Examined Lives

Detox Your Kitchen: The problems with preservatives

Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) are preservatives added to keep oils in foods, cosmetics and drugs fresh. Some animal studies have shown an association between these chemicals and cancer, and they have been linked to chronic skin conditions like hives.

Nitrates and nitrites, which appear on labels as sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, are used in cured meats like hot dogs, bacon and sausage. These chemicals can bond with others called amines, forming yet another substance, nitrosamine, that is a carcinogen, at least in animal studies. Is the amount humans take in enough to make us sick?  Hard to tell yet.

Sulfites, on labels as sulfur dioxide, sodium or potassium sulfite, bisulfite, or metabisulfite are used in wine, dried fruits, frozen potatoes, maraschino cherries and fresh shrimp. They can cause mild to life-threatening symptoms in a small percentage of asthmatic people, such as chest tightness, hives, stomach cramps and diarrhea.

Trans-fatty acids (trans fats): Most of the trans fats we consume have been chemically created. Hydrogen is added to vegetable oil atoms to give the substance a firmer texture for baking and provide a cheaper alternative than lard or butter that stays fresher far, far longer. Pies, cookies, chips, margarine - for a while, trans were hard to avoid.

The problem with trans fats is they have been found to significantly increase bad cholesterol levels (LDL) and decrease the beneficial ones (HDL) in human test subjects. Large studies over years show that they significantly increase risk of fatal heart disease. They are generally considered to be as bad for you as saturated fats, if not worse.

The FDA now mandates that food with more than 0.5 grams of trans fats must say so on the label. How much can you safely eat in a day? Hard to say; the United States Department of Agriculture says that fat should make up no more than about 35 percent of a day’s calories, and that trans fats should be limited. Experts on the dietary guidelines committee unanimously recommended that trans fats should be limited to 1 percent of total daily calories, though no official documents include this recommendation (What did they do, gag these folks and stuff 'em in the closet?).

Meanwhile, seeking our good side, manufacturers are finding new formulations for crappy snack foods, with oils such as canola, safflower, and olive, or genetically modified specialty oils. Just look for labels that boast no trans fats, or list no partially hydrogenated oils. (There may still be less than 0.5 grams in them, though.)

Short-term fixes: When assessing your risk, think about what and how much you eat. If your family has a few mass quantity items that commonly use worrisome additives, you may want to find organic substitutes. USDA-certified organic meat, milk and cheeses are produced without using hormones, growth antibiotics, pesticides or preservatives. Look for the round green USDA organic label.

If you suspect you or your child has a problem from an additive – hives, irritability, stomach upset - talk to your doctor about symptoms. She may have suggestions on pinpointing a cause using restricted diets or tests. Some food allergies can cause minor but irritating symptoms that persist for years until you undertake a fact-finding mission.

Longer term, when it comes to food, the simpler the better. Basing your family’s diet on simple staples and ingredients obviously reduces additives, though this way of eating increases cooking and shopping time and expense. It may be worth taking stock of how you eat, though, and not just to cut down on chemicals and trans fats. The fiber in minimally processed produce, whole grains and beans can lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes and colon disorders.

You know you need to go to the beach when ...

• You parse everything everyone says (and get in trouble doing it) ...

• You leave frozen meats you've paid good money for at the CSA out on the counter because you completely forgot to put it them in the freezer (crossed fingers they're still good) ...

• The kids start bickering the moment they wake up.

• You read the same paragraph over and over and yet can't quite get a handle on what it's saying ...

• Not even two scoops of chocolate ice cream (okay, soy ice cream) rids you of the grit and grime of a hot and muggy day.

• You ask yourself, "Why bother to shower?"

• You care way too much about Madonna and Guy Ritchie's marriage (or insert current celebrity headline here).

• You're writing listicles running down reasons why it's time to feel sand between your toes.

In other words, I'm off to the beach ... have a good week! BurbMom's got your back.

—CityMom

Behind bottled water

Found out today about a recently released book from Gawker.com (the snarky, deliciously funny media Web site) that may be worth paging through: Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed the book and describes it as a "timely, densely reported but also very readable and distressing examination of the way we drink."

