Food safety
revere | October 10, 2006Not even dinner is safe in Iraq. Reports seem to agree on is that there was a mass food poisoning of Iraqi policemen on Sunday, although whether 11 died and hundreds fell ill or 7 died and hundreds fell ill or no one died but over a thousand became ill is still unclear.
Authorities are saying it could have been from "spoiled food," but this is highly unlikely. The victims reportedly became ill immediately upon finishing their meals:
Some collapsed as soon as they stood up from the meal, others fell "one after the other" as they headed out to the yard in the base to line up in formation, Mr al…
revere | October 7, 2006I'm always a little suspicious of nutritional epidemiology. It's a prejudice, I admit. But trying to figure out how past diet affects present health is difficult. How many people remember with any accuracy what they ate years ago? Still. some things seem easier to remember, like how much cola you habitually drink. That's some data collected via questionnaire from 2500 women enrolled in an osteoporosis study. Their mean age was about 60 years old. The results have been reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, although I've only seen the press reports.
What they reveal (again…
revere | August 23, 2006Recently we posted about pending legislation that would have gutted hundreds of state and local food safety laws. The argument was that the federal government could do this more consistently and eliminate the confusion of a patchwork of different laws. The patchwork would be eliminated all right. And the replacement would be all one color: white, as in whitewash.
Now the government's watchdog lapdog agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent a report to Congress on the food industry's compliance with labeling regulations in response to concerns about inaccurate nutrition…
revere | July 30, 2006We've posted about this before (here and here) when it was still in the middle distance, but now it's a disaster just over the horizon. It's the National Uniformity for Food Act (S.3128) (aka The Food Industry Protection Act), poised to become law if it passes the US Senate. It is a blunderbuss aimed at California's Proposition 65 which requires warnings for food ingredients that may cause cancer or birth defects. If it passes it will take down that state law and another 220 or so other state and local safety and labeling laws as collateral damage. The food industry won't mourn those little…