Irradiated produce

FDA approves irradiated produce
William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

Dear Friend,

Does your salad glow in the dark? You might want to hit the lights and check, because for the first time ever, the FDA is allowing fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce to be zapped with radiation in order to kill bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella.

Puts a whole new spin on "nuking" your food, doesn't it? The goal, as with most wrongheaded ideas, is to "protect" consumers. And as usual, the FDA has chosen incorrectly. Are you surprised?

After years of being on the fence about food radiation, I re-examined my stance back in 2003 and did some in-depth research on the issue. What I saw wasn't pretty. The fact is, irradiation turns even the most nutritious foods into junk foods. While it's true that the process kills the fungi, parasites, and bacteria that can cause spoilage and disease, this it also obliterates the good stuff in food, too. These discoveries put me squarely in the anti- irradiation camp. And I've been there ever since.

Luckily, I'm not alone. Many food safety advocates have also bashed the FDA's decision to allow produce irradiation, pointing out – as I did years ago – that it decreases the taste and nutritional value.

Of course, the FDA has taken the polar opposite side of the argument.


Dr. Laura Tarantino, director of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety, said irradiation made no significant nutritional or safety changes to spinach or lettuce.

The FDA's announcement of this decision comes hard on the heels of this summer's nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Saint Paul, which sickened hundreds. Of course, the source of this most recent outbreak was traced to a farm in Mexico… where they won't be irradiating the produce.

So I guess the FDA wants to ensure that only domestic produce is rendered nutritionally empty, tasteless, and possibly toxic. Nice.

What's more, the studies conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) have found that many of the outbreaks and sickness associated with tainted produce are the result of viruses which CAN'T BE KILLED by the irradiation process. So irradiation is a double whammy – useless AND dangerous!

Unfortunately, the awful process of irradiating food is nothing new. For years, the FDA has allowed the irradiation of beef, poultry, eggs, spices, and even oysters. But the market is small because these foods need to carry labels that let consumers know they've been exposed to high doses of radiation.

As a result, people tend to steer clear. Because even though the public at large may not know the details of just how bad irradiation is for food – they know it doesn't sound natural. Consumers are never as stupid as the high-and-mighty FDA would like to believe they are.

But the FDA, in its infinite stupidity, is said to be considering downgrading or removing the labeling requirement on irradiated food.

Now you know I always err on the side of natural first. So what I wonder is why the FDA would opt to let food processors zap food with a shocking amount of radiation when there are natural solutions to the problem of food contaminates? According to Smith DeWaal of CSPI, the FDA "is choosing to have a high-tech, expensive solution to a problem … that really starts on the farm."

It's clear to me that the FDA has allowed Big Agriculture to install an expedient solution. The alternative would be for this sluggish and notoriously under-staffed bureaucracy to put its agents in the field and do the hard work of controlling food contamination the right way – at the source.

Instead, the FDA took the easy route – as it often does – and our food will be less nutritious for it.

Always glowing after a good FDA rant,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

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Food co-op opposes irradiated produce
WNYT, NY - Aug 26, 2008
Most meat is already irradiated. Now vegetables are being added to the mix. The concern is that the end doesn't justify the means. ...
FDA Allows Irradiation of Some Produce New York Times
FDA Approves Irradiation of Spinach and Lettuce KCBA
FDA: Irradiating spinach, lettuce OK to kill germs

Food news from around Puget Sound
Seattle Times, United States - Aug 27, 2008
Irradiated produce is required to bear the statement "treated with radiation" or "treated by irradiation." Irradiation is voluntary, the FDA says..




San Francisco ChronicleX-Ray With Your Salad?
San Francisco Chronicle, USA - Sep 12, 2008
It was fascinating to learn from janglin' Jim that there are only two facilities where produce can be irradiated, meaning that either irradiation would not .

Germ-free greens: Foodborne illness outbreaks put irradiated ...
Monitor, TX - Sep 3, 2008
The government already allows irradiation of beef, poultry, eggs and spices, but has never permitted produce to undergo irradiation at levels high enough to


Natural News.com
Hold the Spinach, Hold the Lettuce - the FDA Wants to Nuke Our Veggies
Natural News.com, AZ - Sep 4, 2008
Rather than using something like a skull and crossbones, food that has been irradiated is supposed to be marked with the radura symbol, which looks like a ...

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The various disinfectants and devices being used kill anthrax spores in different ways.

