Tag: food

Walmart on hook over claims of heavy metals in spices

A federal judge advanced claims that some products in Walmart’s Great Value line of spices may contain toxic heavy metals, and that the retail giant failed to warn customers of those metals and potential health risks.

Plaintiffs Susan Gagetta and Traice Gomez say in a class action filed this past June that Walmart failed to tell customers that certain herbs and spices in its Great Value line including basil, chili powder, ground cumin and organic paprika and ginger, may contain lead, arsenic and cadmium. Both plaintiffs are Walmart customers living in California. 

They cited a November 2021 report “Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead” from Consumer Reports, which analyzed 126 individual products from national and private-label brands, including Walmart’s Great Value, and determined a third of the tested products had high enough levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium combined, on average, “to pose a health concern for children and adults when regularly consumed in typical serving sizes.”

Heavy metals in foods can cause cancer and serious, possibly irreversible damage to brain development along with other serious health issues. Exposure to lead may cause anemia, weakness and kidney and brain damage, which affect almost every organ and system and accumulates in the body over time. Arsenic can cause bladder, lung, liver and skin cancer, as well as strokes and diabetes. 

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OLDEST COOKED FOOD EVER FOUND UPENDS THE “PALEO” THEORY OF ANCIENT HUMAN DIETS

WE HUMANS CAN’T stop playing with our food. Just think of all the different ways of serving potatoes — entire books have been written about potato recipes alone. The restaurant industry was born from our love of flavoring food in new and interesting ways.

My team’s analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found shows that jazzing up your dinner is a human habit dating back at least 70,000 years.

Imagine ancient people sharing a meal. You would be forgiven for picturing people tearing into raw ingredients or maybe roasting meat over a fire, as that is the stereotype. But our new study showed both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had complex diets involving several steps of preparation and took an effort to season and use plants with bitter and sharp flavors.

This degree of culinary complexity has never been documented before for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers.

Before our study, the earliest known plant food remains in southwest Asia were from a hunter-gatherer site in Jordan, roughly dating to 14,400 years ago, reported in 2018.

We examined food remains from two late Paleolithic sites, which cover a span of nearly 60,000 years, to look at the diets of early hunter-gatherers. Our evidence is based on fragments of prepared plant foods (think burnt pieces of bread, patties, and porridge lumps) found in two caves. To the naked eye or under a low-power microscope, they look like carbonized crumbs or chunks with fragments of fused seeds. But a powerful scanning electron microscope allowed us to see details of plant cells.

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Black Market in Broad Daylight

Operating in the shadows is easy in the United States secondary food market, as few question what happens to food that exceeds its expiration date in leading supermarket chains across the nation. Well, truth be told, expired food gets reprocessed, repackaged, relabeled, and resold to institutions, discount retailers and restaurants.

With scant regulations in place for repurposed food, and institutional purchasing specifications silent, food liquidators underbid their competitors and win contracts nearly every time. In the secondary food market, you get what you pay for, and never has the saying “garbage in, garbage out” been more appropriate.

No matter how much hot sauce or gravy is added as camouflage, spoiled food products are unfit for human consumption and cause foodborne illness. Here, what you don’t know can kill you.

In its most recent public report posted on its website, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that, each year, roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. However, “recent” is a misnomer here as the CDC’s report is shamelessly outdated by more than ten years. It was issued in January 2011.

Considering that food poisoning is an embarrassing indicator that reveals in its gory horror the systemic corruption of what turns out to be an unregulated food market, it is highly probable that there was undercounting back in 2011—especially in institutional settings. And it is more than likely that things are even worse in 2022.

When oversight agency reports are no longer published, it is clearly because industry statistics and agency performance metrics do not look good. Cover-ups at the federal level are routinely done by appointing incompetent or industry-compromised agency heads, and by defunding key reporting departments, and reducing analytic staff positions and field inspectors.

Despite oversight agency neglect, both schools and prisons have been independently studied for foodborne illness outbreaks. While these reports/articles are also outdated, their shallow analysis remains current. The accepted prevailing narrative blames foodborne illness outbreaks on food handlers that failed to follow U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) protocols for cleanliness and neglected to maintain the proper temperatures for food storage and service.

While not to detract from standards set by the USDA, there are no reports that expose the lethal dangers of the secondary food market. Moreover, unlike the primary food market, these repackaging facilities are not inspected, despite their erroneous claims of USDA or FDA certifications.

A media spokesperson for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) explained that “the FDA doesn’t oversee meat and poultry, only dairy products.” And that “expiration dates are not regulated, only food safety.”

This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, food that is spoiled, contaminated, or toxic but within its expiration date is unquestionably unfit for human consumption. On the other hand, expiration dates are necessary as packaging, coloring and processing conceal food quality from consumers, as well as purchasing agents and food handlers.

When a food product’s expiration date is concealed by repackaging and relabeling, all food safety bets are off. The reselling of expired food is a black market in broad daylight.

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FDA Announces LAB GROWN MEAT That Was Served at COP27 Climate Conference Is ‘SAFE TO EAT’: ‘The World Is Experiencing A Food Revolution’

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved lab-grown meat, a product grown from animal cells, for human consumption for the first time.

The FDA announced Wednesday that laboratory-grown chicken developed by Upside Food, is “safe to eat,” clearing the way for the California-based company that creates cell-cultured chickens to begin selling its products.

To manufacture its meat, Upside Foods harvests cells from live animals, chicken tissue, and uses the cells to grow meat in stainless-steel tanks known as bioreactors.

