Founded by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Day is commited to:

Reducing diet-related disease by promoting healthy foods

Supporting sustainable farms & cut subsidies to big agribusiness

Expanding access to food and alleviate hunger

Protecting the environment & animals by reforming factory farms

Promoting health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids

Who can argue with any of that?

For learn more and see how you can be part of Food Day, visit their website now:  Food Day

The Adventist Health Study 2

• Received June 25, 2010.
• Accepted February 2, 2011.

• © 2011 by the American Diabetes Association.

“Americans are really turned on by a bright-red strawberry juice, and they think it’s natural,” said Kantha Shelke, co-president of the food research firm Corvus Blue. “Or cheese — cheese is naturally a pale color, but most young kids will not eat cheese unless it’s a bright, almost fluorescent orange.”

Foodmakers have used dyes since ancient times to make food more appealing to the eye. But the practice has so invaded the modern psyche that artificial dyes are being used even on some pet foods. Dogs see limited color, but apparently their owners don’t like buying dull, gray chow.

Now, federal regulators are reexamining artificial ingredients they have long deemed to be safe, prompted by scientific studies suggesting that color additives might be linked to hyperactivity in children and other health effects. On Wednesday, an advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration will begin a two-day meeting to discuss the science behind artificial dyes and whether the government ought to restrict their use.

“There are sometimes nine different dyes in a food product,” said Laura Anderko of Georgetown University Medical Center, who serves on the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee for the Environmental Protection Agency. “Moms and dads will say, ‘Here’s a fruit roll-up — that must be healthy.’ But it’s filled with dyes. And emerging science suggests it’s a harm to children.”

Two recent studies sponsored by the British government found that children given foods made with some artificial dyes and a food preservative, sodium benzoate, showed an increase in hyperactivity. The study sampled children in the general population, not just those known to show hyperactive behavior.

The studies remain controversial, with some scientists skeptical about the links that can be drawn.

“At first glance, a study may appear to show an association, but when you consider other important factors that could be responsible for the results, such as gender, maternal education level, pretrial diet and other factors, it becomes impossible to affirm that the change in behavior was due to food colors,” said Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at the Rose F. Kennedy Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In 2009, after the studies on hyperactivity, the British government urged foodmakers to stop using six dyes. The European Parliament required foods containing the tested dyes to carry a label warning that products “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” The government continues to allow the use of several other artificial dyes.

To avoid warning labels on their products in Europe, many foodmakers — including U.S.-based companies such as Kellogg and Mars International — replaced the six dyes with other dyes, including some natural ones made from fruits and vegetables.

“Companies in Europe are managing perfectly well — people get used to a slightly different color,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has petitioned the FDA to ban artificial dyes and, as a first step, require a warning label.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest points to studies suggesting that some of the dyes are also suspected carcinogens.

In 1990, the FDA banned Red No. 3 in cosmetics, medicines and some other products because it was linked to cancer in mice but permitted its continued use in foods.

Food industry officials say artificial dyes are safe and contend that the British studies and others are inconclusive. Manufacturers also note that the dyes are heavily regulated by the FDA, which requires approval before they can be used commercially, unlike many other ingredients used in foods.

“Show us the science that use of antibiotics in animal production is causing this antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner of the National Pork Council told the Washington Post back in June 2010, responding to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance document advising against the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock.

Well, here’s some.

To be clear: That’s the paper’s language, not mine. The gut-punch challenge comes from an editorial that is only on the web so far but is scheduled for publication in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection. It accompanies a research article that makes an important claim:

Chickens, chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands are carrying identical, highly drug-resistant E. coli — resistance that is apparently moving from poultry raised with antibiotics, to humans, via food.

For anyone who thinks about these issues — anyone interested in sustainability, organics or small-scale farming, anyone working to combat foodborne disease — this may seem like a foregone conclusion. And it should. The first observation that giving antibiotics to animals spreads antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans was made in 1976, and there has been a steady accumulation of evidence since. Nevertheless, the argument keeps being made that the connection is not water-tight , and that antibiotic use outside agriculture — in human medicine, perhaps — can be blamed for the vast rise in antibiotic resistance.

For those who don’t want to believe in this connection — and it is, at this point, a matter of belief much more than it is of evidence — this new paper too may not convince them. To me, though, it’s more good evidence that overuse of antibiotics in farming is a human-health threat.

The details:

A public-private team from the Netherlands (several universities and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) gathered samples of E. coli, the ubiquitous gut bug, from live poultry and from retail chicken meat. They looked for a particular resistance pattern: extended-spectrum beta-lactamase resistance, or ESBL.

ESBL is an emerging problem in human medicine. It tends to appear in Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli and also Klebsiella, species that cause hospital-acquired infections in vulnerable people such as ICU and burn patients. ESBL confers protection against whole families of drugs, starting with penicillin and extending to the later generations of cephalosporins, and leaves bacteria treatable by only one remaining small family of drugs, the carbapenems.

