Mmmmmmm-mercury
Mercury was found in nearly 50 percent of tested samples of commercial high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), according to a new article published today in the scientific journal, Environmental Health. A separate study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) detected mercury in nearly one-third of 55 popular brandname food and beverage products where HFCS is the first or second highest labeled ingredient-including products by Quaker, Hershey’s, Kraft and Smucker’s.
HFCS use has skyrocketed in recent decades as the sweetener has replaced sugar in many processed foods. HFCS is found in sweetened beverages, breads, cereals, breakfast bars, lunch meats, yogurts, soups and condiments. On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS. Consumption by teenagers and other high consumers can be up to 80 percent above average levels.
tochigi:
well, they know who’s boss!
29 January 2009, 4:02 amBuddhalovesPaine:
Wow, this should make people in the US explosive and people in Europe nuclear. Will it even make it on to the back page of Newspapers?
29 January 2009, 4:05 amStan:
If that one gets you, try Atrazine on for size… Syngenta’s herbicide, banned in Europe (where it is made), it is still widely used in the US. It goes on the corn before the mercury is added to the syrup.Read more.
Movie recommendation, Flow.
Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson has a sketchy record of dragging her feet for industry, and of outsourcing cleanup efforts to big biz. Perhaps more important is the Energy tzar, Carole Browner, who will be Obama’s cat’s paw on three agencies — birdwatcher and liberal greenie, who has represented Coke and Merck. Ambiguous as they are, those are the office to which mail and phone campaigns can be directed about things like mercury and Atrazine. EPA, FDA, and the Office of the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.
I’m running now, but if anyone can find the links for these addresses and post, it will be much appreciated. Organic Consumers probably has them somewhere, but it’s open source stuff. CC copies of letters to you own Congresscritter just to let them know one of the kids is awake. Another idea is to include pictures of your favorite kids. And don’t forget the local paper’s letters-section.
Gotta go to work.
Peace.
29 January 2009, 6:09 amDeAnander:
Recommended viewing: King Corn, documentary about the corn branch of the Ag Mafia.
29 January 2009, 3:32 pmskol:
“Wow, this should make people in the US explosive and people in Europe nuclear. Will it even make it on to the back page of Newspapers?”
Unfortunately, they only detected it in miniscule amounts (study), or less than one microgram per gram of HFCS-containing foods. The “acceptable” standard is 1 microgram per gram, which the results fell short of.
So, at any rate, even if it did make “big news”, they’d just back it up with that “acceptable” statistic.
(Why do I find that to be such a downer? :-p )
10 February 2009, 11:33 pmStan:
Well, the word is out. Today I saw an ad by the corn growers on television trying to counter the bad rep that HFCS has from the mercury. Millions of dollars on that ad that suggested anyone who is “against” HFCS must be a know-nothing idiot. The word “mercury” never came up. This tells me that King Corn is hugely vulnerable on this issue; so we ought to keep up the chatter. I’m sending the link to my whole address book.
22 March 2009, 7:51 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
But it is not permanently vulnerable because the people who published the study pointed out that there are TWO ways to make HFCS one of which will not lead to mercury contamination. So it is important that the bad way be phased out for the good way immediately. These studies were very revealing though. If the HFCS was “slightly” contaminated when most HFCS manufactured was already made the good way how contaminated was it when most was made the bad way?
23 March 2009, 5:34 amI wonder if there are specific medical problems that can be traced to low levels of mercury consumption. If so then a person could see if there was an increase in these problems during the 80s and 90s.
DeAnander:
Another meme that needs deconstruction is the industrial-chemistry dogma that “the dose makes the poison”, i.e. that for every toxin there is a “safe” dosage level below which it is Harmless, and above which it is Harmful.
The first issue with this credo is that the dosage limits are (traditionally, until very recently and very few have actually been revised) based on — guess what — a healthy young-adult male of 180-220 lbs body weight. (Some of these figures are based on experiments done on Army recruits, which is a whole other topic of civil rights violations and the notion that an Army signup is the only legal contract via which you are allowed to sign away your civil liberties — but let’s not get too far off the main topic).
