BOTTLED DRINKING WATER-THE SAFETY ISSUE

Is not this world really crazy? First, one creates a scare about some thing and then an entrepreneur comes out with a solution! Who is benefited? Of course the industry. For example, the fears about the health of children make all parents nervous, fearing that inappropriate foods may harm their children as they grow. In comes a bevy of products claiming that consuming them will make the child grow faster, taller, more intelligent and more athletic! Vow! parents fall over each other to be seen buying these products though there is hardly any scientific evidence to support the outlandish claims of these peddlers! This blogger is provoked by the sorry situation that exists in almost all countries of the world about the safety of drinking water leading to its exploitation by the bottled water industry for beefing up their bottom line. In India also this industry is flourishing under the very nose of a democratic government where right to affordable food, safe water and pure air is enshrined in the constitution. Yet no water supply in any parts of the country is safe and water borne diseases are common among population which cannot buy expensive water treatment gadgets or spend costly fuels to boil it. Can any one believe that in India cost of bottled water is almost same as that of soft drinks! Now that bottled water has established itself as a standard item of family purchase, its negative impact on the health of citizens is coming out. Here is a report on this issue which is considered mundane by many people though reality is some thing else.   

"Plastic water bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate. When heated, the material releases the chemicals antimony and bisphenol A, commonly called BPA. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said BPA is not a major concern at low levels found in beverage containers, it continues to study the chemical's impacts. Some health officials, including those at the Mayo Clinic, say the say the chemical can cause negative effects on children's health. And antimony is considered a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization. UF soil and water science professor Lena Ma led a research team that studied chemicals released in 16 brands of bottled water kept at 158 degrees Fahrenheit for four weeks, what researchers deemed a "worst-case scenario" for human consumption".

Packaging water in plastic bottles and sachet is so common that consumers take it for granted that nothing is wrong with it. It is well known that except for glass and stainless steel, all other packaging materials are not "content-neutral", ie the packaging materials do cause leaching of some of its constituents: many of them can be harmful beyond a limit. According to the above report plastic bottles being used by many bottlers can cause migration of Antimony, a heavy metal and bis-Phenol A, both of them with health damaging potential, especially to growing children and this leaching out becomes more extensive if the water is exposed to higher temperatures that prevail in many tropical countries. What is scary is the long term effect of consuming such water over a long period on the future generations if health authorities do not revisit this area immediately.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

SUGAR CONSUMPTION-OLD TOBACCO "DAYS" BEING REVISITED?

Knowing fully well that high consumption of sugar is dangerous for human beings, many policy makers world over are breaking their head to evolve suitable steps to curb its consumption. Unfortunately voluntary action, supposed to be taken by the high-profit tuned food processing industry is a non-starter and if any thing this industry seems to have found a friend in sugar to rake in more money. According to some critics sugar must be regulated like alcohol and tobacco denying or restricting easy access for every body. Here is a passionate demand from a well recognized campaigner against bad quality foods, especially sugar worth listening to. 

Public reception of Lustig's new book, Fat Chance, will likely be just as divided. The book repeats and expands on the main point of contention in the sugar wars: whether our bodies treat all calories the same. The old guard says yes: A calorie is a calorie; steak or soda, doesn't matter. Eat more calories than you burn, you'll gain weight. Lustig believes that our bodies react to some types of calories differently than others. Specifically he believes that sugar calories alter our biochemistry to make us hungry and lazy in ways that fat and protein calories do not. As a result, he says, the ubiquity of sugar in the Western diet is making Americans sick, obese, and bankrupt. But Lustig does not stick to explaining his reasoning and raising public-health awareness. "Education has not worked. Labeling has not worked. And they're not going to work," he told me in his characteristically emphatic way. "Education hasn't worked for any addictive substance." According to Lustig, we need to accept that America's obesity problem can't be fixed by a Puritan resolution by each individual to eat fewer calories. To fix America's obesity problem, we need a regulatory framework for selling and serving less sugar-laden food.

When it is realized and further confirmed through scientific studies that sugar is an addictive working at the brain level, more caution is needed to break this vicious hold what ever it may take to accomplish the same. Whether one can make a differentiation between sugar calories and calories derived from fat and proteins is a subject matter of debate, it has been shown conclusively that excess sugar definitely contribute obesity and other life style disorders. Similarly the surge in Diabetes among  populations in the wealthy segment in almost all countries is sought to be linked to excess sugar consumption. It is known that availability of sugar rich processed foods at relatively low cost in some countries drives their consumption upwards and more than what is consumed at home gets into the body through the industrially produced sugar rich products. Naturally the author has a case in demanding for stringent action against the industry through punitive regulatory steps. knowledgeable pundits are predicting that it is a question of time before the food industry is saddled with law suits claiming billions of dollars as reparation by the obese and health compromised people, if action is not taken, NOW and HERE!

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

WILL THERE BE MEGA LAW SUITS AGAINST FOOD INDUSTRY?