Despite the recent supposed backlash against bottled water, Americans continue to guzzle outlandish amounts of it. But beyond the obvious environmental concerns—all those bottles have to end up somewhere, don't they?—are philosophical and ethical questions worth asking. Here, an excerpt from the book featured on the author's Bottlemania Web site (emphasized parts are ours):

You can’t walk a block in New York City without seeing a bottle in someone’s hand, their baby stroller, or bike cage, spilling from the corner litter baskets or crushed flat and gray, ratlike, in the gutters. Nationwide, we discard thirty to forty billion of these containers a year. The bottles, and the trucks that deliver them, are haunting me. Poland Spring is the bestselling springwater in the nation, even in a city with some of the best tap water in the world. Everyone is drinking the stuff, and other waters like it. In the West, it’s Arrowhead and Calistoga; in the South Central region, Ozarka; in the Midwest, Ice Mountain; in the mid- Atlantic, Deer Park; and in the Southeast, Zephyrhills—all owned by Nestlé, a company with estimated profits of $7.46 billion in 2006. Pepsi- Cola and Coke are bottling water too, and making billions.

Why this turn against the tap? And how had we gotten to the point where activists are sneaking bombs into pump houses— infrastructure devoted not to oil, but water? It isn’t just Michigan: citizens in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, California, New Hampshire, Texas, Florida, and, yes, even Maine, are in arms against groundwater pumping for bottling. Legal scholars are loudly debating water rights; the United Church of Canada has called for a North American boycott of the stuff, so has a group called Food and Water Watch. The Franciscan Federation declared to the Environmental Protection Agency that access to safe and clean water is “a free gift from God,” and the National Coalition of American Nuns adopted a resolution, in the fall of 2006, that asked members to avoid drinking bottled water unless absolutely necessary. Their issue? Privatization of something so essential to life is immoral. An antiglobalization organization was traveling the country offering blind taste tests of bottled water versus tap. Their point—tap is pretty good—never fails to make the news.

Still, every week a new bottled water—offering the stuff neat or with “beneficial” additives (vitamins, herbs, laxatives, nicotine, caffeine, oxygen, appetite suppressants, aspirin, skin enhancers, or healing mantras)—hits the market. U.S. sales of bottled water leaped 170 percent between 1997 and 2006, from $4 billion to $10.8 billion. Globally, bottled water is a $60- billion- a-year business. In 1987, U.S. per capita consumption of the stuff was 5.7 gallons; by 1997 it was 12.1 gallons; and in 2006, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, it was 27.6. Sales of bottled water have already surpassed sales of beer and milk in the United States and by 2011 are, by some analysts, expected to surpass soda, of which Americans drink more than fifty gallons per person a year.

For sure I'm getting a copy.

—CityMom

Why my guy's a keeper

We're coming up on our sixteenth wedding anniversary in a few days, so I gifted my partner with a pair of his favorite loafers, of the comfy Geox brand. I was nervous presenting. First, he tends to be ridiculously stingy about purchasing new clothes — mind you, his old loafers were literally in shreds; in the past he's worn the soles off dress shoes and the crotch through his best suit. Second, he'd had a punishing day at work and we had a bit of hand wringing over the future of his job and the economy.

But he accepted the gift gracefully, and we went outside to tipple and watch the kids weave around on their bikes, which he'd just taught them to ride without training wheels.

Later, as the kids and I played Pass the Pig, he had what my dad would call a shit eatin' grin stuck on his face for the better part of an hour.  "What's with all the smiling?" I asked.

"Well, I'm happy," says he, still with the silly grin. "The All Star game is on, my kids learned how to ride, and I got a new pair of shoes."

—BurbMom

Stunt or satire?

Everyone's talking about it—even the ladies of The View—so why not join the fray? This week's New Yorker cover (pictured): Is it brilliantly satirical, meant to poke fun at all the untruths propagated about Barack Obama, or did it go too far? Watch journalists discuss it on CNN's Reliable Sources.

—CityMom

Detox Your Kitchen: Are GMOs bad for you?

In short, we don’t know. But it's been a long-running experiment; humans have been selectively breeding animals and plants for thousands of years, and plant breeding over the past century has combined genetic traits through slow natural processes for bigger ears of corn or tomatoes or new varieties. Cauliflower and broccoli were once the same plant, for example. Most of the food we eat has been genetically modified in some way.

In modern terms, genetically modified (GM) foods are created when scientists use high-tech engineering to splice in genes from other plants or organisms that have some desired trait, like resistance to a viruse or insect, or a large quantity of a certain nutrient, like vitamin A or protein. This ideally results in more nutritious or hardier crops that don’t need pesticides, potential boons for developing countries. Genetically modified (GM) animal foods, like bigger fish or more tender pork, may also come on the market in the next decade.

