What’s In Your Food? Do You Really Know?

Print  | 

Disclosure Campaign Underway

Ambler, PA, April 26, 2010 — Incomplete and/or inaccurate ingredient labels are primary reasons for food recalls by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Prepared and packaged foods containing ingredients that are not declared or printed on labels either are voluntarily recalled by manufacturers or obligatory by the FDA. Recalls fall into three categories:

Class I recalls are for dangerous or defective products that predictably could cause serious health problems or death.

Class II recalls are for products that might cause a temporary health problem, or pose only a slight threat of a serious nature.

Class III recalls are for products that are unlikely to cause any adverse health reaction, but that violates FDA regulations.

Since April 1^st, FDA recalled food products because of undeclared sulfites, an undeclared allergen, unlabeled wheat and milk ingredient, undeclared milk and soy, undeclared egg product in raisin bread, and unlabeled wheat and barley ingredient.

The Food and Drug Administration takes unlabeled ingredients seriously and rightfully so. However, there are numerous unlabeled ingredients-and toxic chemicals, in particular-in products consumers use or ingest daily that do not appear on labels, but those products are not recalled.

A case in point is genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are NOT listed on USA-grown and processed foods and their labels. That means consumers unknowingly are consuming GMOs even if they don’t want to, and all while being denied their preferences and choice. Other countries mandate that food labels must identify GMs.

With more than 89 percent of all soy grown in the USA; 83 percent of cotton with its oil used as food grade vegetable oil; 75 percent of canola; 61 percent of corn and its oil; 50 percent of Hawaiian papaya; and numerous other crops making their way into food packages, consumers need to know which GMO ingredients are included in their shopping carts and, ultimately, in their bellies and intestinal tracts. Allergies are a prime concern together with unknowns about how GMOs alter body chemistry.

Since food allergies affect more than 6 percent of children under the age of three and more than 3 million children had food or digestive allergies within the last twelve months of 2007, according to the American Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology, the author of the book Our Chemical Lives And The Hijacking Of Our DNA, A Probe Into What’s Probably Making Us Sick, is organizing the Consumers Toxin-free Bill of Rights movement so that consumers will know the toxins they are exposed to in products. For more information and to sign the online Consumers Toxin-free Bill of Rights petition, please visit http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/695427183 .

Some GM crops can produce their own herbicides, i.e., Bacillus Thuringiensis, which may have the capability to reproduce within the human intestinal tract. Jeffrey M. Smith, a world-renowned researcher and expert on adverse effects of GMOs, feels that possibility neither has been confirmed nor denied. And no one seems to want to find out.

Other transgenic crops can withstand inordinate amounts of the pesticide glyphosate that must be used and sprayed in growing fields where crops were sown with seeds genetically modified to resist being killed by that ubiquitous pesticide. The Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering in Caen, France, found pesticide residue in GMO-soy and published the results in the January 2009 article, Glyphosate formulations induce apoptosis and necrosis in human umbilical, embryonic, and placental cells. This research indicates that fetuses and the unborn are at risk. Is that a Class I?

While some brands may utilize “reverse” declarations-no GMOs; or, organically grown-on product labels, not every product has such transparency. The Consumers Toxin-free Bill of Rights would mandate transparency and truth in advertising on labels. With almost daily news stories breaking about more and more products sickening consumers, the Consumers Toxin-free Bill of Rights is a form of consumer protection whose time has come.

Other press releases from Catherine J Frompovich

• HPV Vaccines - Do the Risks Outweigh the Benefits? - April 22nd, 2010
• Women Look to India for Answers about HPV Vaccine Dangers - April 16th, 2010