The "sugar in the food" controversy is raising its head again, threatening the food industry in a serious way which the latter cannot ignore any more. There are thousands of studies which have implicated over consumption of sugar in creating dreaded life time disorders like diabetes, CVD and obesity but there is still no unanimity regarding the adverse consequences sugar may have on human health. The food industry is exploiting this lacunae to put in the market more and more products containing high sugar levels. It knows well that like tobacco, sugar is also an addictive and consumers, especially the kids, can be depended to to buy these unhealthy products again and again. If the coincidence between the onslaught of obesity and High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) becoming cheap in the US is taken into consideration, no further evidence is needed to implicate HFCS as one of the major critical factors for the progressive health deterioration among American citizens. Here is a critique on this subject which is both illuminating and logical to understand. 

"The first people in America to say smoking was bad for your health were greeted with derision and called quacks. Even while studies emerged in the 1950s linking smoking to various ailments including lung cancer and heart disease, tobacco supporters (nearly half of Americans smoked back then) questioned whether anti-smoking campaigners detracted from more serious attempts to get at the real causes of these diseases. Robert Lustig, a pediatrician and author of a book out last week, Fat Chance, is sympathetic. He's heard it all before. He wants sugar (both the table variety and high-fructose corn syrup) regulated like alcohol. He wants products full of sugar to get health warnings, like on cigarette packs. Sugar, he says, is toxic in high doses, and should be treated as such. It's also making us really fat. Excess sugar turns into liver fat and that fat makes the liver more resistant to insulin, he explains. The pancreas, which makes insulin, then has to make more. This raises insulin levels in the blood stream, and forces energy into fat, which causes weight gain. Then there's the effect on the brain. High insulin levels block actions on the hormone leptin, which tells the brain when the body has had enough to eat. People who eat lots of sugar are told by their brains that they are still hungry and so keep eating. Lustig says that food companies know this and that's why there's more sugar than ever before in our processed foods. The more sugar foods contain, the more consumers will eat. Here is a (rather long) video of him explaining the science at greater length. Lustig's research started in 1995 while working as a pediatric endocrinologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee. He noticed that children whose hypothalamus were damaged, following neurosurgery to remove tumors, started producing too much insulin and became lethargic and fat. He prescribed a drug to block the insulin and the children ate less, became more active and lost weight. He says the weight loss was the result of the drug (i.e., a hormonal change), not the change in behavior. Since then Lustig has done four studies, two with children and two with adults, to verify the phenomenon. He has concluded that the obesity problem is not about our couch potato tendencies but about the amount of sugar Americans consume, which he says is double what it was two decades ago".

The argument of the author of the above critique, that a day will come, sooner than later, when the food industry will face mega law suits for health damage by millions of citizens who face bleak prospects of leading a healthy life because of industry's deliberate strategy of restricting the product mix to high fat and high sugar containing ones, is logical. This reminds every one about the unhappy saga of tobacco industry of yesteryear which ignored and suppressed colossal evidence against tobacco blatantly and with no remorse about scientific findings implicating tobacco in lung cancer. Looking back, it became a tragedy of Himalayan proportion for the tobacco industry which had to shell out more than $ 300 billion for its past sins and omissions as reparation. Why not food industry learn from the history and overhaul its product basket with less and less sugar, salt and fat, all implicated unequivocally in many human disorders? Earlier this bitter truth is realized better it will be for this high flying industry.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

CHILDREN'S FOOD-NEW "GUIDELINES" WITH NO TAKERS!

Why should there be special attention to children's food that are marketed through high visibility promotional programs? One of the reasons is that children at their tender age cannot discern bad food from the good ones and hence need protection from intrusive advertisements with lot of incentives. More over food habits developed during early stages of growth are likely to be carried through out life and wrong foods based diet can do considerable harm to the health of future citizens. Obesity syndrome that is rampant in affluent countries like USA is linked to consumption of unbalanced foods vis-a-vis energy and nutrients and every society has a responsibility to see that their young ones start their life without a handicap. Though there have been suggestions to ban advertisement of kid's foods in the electronic media, such a move may not find favor in many democratically ruled countries. The latest move in USA to "persuade" the food industry to voluntarily stop advertising foods to kids if they do not meet with some standards is fiercely being resisted by the industry. Here is a take on this vital issue.

"The guidelines are designed to encourage foodmakers to reduce salt, added sugars and fats in foods and drinks targeted to children. If their products did not meet the standards, foodmakers following the guidelines would refrain from advertising them to children. The standards would be voluntary and not regulations; companies would not be required to meet them, and the government would have no way to enforce them. Public-health experts say children, many of whom may lack the critical-thinking skills to understand advertising, are bombarded daily by television ads, Web sites, toy giveaways and cartoon characters promoting junk food. The food and beverage industry spends about $2 billion a year marketing directly to children. The business community has portrayed the government's guidelines as job-killing government overreach. Foodmakers said the voluntary guidelines are too severe and would prevent them from marketing even relatively healthy foods to children".

It is sad that the food industry lacks conscience while resisting such a positive policy of protecting children from the ill-effects of bad foods, rich in sugar, fat and salt. Probably profit motives over ride all other concerns and the industry cannot absolve itself of the responsibility of creating a healthy society through good foods. Governments world over must put in place reasonable restraints to prevent the industry from causing damage to the health of its citizens through reckless practices considered illogical from the national perspective.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com