New GM strains of corn and soybeans have been on the market for years -- last year more than 64% of the world's soybeans were genetically modified -- so your family has probably already eaten them in cooking oils, snacks, breads, cereals, starches or baby formula. There haven’t been any adverse effects in humans to date, at least that we know of, and animal tests have generally shown no problems. One concern is many of the gene combinations have never been in our food supply before, and could cause a surprise allergic reaction in some people or even be toxic. All GM processes are supposed to undergo allergy and toxin risk assessments, according to World Health Organization regulations. Yet we are still confoundingly lacking in enough information to know what, if any, long-term health effects these products have on our health.

Ecologically, there are potential side-effects. Crops engineered to be resistant to some weeds can infect other weeds in farms nearby, leading to a new, more resistant breed. Splicing genes from two entirely different organisms could raise entirely new and unknown hazards for our ecosystems, especially if the genes “escape” into the wild.

To date, though, products sold in this country with GM ingredients don’t have to say so on the label. So the only way to avoid them right now is to buy items labeled 100% certified organic, even though GM ingredients are already so common they can crop up even when manufacturers do their best to avoid them. Given that the health risks to individuals appear to be low, don't drive yourself nuts worrying about GMOs.

Juno everywhere

Feel like I've been such a Debbie Downer lately, but here's yet another sobering piece of news: Teen pregnancy is up here in the U.S. for the first time in more than a decade, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Sadly, "pregnant teens aged 15 to 19 are less likely to get prenatal care and gain appropriate weight" and "are also more likely smoke than pregnant women aged 20 years or older," says the CNN.com article. The piece has one expert affirming that the trend is a significant indicator "for the health of the teen population because it not only reflects their health at this point, but it reflects their health and well-being for the next 20 to 40 years."

—CityMom

Moment of silence

The din's so overwhelmingly loud this week with all the Madonna&A-Rod/Did-Angie-give-birth?/Christie-Brinkley-skeezy-divorce-trial news. Put it in perspective, though, and it gets quiet real quick.

Over at the blog More Ways to Waste Time, there's a link to Iraq Body Count, which, according to the site itself, "maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion." At least 85,000 civilians have died in Iraq since 2003 (see picture for timeline). On Wednesday this week, 27 were added to the ghastly roll. Also at MWTWT, there's another link to a tally of American casualties, too: Since the war began in 2003, 4116 men and women have perished there.

—CityMom

That hindsight: Still 20/20

Great read in last Sunday's NYT business section. (Ask me not why but I am fascinated by the business section.) Here's the headline: Asleep at the Spigot: A Thirst for Oil Comes Back to Haunt A Nation of Gas Guzzlers. With gas prices kissing $4 per gallon, we're hurting, and we're hurting bad.
Some revelations:

• Legislators' attempts to tighten fuel economy laws were defeated three times—THREE TIMES!—in 2001, 2003 and 2005.
• Auto workers, fearing job loss if SUVs were outlawed because of said legislation, fought their passage. Sadly, now, many are unemployed because people just plum can't afford to gas up their SUVs. (Apparently, in some cases, it costs over $100 to tank up.)
• Between 1990 and 2000, our country's gas consumption increased by 3 MILLION barrels more a year, "a 17 percent jump in 10 years that wiped out much of the fuel savings that followed the energy crises of the 1970s."

Here's a bit of good news:
• In 2007, fuel efficiency standards finally passed; it requires the average mileage to be around 35 mpg.

But wait—it's not all good:
• Those new mileage rules are supposed to kick in by 2020.

2020?!? We're running on empty now.

—CityMom

Waste or Want? Physicians Formula Organic wear makeup

I was happy to try Physicians Formula Organic wear makeup. It promises that it's free of harsh chemicals, synthetic preservatives, GMOs and the like, and has some soy and olive ingredients. When I saw the  display, I thought, 'Finally! Affordable organic drugstore makeup.'

The recyled-paper packaging is attractive, and so far seems durable enough. The blush closes smartly with a little magnet snap.

Unfortunately, I haven't been much impressed with the products. The concealer stick ($6.95) has the consistency of wall spackle (and the smell), though it spreads more easily when mixed with a little moisturizer. The two-tone blush ($11.95) — I bought shade 2161, which I believe is pictured above — just doesn't seem to apply well or have staying power. Perhaps my skin is too dry, or the goat-hair brush that's included is just too coarse. But I've seen similar comments in other reviews; you brush and brush and can't see a thing on your face.

Still, there is so little organic makeup that's easily available, I may have to try their eyeliner and lip gloss, too. Didn't Burt's Bees used to make eye makeup and blush? I can't find them on their site. If so, I wish they would try again.

The Verdict:  So disappointing. 

—BurbMom