Recently I was reading an article on AltHealthWorks.com about a fake rice being produced in China. The rice is being made out of plastic believe it or not and no one is doing anything about it. Naturally, as a health advocate and researcher of food and how food is processed I thought to myself, this is going WAY too far. Continue reading
Global food production today is a mess. Not only do we have millions of people opposing major biotech corporations for their use and production of GMOs and pesticides (for good reasons – backed by science), we are also completely destroying our environment with intensive animal farming.
They are called feedlots, officially referred to as “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation” (CAFO) and more commonly known as factory farms. They house thousands of animals in horrid conditions that breed disease and massive environmental degradation. Despite this fact, they remain a non-issue to several major organizations whose job it is to raise awareness on the various issues contributing to our planet’s destruction at an exponential rate.
Brominated vegetable oil, a synthetic chemical that has been patented in Europe as a flame retardant, will no longer double as an ingredient in Gatorade sports drinks.
(LA Times) Molly Carter, a spokeswoman for Gatorade owner PepsiCo Inc., said the company has been considering the move for more than a year, working on a way to take out the ingredient without affecting the flavor of the drink.
A recent petition on Change.org to drop the chemical – which has more than 200,000 supporters – did not inspire the decision, Carter said, though she acknowledged that consumer feedback was the main impetus.
In the petition, posted by Sarah Kavanagh of Hattiesburg, Miss., “BVO” is described as banned in Japan and theEuropean Union.
The effort quotes a Scientific American article suggesting that “BVO could be building up in human tissues” and that studies on mice have shown “reproductive and behavioral problems” linked to large doses of the chemical.
The reformulated Gatorade flavors “will start rolling out in the next few months,” Carter said.
There’s no hard date for the launch because “we’re not recalling Gatorade,” she said. “We don’t think our products are unsafe. We don’t think there are health or safety risks.”
The BVO ingredient was used as a flavor emulsifier, helping to distribute Gatorade’s coloring throughout the bottle, Carter said. Now, the company is swapping in another emulsifier with an intimidating name: sucrose acetate isobutyrate.
