm going to eat." So education must come first. Then when all of our people learn what improper food does to us, they will demand that harmful foods be taken off the market, just as we now demand that hamburger contaminated with E. coli and cheese contaminated with salmonella be confiscated. The nourishing food revolution (which will follow the infectious disease revolution) will take time, because it must start from the bottom up. This will be a grass-roots revolution, not a revolution led by the scientific community, which is dragging its heels on identifying the damages caused by junk food. So, for now, you have to protect yourself. You have to educate yourself. You have to learn what's good for you and what's not. And your taste buds won’t guide you in this. Animals are guided by their instincts to choose what's good for them. But, since the advent of junk food, we seem to have lost that instinctive ability. We eat harmful crap that a mouse or a rat will turn its nose up at if they have healthful food available. So, since we can't rely on our instincts, we have to rely on what lower animals don't have: our intelligence. We have to use that intelligence to learn what's good for us and what's not. Fortunately for us, dedicated people have compiled the information we need to make the food choices we have to make to stay healthy. All we need do to learn how to stay healthy is to check out “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price and "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. Incidentally, this is a freebie site. I don’t get one dime from anybody to bring you this information. In fact, it costs ME money out of my own very limited retirement budget to put this page on the net. I do this because I can’t, in good conscious, stand silently by and watch millions die without speaking out. Won't you join me in spreading the good word? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
