Over the past few months, Chinese products (and Chinese food imports in particular) have taken a beating in the world press.
So how bad is it?
The simple truth is that no country in the world can guarantee their products to be 100% safe. Yes, but isn’t food from China more dangerous than from anywhere else?
Not necessarily.
Is Food Safe From China?
The Chinese press has been busy promoting the results of a July report from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which stated that 99.42% of the imported food from China in 2006 met safety standards. Surprisingly, this turned out to be better than either Europe (99.38%) or the United States (which came in at the bottom of the pack at 98.69%).
Look, this really has little to do with China (although more accountability is certainly a good thing). The bottom line is that there’s always some risk associated with food. The problem is everywhere, not just China.
- Kroger recalls potato salad
- E. coli alert is issued for ground beef
- Spinach recalled over salmonella
- Valio orders recall of thousands of cartons of cooking cream
Yes, we want to keep food as clean and as healthy as possible, but let’s not overreact here. Banning foods from China may make people feel good in a nationalistic way, or score political points for someone seeking election, but as we’ve just seen, domestically grown foods are at least as dangerous — if not more so. In the end, the net result of food bans probably has more to do with politics and money than health. And as for many safety options, they are potentially more counterproductive than healthy.
- Spraying imported herbs and produce with organophosphate nerve gas pesticides carries a number of health risks.
- Heating food until it’s dead destroys much of its value — assuming that it’s labeled correctly.
- Irradiating it until teeming with radiolytic byproducts makes little sense.
Given a choice, I’d rather have a little higher risk (a fraction of a percent it turns out), but maintain my access to organic produce, raw organic dairy, unpasteurized juice and nuts, and non-irradiated meat and produce.
Hey, and just for a little perspective: before you worry about food from China, you might want to clean up your cell phone. It’s a far more likely threat than bad food from the Middle Kingdom.
True vitamin C with the mineral ascorbate attachments optimizes protien synthesis with respect to neurologcal metabolic processes vs absorbic acid vitamin C. In other words, if from birth you put human beings on asorbic acid instead of on true vitamin C (because the medical profession is taught and belives there is no atomic difference), then you are going to have protien quality synthesis problems at the atomic level. This leads to a variety of disease processes from cellular membrane integrity ( the abilty to resist virus, bacteria, microplasms and inflamatory auto immune responses) just like Linus Pauling said 70 years ago, True or False?
Dr. Droskey: false. Ascorbic acid is the “true” vitamin C, the same kind found in food and that most mammals produce in their bodies. The minerals dissociate from the ascorbate molecule anyway in the gut, so other than the fact that mineral ascorbates are a source of minerals and are gentler on the gut, there is little difference.
Nestle Juicy Juice 100% juice straight from China.
We thought we were doing the right thing for our toddler until one day we noticed on the back in tiny lettering the juice comes from China. I can only imagine the pesticides and god knows what else that’s in there. Nestle just got busted on the milk scare from China. Way to chase profits you clowns.
Don’t be too quick to jump on China. When you consider the amount of supplements, foods, and ingredients that come from there, the ratio of contaminated products might not be that dfferent than those found in products manufactured in the United States. In fact, the case could be made that US manufacturers just do a better job of hiding it. http://www.jonbarron.org/blog_published/2008/02/carbon_monoxide_keeps_meat_loo.html
or
http://www.jonbarron.org/blog_published/2008/07/contaminated_beef_and_the_fda.html
or (very disturbing)
http://www.jonbarron.org/blog_published/2008/02/eating_very_mad_cows.html
So again, I’m not sure I’d be that hard on China.
can you tell me the difference between ascorbic acid and sodium ascorbate, iv been told to take 25 grams of S.A. then keep it at 10 grams per day, but i cant take 25 grams of A.A. why is that?