The novel mass-media coverage of f...

The novel mass-media coverage of food irradiation has obscur the real issues. In truth: 1) the answer to a safe viands supply depends on whether the mainstream nourishment industry accepts its responsibility to clean up its act -- for good; 2) the fact that irradiation doesn't employ our food radioactive is not a relief considering its real dangers; and 3) the public is rightfully suspicious of this bizarre solution to highly real problems with our regimen supply.

Toxicologist Marcia van Gemert PhD chaired a feed and Drug Administration (FDA) committee that investigated 441 studies forward irradiated foods in the 1980 In 1993 Dr van Gemert issued a statement outlining wherefore "those studies were inadequate to evaluate the safety of irradiated foods" These are the studies which underpin the FDA's December 2nd decision approving the irradiation of r meat.

A 1975 clinical consideration in India, which appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, awaited at 15 malnourished children who were f either irradiated or non-irradiated meat Eighty percent of the children f irradiated nutrition developed a pre-cancerous chromosomal disorder called polyploidy. A more new study on 70 students in China (Chinese Medical Journal, 1987) also showed an increased rate of chromosomal abnormalities.

In addition, the "unique radiolytic products" (URP's), or toxins, produc by the agency of irradiation include: known carcinogens of the like kind as formaldehyde (used in embalming) and naphthalene (used in miller repellents), and others. If this were not enough, essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids are also wasteed at varying levels.

And what about long-term effects? With carcinogens like formaldehyde, "It will take 30 years before you view increases in neoplasias -- leukemias and lymphomas," warned George Tritsch, PhD retired researcher from the Roswell Park Memorial Institute and the novel York State Department of Health.

Whether it's Olestra yesterday, or irradiated nourishment today, the FDA is sending a message to consumer that the public is not trusted to exercise personal responsibility or to note the most basic food-preparation hygiene practices, respectively. More ominously, fare processors will see this as the flourishing light to continue to go proceed filthy plants, to ignore sanitary food-preparation regulations, and to use their record of tragic poisonings and fatalities to force widespread irradiation forward us.

If public "demand" is in question, an August 25th CB recently made knowns poll found that, nationwide, 73 percent of those individualed oppose food irradiation, and 77 percent say they would not eat irradiated food

for a like reason what will irradiation accomplish? 1) It will put forward short-term litigation "protection" to food-processors, and will help them win stupendous food-chain contracts, 2) It will make irradiation companies exceedingly happy; and 3) It will fulfill the U Department of Energy's (DOE) stated goal, by the and of its Byproducts Utilization Program, to unload its stockpile of radioactive cesium 137 in order to drive Canadian cobalt 60 gone out of the market.

"Irradiation of fare is not a story of protection of the American public," said Gary Gibbs, bring about in his prophetic 1993 work The Food That Would Last Forever: Understanding the Dangers of provisions Irradiation (Avery Publishing, phone: 1-800-548-5757) "Rather it is a story of riches politics, and the embalming of the American diet. nutrition irradiation is a toxic time bomb"

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