These “safe” dosages are not calibrated for children, the elderly, people whose health is already compromised (by disease or by the cocktail of industrial chemicals already in our body fat and blood, or by malnutrition, whether via deprivation of food or excess of lousy food). They are not calibrated for women, or particularly for pregnant women (there are phases of pregnancy during which the developing foetus is exquisitely vulnerable and sensitive to toxins and mutagens, other phases in which it is more robust).
Further, these dosages were established by the 19th century standard of visible/observable symptoms — if it doesn’t make you palpably ill, make you experience observable symptoms w/in a few hours of dosage, then it must be safe. This is arrant BS, as we now know — many toxins are irreparably cumulative (POPs for one), or have cascade effects that may take years to manifest (not every toxin is as spectacular as dimethyl mercury, but many have similar “time release” effects). Others are harmless (we think) in a single low dose, but with repeated low dosage over an extended period (years, lifetime) will have deleterious effects on a living organism. I seem to remember J Adams, in a book on risk and risk management, stating that of over 5000 industrial chemicals and compounds released into the general environment, only about 500 have been extensively tested for toxicity to mammals; and almost none have been tested *in combination* with even one other compound, let alone in the gadzillions of possible active or synergistic combinations offered by 5000-factorial chemical interactions (there isn’t enough lab space or research time on the planet to test such a staggering, astronomical number of combinations).
So… Industrial civ is basically a huge gamble — a blind-faith gamble — that the robustness of biotic systems will “somehow” manage to survive such an insult (in the medical sense of “trauma or damage”, but also I think a very apt term for the attitude of contempt, hostility, and domineering arrogance that industrial civ displays towards the biotic world in general). I think we see plenty of evidence in our time that the biotic fabric is *not* that robust, and that it is fraying badly under the combined impacts of hunger (as humans pre-empt more and more of the food chain), climate change, damage to the upper atmospheric envelope, and massive ubiquitous industrial toxicity.
The whole subject of toxicity is fraught with controversy, bad science (from the spinmeisters for the chemical industry), wishful thinking, and (occasionally) needless alarmism (as when spinmeisters for corporate ag start spreading FUD about organic veggies!). A gross generalisation that I think will serve us fairly well is that at this point in the culture we are far too phobic about biota (going way overboard in our antibacterial phobic reactions, fear of insects, fear of biotically-borne diseases and “food sanitisation”) and far too nonchalant about synthetic toxins and byproducts of industry, particularly the plastics and petrochemical industry but also the chloralkali sector and byproducts of combustion.
If I had to make a WAG (not being myself an epidemiologist or clinician) I would say that the human metabolism is probably fairly well armed against natural toxins (the low levels of toxicity found in many common food plant species), many of which can be “fixed” by cooking or otherwise processing (as indigenous cultures discovered millennia ago, or they would not have survived); but it has had no evolutionary time to develop resistance to the cocktail of industrial ullage in which we are now marinated from birth.
Industrial civilisation, medically speaking, is an enormous uncontrolled experiment (not only uncontrolled in the layperson’s sense, that no one seems to be in control, but in the technical scientific sense: there is no control group, no population that has been kept separate and safe from the widespread contamination of food, water, and air by extremely novel, recently-invented toxins). So we have no way to measure the effects of industrial contamination, no comparison with the state of health of persons not exposed to the toxicity; there is no one, from pole to pole, who’s not exposed. Apologists for industry point to “longer life spans” (in the affluent nations at least), kind of ignoring the piss-poor state of health in which most people reach their final years, kept functional only by high-tech medical interventions (and the med and pharma industries are themselves major resource consumers and polluters, causing heaven-knows-what kinds of literally iatrogenic disease downstream); critics point to the cancer epidemic (particularly childhood cancer), diabetes epidemic, apparent serious increases in troubles such as autism in children, allergies in children, etc. Apologists then counter by claiming that all these dysfunctions existed previously but were not properly diagnosed. And so it goes.
