Petition against Tyson

I get emails from change.org, a place where people can start petitions for pretty much anything. Most of them I end up signing. I got one this morning that is worth sharing. It's against Tyson chicken.

The petition was started by a poultry inspector at one the their plants. She has worked there for 16 years, but has come down with many health problems since they started washing down all the chicken with a chemical called peracetic acid.

On its wikipedia page under Safety, it says "Exposure to peracetic acid can cause irritation to the skin, eyes and respiratory system and higher or long-term exposure can cause permanent lung damage. In addition, there have been cases of occupational asthma caused by peracetic acid."

Here is a little taken from the petition:

I want Tyson to be an industry leader and stop using these chemicals, especially peracetic acid, which is poured all over these carcasses.

Currently, I'm suffering from health problems, including asthma attacks, sinus problems, and even organ damage. My failing health has seriously impacted my lifestyle and may have ended my 16-year career as an inspector. As highlighted in a recent Washington Post article, chemical problems seem to be cropping up in plants all over the country.

As of the moment I am writing this, the USDA has not done any formal evaluation of how these chemicals affect workers' health. Additionally, there have been no studies of how these dangerous chemicals, directly applied to the carcasses in processing, affect humans' health other than directly from the very companies that profit from their sale.

My doctors told me they have witnessed an increasing amount of patients coming from the Tyson plant with similar symptoms, including respiratory infections, eye irritation, and the development of serious allergies.

You can check out the petition, and for as long as it's active, I encourage you to sign it.

Partially Hydrogenated Oils

When you're looking through an ingredient list on food packaging, you may shrug off any vegetable oils as being fine, like soybean oil. But when it has the words "partially hydrogenated" in front of it, you need to put it back on the shelf.

What is a hydrogenated oil?

Any oil can be hydrogenated, either partially or fully. A majority of the time in processed foods, they use soybean oil (which most likely is genetically engineered).

The process of hydrogenation is to take these oils in their natural state and raise them to very high temperatures and then force hydrogen gas into them at high pressure.

This changes the consistency from liquid to solid or semi-solid.

Why hydrogenate?

Companies prefer this type of oil for a few reasons.

First, it's cheap (and that always wins). It also prolongs the shelf life of the product, enhances the flavor, and creates a desirable texture in baked goods.

Why should you avoid it?

One of the main reasons to avoid this type of oil is that once it goes through this process, it now contains trans fats.

We have all heard that trans fats are bad, but do we specifically know why?

According to the article Soybean Oil: One of the Most Harmful Ingredients in Processed Foods, these unnatural, man-made trans fats are linked to:

• Cancer
• Diabetes
• Decreased Immune Function
• Reproductive Problems
• Chronic health problems such as obesity, asthma, auto-immune disease, and bone degeneration
• Heart disease
• Increasing "bad" cholesterol, while lowering "good" cholesterol

A list like that makes me want to stay far away from it. This type of oil is widely used in processed foods, which makes getting large doses quite easy for the typical American.

Watch out for the loop-hole.

Since 2006, the FDA has required trans fats to be listed on the label. But they also allowed any product with up to a half a gram to be rounded down to zero trans fats.

So what some companies have done is to get their serving size down small enough that it is half a gram or less.

If you see a serving size of 5 chips, or 1 cookie, then you know they're probably hiding something.

***

With hydrogenated oils having so many benefits to the manufactures, they have been used in thousands of food products. Don't let them bully you into eating them. Pick products without these oils...or better yet, grab a carrot :)

For more reading:

The health dangers of trans fats have been known for decades, yet food companies still poison customers with hydrogenated oils

What in the world are we eating?

It's an obvious statement to say that in general, Americans have a diet consisting mostly of highly processed foods. We hear all the time about things that are bad for us: high fructose corn syrup, genetically modified or engineered ingredients, trans fats, preservatives, pesticides. We hear about so many things causing cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, etc.

We hear all this, but we're still eating tons of processed foods without much thought behind it. Some people may truly not care what they put in their bodies, while others pay a great deal of attention to it and only eat "real" food.

A majority will fall in the middle somewhere: caring about their health, but at the same time probably fooled by the food industry, causing them to make poor food choices.

Advertising and food labels can be terribly misleading, even downright lying. Most of the options laid out in front of us in the supermarkets are "foods" boxed up with a list of 25 ingredients, leading people to believe that eating this way is our only option. We also have a false sense of security believing that the FDA is looking out for our health (I don't believe they are) and that if it passes the test and is on the shelf, then it can't possibly harm us.

I think that the general public is vastly uninformed about what they are eating. I have only begun in the past few years to pay very close attention to what I eat, and I'm upset that it took me this long to care.

The message has seemed to get out that we need to always check the ingredient list before buying something. The problem is, even when you glance over the list, you're probably only going to know what a handful of the ingredients actually are. So you recognize a few things, ignore the unpronounceables and put it in your cart anyway.

Not many of us take the time to learn what these ingredients are: what they are made from, how they are made, and what health affects they can have.

What I'm going to do (maybe weekly?) is take a common ingredient that I - and probably most people - don't know a thing about and elaborate on it. I want to learn right along with you. And even if you don't remember all the details of what I write, maybe the next time you see it listed, you'll know that it's generally a bad thing and needs to be avoided.

First up will be Partially Hydrogenated Oils...

*note: the ultimate goal should be to stop buying processed foods altogether. But I realize cutting them out 100% is a hard thing to do. I haven't even gotten there yet, so let's at least be educated on what's out there.