Off the Cuff
The "irradiated products industry"?
Written by James Gormley, editorial
director VITAMIN RETAILER MAGAZINE
What if I said there is a technology that zaps food with the
equivalent (for each zap) of well over 40 to 233 million chest X-rays
and thousands of times more than one lethal dose in humans?
What if I told you that this technology creates
chemicals that do not occur naturally in any food, such as
2-alkylcyclobutanones, or 2-ACBs (which have been linked to cancer and
genetic damage in human cells) and benzene (known to cause cancer and
birth defects)?
What if I also then informed you that the US government
is now poised to approve a food additive petition that was filed by Steris
Corp. in 2003 that would use theis same technology-powerful,
ionizing nuclear irradiation up to 30 kGY (KiloGray)-for the
sterilization of dietary supplements and ingredients?
Then I would be telling you the truth as this technology
and the intended use described above are very real.
Toxicologist Dr. Maria Van Gemert chaired a Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) committee that investigated 441 studies of
irradiated foods in the 1980s. In 1993, Dr. Van Gemert issued a
statement that, "Those studies were inadequate to evaluate the
safety of irradiated foods."
These same inadequate studies were used to excuse the FDA's
December 2, 1997, decision approving the irradiation of red meat and
all subsequent approvals.
So what is this REALLY about?
It's about the US government, through the Department of
Energy's (DOE's) Byproducts Utilization Program, working for years to
unload part of its stockpile of highly radioactive cesium-137, a
fission byproduct of the production of enriched plutonium and a major
component of the fallout from nuclear explosions.
In addition to human health dangers and risks to the
environment, this technology also profoundly alters the biochemical and
nutritional profile of foods and food supplements.
As Washington, DC-based Public Citizen wrote in 2004,
"Radiation cannot kill bacteria while dancing around food
molecules and leaving them unaltered." Irradiation "also
destroys vitamins-up to 80 percent of vitamin A in eggs and 48 percent
of beta carotene in orange juice; protein, essential fatty acids and
other nutrients are (also) disrupted."
In fact, the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA)
recently learned of Steris Corp's dietary supplement irradiation
petition (Docket No. 03F-1082) through a mention of the petition in the
preamble to the Food & Drug Administration's (FDA)
final rule on current good manufacturing practices for dietary
supplements.
AHPA and grassroots advocacy group Citizens for Health (www.citizens.org)
are asking the FDA
to deny Steris Corp's petition on several grounds, including:
*current dietary supplement GMPs are sufficient to ensure safety
from microbial contamination;
*the use of ionizing irradiation on dietary ingredients will mask
the measurement of pathogens and yeast and will yield toxic by-products
(endotoxins and exotoxins);
*the high levels of irradiation proposed in the petition will put
consumers at risk to take in, on a daily basis, high levels of
irradiated material; and that
*consumers of dietary supplements believe that supplements are
natural products and do not accept irradiation of supplements as a
natural process.
This last point is really at the heart of what should be
our objection to irradiating supplements: consumers will not accept it
and don't want it!
Visit the web sites of AHPA and Citizens for Health and
click on the action links in order to put the kibosh on the dietary
supplement irradiation petition-once and for all.
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