The agency issued a statement Wednesday announcing it evaluated Upside Food’s production and cultured cell material and has “no further questions” about the safety of its cultivated chicken filet.

“The world is experiencing a food revolution,” stated FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf. “Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock poultry, and seafood in the production of food with these products expected to be ready for the US market in the near future.”

“The FDA’s goal is to support innovation in food technologies while always maintaining as our first priority the safety of the foods available to US consumers,” he added.

Upside Foods founder and CEO Uma Valeti heralded the FDA’s approval.

“I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time. UPSIDE has received our “No Question Letter” from the FDA. They’ve accepted our conclusion that cultivated chicken is safe to eat, meaning UPSIDE is one step closer to being on tables,” Valeti tweeted.

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Raising the steaks: British scientists grow fillet steak in a LABORATORY that looks and smells just like real meat – and it could be coming soon to a plate near you

British scientists have successfully grown fillet steak in a laboratory – and it could be available to buy as early as next year.

3D Bio-Tissues (3DBT), a spinoff from Newcastle University, produced three small prototype fillets, each weighing just 5g each.

According to the team, when pan fried, the fillets seared easily and showed heavy caramelisation, with aromas ‘identical to those of barbecued meat’.

Che Connon, Chief Executive of 3DBT, said: ‘We are extremely pleased with the results of our first prototype which has exceeded our expectations in terms of integrity, aroma, texture and more.

‘We believe our prototypes to be some of the first fillets of cultivated meat in the world, representing a ground-breaking development for the industry.’

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Honeybee Lifespan Could Be Half What It Was 50 Years Ago – New Study

A new paper shows how the lifespan of the adult honeybee appears to have shrunk by nearly 50% in the past 50 years. The European Red List for Bees suggests nearly one in ten species of wild bees are facing extinction. Imagine how we would react if human lifespans halved. The equivalent would be if the average woman in the UK was living to 41 instead of 82 years old.

Our future is intertwined with bees. Without bees and other pollinators, we cannot grow the majority of crops we depend on for food.

This research could help explain the high levels of bee colony deaths around the world over the past few decades. Bee deaths were particularly severe in the USA in the winter of 2006-7, when some commercial beekeepers lost 90% of their colonies.

Unexplained high rates of bee colony deaths have also been reported in Canada, Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Finland and Poland. In the cold winter of 2012-13, 29% of honeybee colonies in the UK died.

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Here is the Updated List of US-Based Food Manufacturing Plants Destroyed Under Biden Regime — You Can Now Participate and Add More Incidents on the Interactive Map

Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ is not working as planned, or is it?

Gas prices are at record highs, the economy is in recession, parents are having difficulty finding a baby formula, and the cost of everything is way up.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), there are currently no nationwide food shortages in the country.

“There are currently no nationwide shortages of food, although in some cases the inventory of certain foods at your grocery store might be temporarily low before stores can restock,” the agency said on their website. “Food production and manufacturing are widely dispersed throughout the U.S. and there are currently no wide-spread disruptions reported in the supply chain.”

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It Begins: TMZ Promotes Cricket Protein Powder

The globalists and the left-wing media will not stop convincing people to eat bugs.

“If you’re sick of that post-protein-shake bloat or tired of heavy powders and supplements that leave you feeling overly full and sluggish, try this out instead!” This is the very first line that you come across on TMZ’s website in their advertisement for a protein powder alternative made from crickets.

TMZ is now advertising protein supplements produced by Human Improvement that are made with cricket powders.

Human Improvement tried a variety of protein combinations before settling on one cricket powder. They tried on a blend of organic pumpkin protein, pea protein, and brown rice protein.

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Not Even the FDA Trusts the FDA To Regulate Food Safety

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the agency has sought an external review of its approach to food safety. The surprising announcement, issued by FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, says the review will look primarily at work carried out by the FDA’s Office of Food Response and Policy (OFPR) and Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN).

In his announcement, Califf stresses that America’s food supply is safe. But he also notes issues with the agency’s food-safety inspection regime and says “the increasing diversity and complexity of the nation’s food systems and supply chain” have raised fundamental “questions about the structure, function, funding[,] and leadership” of the FDA.

As Politico, The New York Times, and others have reported, the external FDA review comes as the agency is hammered for its role in an ongoing shortage of baby formula. But suggestions that this review is all (or even largely) about baby food are likely off base. Consider that Califf’s announcement didn’t mention baby formula. What’s more, the it’s-the-baby-formula crowd suffers from recency bias. In fact, there’s no shortage of non-formula reasons why the FDA’s food-safety oversight is in critics’ crosshairs.

Last year, for example, the FDA celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which the agency and many of the law’s supporters have touted as the most extensive, impactful, and important overhaul of the FDA’s food-safety authority in more than 75 years. It’s not. As I noted in a column marking FSMA’s first (and hopefully last) decade, CDC estimates of the number of annual cases of foodborne illness in America have remained unchanged in the wake of FSMA’s passage and implementation.

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The United Nations Scrubbed This Article Heralding ‘The Benefits Of World Hunger’ From Its Website After It Went Viral

Mounting evidence continues to emerge proving the food shortages and supply chain disruptions are being manufactured by the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization in an effort to institute a New World Order, global government and destroy the United States.

A 2009 op-ed published by the United Nations, which is now removed from its website, heralds hunger as “the foundation of wealth” and a means to bolster the world economy.

Hunger must be sustained to exploit manual labor, contends George Kent, a professor at the University of Hawaii’s political science department. who authored the November 2021 UN the document.

“We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people,” Kent notes. “Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is need for manual labour.”

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