ESBL incidence has been rising steadily for the past two decades, even in countries in the European Union where human antibiotic use is strictly controlled by government policy — meaning there are not a lot of antibiotics washing around, exerting the selective pressure that drives the emergence of resistance.

Microbiologists have been curious how that might be. They have started to look closely at whether antibiotic use in livestock is stimulating ESBL resistance instead, and they have made provocative findings. In the Netherlands, for instance — which has conservative human antibiotic use, but the most liberal agricultural antibiotic use of any EU member — the percentage of E. coli that was found in the guts of chickens and was carrying ESBL went up five times over between 2003 and 2008.

So, in this new study, researchers looked for ESBL-containing E. coli in bacterial samples taken from chickens and stored in a vast national database, and also from 98 chicken breasts that they purchased from 9 stores and 3 independent butchers. They analyzed the E. coli for the presence of ESBL genes, and plasmids — mobile loops of DNA that move between bacteria — containing those genes. They weren’t difficult to find, either: Of the 98 chicken-meat samples, 92 contained at least one ESBL.

Then, in a second step, the researchers plumbed a different national database, of resistant bacteria found in humans. They looked for ESBL-containing E. coli, analyzed the genes and plasmids, and then looked for matches between the human genes, plasmids and bacterial strains and the ones they had already  found in poultry. Did they find them? Why, yes, they did.

Would you like some salmonella with those budget cuts? If Republicans have their way, food safety could fall casualty to the congressional budget-cutting fervor. Buried in the House GOP's budget bill, which passed last month and would axe $61 billion in spending, are major funding reductions for agricultural inspections. And consumer advocates warn that these cuts could escalate outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.

The House budget bill slashes $88 million from the agency that inspects the country's meat and poultry, which could reduce its operations by 18 percent for the remainder of the year. The cuts to the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service could furlough thousands of inspectors and decrease the number of inspections at the nation's slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants. With fewer inspectors on the job, the quality of inspections could also fall by the wayside, explains David Plunkett, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest: "They could be windshield inspections—when they show up, look through the windshield, and then drive off."

Without sufficient monitoring, the risk of tainted meat in the nation's food supply is likely to increase, Plunkett and other advocates say. "If the cows are not slaughtered appropriately and cleanly—if you're not careful, manure is often on the hide," which could in turn contaminate the meat with E. coli, salmonella, and other bacteria, says Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America. There's also the economic impact to consider: Slaughterhouses may be forced to close if there are big cutbacks in inspections, since such facilities must be inspected daily to remain open. According to the USDA, the cuts would cost the industry some $11 billion in revenue and could raise the price of meat for consumers.

In addition to targeting the USDA, the House GOP's bill also slashes $241 million from the food-safety budget of the Food and Drug Administration, which, among other things, could require the agency to furlough its 8,600 inspectors for an average of more than five weeks. The cuts could also gut the funding for the scientists responsible for examining contaminated products and determining how to detect tainted foods before they make people sick (or worse), according to Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist for the group Food and Water Watch. And budget rollbacks could result in 10,000 fewer inspections of imported food, less than 1 percent of which is checked in the first place, according to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a member of a House appropriations subcommittee overseeing agriculture.

Children, the elderly, and those who are already sick face the greatest risk of becoming ill or dying from contaminated food. The Centers for Disease Control has reported that one out of every six Americans gets sick each year from food-borne illnesses—with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 dying from such ailments. In response to the growing public outcry over high profile recalls and deaths, Congress passed a bill in December to strengthen food-safety laws. But lawmakers still need to pass a separate bill to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act, which costs more than $1 billion to enact—money that will be that much harder to come by in the current political climate.

Republicans pushing such rollbacks insist that the country's food supply is safe enough as it is, and they've railed against intrusive federal inspectors. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) has been leading the effort to gut federal food-safety efforts as the new chair of the agriculture subcommittee of the House appropriations committee. "We have a lot of concerns about the necessity of putting 18,000 food police on the streets and the kitchens of America," Kingston told Fox News' Atlanta affiliate after the food-safety overhaul passed last year. He claimed that the country's food supply is "99.99 percent safe," adding: "Do you really need to hire 18,000 federal bureaucrats to tell the private sector what to do?"

Kingston's criticisms echo those of the tea party activists who tried to kill the food-safety bill last year, warning that the government's "food safety Gestapo" would crush small farmers and convert Americans to vegetarianism (see "The Tea Party's Food Fight"). Though the Tea Party lost the battle at the time, they may be vindicated by Republicans who are now prepared to take an axe to existing food-safety efforts—and who are unlikely to back new funding for ramped-up inspections and regulations, even for a law that they voted through. Though Democrats have tried to defend food-safety inspections, there's a $50 billion gulf between the GOP's cuts and what the Dems have proposed, putting the funding at risk as both parties continue to wrangle over the budget.

There is in fact a growing body of credible scientific evidence that chocolate contains a host of heart-healthy and mood-enhancing phytochemicals, with benefits to both body and mind.