The irradiation devices used on the mail accelerate and focus streams of electrons to kill from the inside out, disrupting the DNA inside spores and bacteria.

Irradiation is already a big, established business. Manufacturers use irradiation to sterilize products on the assembly line. Food companies are expanding the variety of foods irradiated before they hit store shelves. Irradiated ground beef, approved by the Food and Drug Administration early last year, is being sold in more than 25 states. In Hawaii, papaya, star fruit and other tropical delicacies are irradiated to kill any hidden fruit flies or other potential agricultural scourges before they are shipped.

The effectiveness of the technique depends on the power of the beam and the density of the target.

Officials at Titan Corp., a San Diego company that, with a subsidiary, SureBeam, won the first Postal Service mail sterilizing contracts, said the cleansing of batches of mail already under way at a plant in Lima, Ohio, was very similar to established disinfection methods for medical waste.

Cartons containing sealed bags of the suspect or tainted material roll on a conveyer belt into a large electron-beam machine.

Chlorine dioxide gas, the method chosen for the Senate offices, kills the bacteria in a completely different way, working from the outside in.

The gas causes an oxidizing reaction that eats holes in a spore's outer shell, disrupting its metabolism and preventing it from transforming into a rod-shaped bacterium that can then begin to reproduce.

Some scientists question whether some spores in the middle of a dense clump might survive such an attack. But the technique has big advantages over liquids or foams, particularly in a large, complex structure, because the gas can be easily disseminated through a ventilation system and then permeate every nook and crevice.

The other new disinfectant getting its first big field test is a disinfecting foam that was developed at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to destroy biological and chemical weapons.

The foam, which causes an oxidizing reaction similar to that from chlorine dioxide, has been used to clean several Congressional offices and at ABC News, where the child of a producer contracted an anthrax skin infection.

The Postal Service chose a more tried and true method in its cavernous, carpetless sorting centers -- a 10 percent solution of bleach.

Even with the various limitations and questions, officials say, the anthrax cleanups have to proceed.

The Postal Service has been scurrying to act in the face of uncertainty, driven by the deaths of employees in late October and by fears that have driven some mail recipients to try to sterilize their mail with a microwave oven or steam iron -- both processes that experts say are useless.

Within a week of the deaths of two postal workers from anthrax lung infections, the Postal Service was negotiating with companies to sterilize accumulated piles of mail sent in September or October that had been deemed suspicious.

Companies were also hastily writing proposals for electron-beam devices that could be installed in sorting complexes to sterilize all of the mail as a matter of routine.

Last week, John E. Potter, the postmaster general, told Congress that it could cost $2.5 billion to install electron-beam sterilization machines capable of handling the entire national flow of mail. Whether the country decides that level of security is necessary remains uncertain.

But postal officials have already earmarked more than $200 million for cleaning up the existing contamination, primarily in large mail-sorting buildings in New Jersey and Washington, and killing bacteria in 45 truckloads of ''suspect mail'' from the Washington post office.

In the meantime, with half of the Senate locked out of offices because of anthrax traces and a host of other government mail rooms showing signs of spores, federal environmental officials are poised to start cleaning tainted government buildings.

The E.P.A. is also in charge of testing and cleanup in the American Media offices in Florida, where the first anthrax cases surfaced just over a month ago.

The largest federal structure with traces of anthrax is the Hart Senate Office Building, a nine-story, million-square-foot structure housing the offices of 50 senators, including the one where an aide to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, opened an envelope on Oct. 15, releasing a puff of anthrax spores.

Since then, the only people venturing inside the tainted portions of the building have been crews dressed in airtight suits who were there to test its suitability for a giant experiment -- filling the entire building with chlorine dioxide, which in theory will perforatethe protein shell of anthrax spores.

The process, incidentally, is likely to eliminate any stray roach or mouse cached in the buildings, E.P.A. officials said. But it is rife with uncertainty, and the test in the trailer last week was one effort to reduce the unknowns.

At a briefing by E.P.A. scientists and other experts a week ago, two dozen senators asked a flurry of questions, several people who attended said.

One Senate staff member, echoing accounts of others who were there, recalled some of the concerns voiced by senators: ''How do we know we're not going to have to redo this thing? If someone gets sick there's going to be hell to pay. Are you sure, are you positive?''

No one was quick to respond.
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: November 6, 2001
Evicting an Unwelcome Tenant: Anthrax