Industrial apologists always try to transfer the blame for disease onto the individual: if people develop cancer it is because of their “lifestyle” or their individual genetic make-up — and is therefore addressable by marketable, profitable individualistic interventions such as “cancer-fighting” sales pitches for corporate processed food, or “gene therapy” or “powerful anti-cancer drugs” from officially sanctioned sources. This rather begs the question of e.g. beluga whales riddled with cancer, washed up on northern beaches: have those whales been sitting on the couch watching TV and eating junk food? Denial of the connection between industrial toxicity and human health effects is a central meme of capitalism — admitting the connection would mean admitting a cascade of culpability and crime (or dumb-as-paint ignorance and incompetence) that would deeply tarnish the industrial heroic mythos (the Noble White Guy In Lab Coat With Test Tube In Hand, Saving The World shtick). And that would de-legitimise the present ruling class (the barons of extraction, manufacturing, and synthesis, with their chronic and deep-seated enmity to the biosphere).
The common-sense approach suggests that toxicity is bad, that ingesting toxins is not a good idea, that we should avoid them earnestly, and that if toxins *are* released into the food chain or water system, it should only be under the most pressing of urgent necessity — making a bad choice only because to refrain would be even worse. Many of the current crop of toxins are being released only because it is cheaper — more profitable — for some already filthy [literally] rich capitalist cronies than it would be to manage their industrial processes more responsibly; or because of some profitable but utterly unnecessary industrial activity undertaken only to keep the physical plant running or ensure the using-up of some waste product from elsewhere (HFCS was originally “invented” mostly to absorb the enormous overproduction of horrible industrial corn by US farmers suckered into assembly-line debt servicing by the agrochemical and equipment manufacturing sector). Dog-waggery is everywhere in industry, no matter how “efficient” it may be at destroying biomass and consuming energy. So much of the toxicity currently afflicting us is utterly inexcusable — neither necessary nor even evaluated by the standards of necessity.
Hmm, I seem to be ranting w/o much direction here. I guess I should say that mercury in HFCS is merely the tip of an iceberg that some very powerful people do not want on our radar screens at all. Industrialism takes living biotic systems and turns them into two things: Product and Toxicity. (The Product is often toxic in its own right, of course.)
I think it’s axiomatic that the most profitable way to make and distribute Product will always be contrabiotic and toxic. (DeAnander’s Law: “It’s always more profitable to do things wrong.”) I think that this axiom is near the heart of the problem of money; *profitable* is defined in a monetist system, and it is money (and usury and the associated manias of infinite growth and infinite accumulation) that creates the notion of profitability in huge excess of the biotic or solar rate of return. This is perhaps another facet of the critique of abstract money (the further refinement and super-abstraction and multiple indirection of money represented by casino capitalism is crashing around us even as we speak, so this may be a good moment for some public thinking about the implications of abstract money and usury — who knows?)
23 March 2009, 12:04 pmpeggy:
I read somewhere that they’re moving back to plain white sugar over high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/dining/21sugar.html?em
23 March 2009, 7:45 pmpeggy:
Countless children in India are dying of starvation. Maybe millions. Death by starvation is slow and painful in the extreme. Meanwhile, the Indian “middle class” as well as the government turns a blind eye.
24 March 2009, 4:42 amSomewhere in Feral Scholar, is there discussion of this matter? My query should be under another topic than this one about HFCS, but I am not sure where. Sorry for my ignorance on this.
BuddhalovesPaine:
More on food safety. What I learned yesterday after falling asleep in front of the TV and then waking up a few moments before a program ended may not be new info for many who visit here, but then again maybe for at least one reader it will be new. It seems that water sold in plastic bottles is more polluted than water sold in glass bottles. It seems that chemicals from the plastic leach in to the water. One chemical in particular is similar to a female hormone. I did not hear the narrator say the word estrogen though. Damn I have always bought soft drinks in plastic bottles. That is going to be a hard habit to break as glass is much harder to find. It would be nice to know how much risk one is taking when they buy plastic bottles. I suspect that at my age eating corn chips is much riskier but what about for people who are still young?
24 March 2009, 10:19 ampeggy:
What you’re supposed to do is just drink tap water.
25 March 2009, 4:44 am