Beast of the Month - January 2008

Beast of the Month - January 2008
Trans Fats, Deadly Food Additive

"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

A New Year is here, and with it comes New Year's Resolutions. And, as is always the case in the USA, topping the list for most Americans involves the results of having one too many servings of turducken over the holidays. And sure, maybe joining a gym (or putting some Tony Little, Tae Bo or P90X on the TV) helps, but ultimately, it's what you put in your body that has more to do with gain or loss of weight than any workout plan can ever hope.

Of course, obesity is just the most blatant side effect of the Standard American Diet (often called SAD by health critics.) Among the other wonderful health problems: heart disease, diabetes, liver problems, infertility and the big C. And while personal responsibility certainly can't be ignored in the resulting health crisis, it's a rigged game. Thanks to the processed food industry and korporate food konglomerates, the most common snacks and meals in the United States are dangerous nutrition filled with killer chemicals and additives. Among the greatest hits:

* Refined Sugars & Carbohydrates: From high fructose corn syrup to Wonder Bread, refined sugars and carbs are overloaded in American food products. It is because of the debilitating nature of America's carbo habit that the Atkins and Zone diets (which stress high protein, low carb diets) have become so popular and successful.

* Aspartame: Need that sweet sugar taste without the side effects? The most popular artificial sweetener, under the label of NutraSweet or Equal, is not the right answer. Among the documented side effects: headaches, fatigue, blurred vision and blindness, heart palpitations, brain lesions and tumors, memory loss, dizziness, seizures and insomnia. Originally, aspartame was categorized as a biochemical warfare weapon by the Pentagon in a list submitted to Congress. It is because of these health issues that sucralose and stevia have risen in popularity (though in the case of stevia, FDA stonewalling has blocked its usage as a food additive despite its extensive history in Japan.)

* Sodium Nitrate: Used in process meats such as bacon and bologna as both a preservative and for coloring, it is a cause of cancer in the colon, breast, prostate and pancreas. Suddenly, we don't wish we were an Oscar Mayer wiener.

* RBGH Milk: Cows juiced with Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone have flooded the US market since Monsanto (the fine makers of noted nutrapoison NutraSweet) pushed it under the brand name Posilac. Despite the evidence linking it to cancer it is still legal to use it in the USA, though it is banned in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Europe. In 1997, a Florida Fox affiliate squelched a news expose on the dangers of rBGH milk and fired the journalists who did the story. Despite attempts to cover up the dangers of rBGH milk, the grocery chains Safeway, Kroger and Trader Joe's (along with, among others, tasty ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's) have rejected the usage of rBGH milk from their stores.

* Frankenfoods: rBGH is just one example of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Thanks to predictably lax regulation by the FDA, the US food market (particularly processed foods) are now loaded with GMOs, making the American public lab rats at the behest of American biotech corporations. Widespread concerns among Europeans over the dangers of GMOs has led to trade disputes over US food crop imports in the EU.

* Super Size Me!: The biggest culprit in obesity may be the "Bigger is better" trend in fast food marketing. Though the "Super Size" on fries and drinks was stopped at McDonald's after Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary exposed the health dangers of the Ronald McDonald diet, in a world where Carl's Jr. has a Double Six Dollar Burger, Wendy's the Baconator, Burger King the Cheese Double Whopper, McD's the Cheese Double Quarter Pounder and Hardee's it's Monster Thickburger (with an astounding 1420 calories) it certainly is hard to lose weight while visiting your favorite burger stand. And to think it all started with the now apparently modest sized Big Mac. (Thanks a lot, Mrs. Esther Rose!)

* Acrylamide: In 2002, this carcinogenic substance was discovered in fried and baked carbohydrates such as breads, cookies and chips thanks to the heating process. Six years later, there is still no labeling or regulation of it in the American food supply.

* Monosodium Glutamate: Found as a taste enhancer in foods ranging from Chinese food to Kentucky Fried Chicken, MSG is (like aspartame) an excitotoxin, which in animal studies have caused brain damage to consumers. Among the other health hazards of MSG: body numbness, chest pain, headaches, nausea and a rapid heartbeat.

* Salmonella & E. Coli: While foodborne illnesses due to bacteria are not put into food intentionally, it is the end result of lax enforcement of food laws by the USDA and industrial methods for producing mass quantities of food that decreases sanitary methods.

* Mad Cow Disease: The most lethal of food dangers, so far the US has been fortunate not to have a massive infection, but critics of the USDA and FDA believe it is only a matter of time due to shoddy enforcement of both laws involving feed and the care of bovine. In the meantime, legitimate fear of US cattle has curtailed US beef imports to Japan.


Still, with all due respect to the previous nominees, the biggest threat to US food integrity has come from trans fats, The Konformist Beast of the Month. It's dangers, and how it became such a part of the American food supply, is illustrative of how korporate profits rule American food production and how it trumps sound health policy.

Artificial trans fats were first introduced into the American diet in 1911, when Procter & Gamble (the korporate titan that includes the Mark of the Beast in its logo) began selling shortening under the brand name Crisco. This was only a decade after trans fats were first created artificially via the process of hydrogenation, where hydrogen atoms are added to non-saturated fats, extending their shelf life. (Perhaps the first sign that hydrogenated oils are not healthy to eat is the extended shelf life: it indicates that bacteria doesn't find it worthy nutrition.) Though there were indeed health dangers tied to trans fats from the start, it was minimized due to hydrogenated oils being consumed in small amounts, primarily through Crisco and margarine. It was during the two world wars, when butter was rationed to support the war efforts, that there were major spikes in trans fat consumption by the American public.

After WWII, trans fats steadily increased in consumption through the sixties, as food processors began realizing the benefits of adding trans fats to their products for increased profits. Coincidentally, as this rise in trans fat usage continued, it was backed by a campaign warning people of the supposed health dangers of consuming butter and other alternatives to hydrogenated oils. This created some strange alliances: the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has often been on the right side on health issues, pushed in the 80s for the removal of animal fats use for frying in restaurants, as well as coconut oil in popcorn at movie theaters during the 90s. (While the CSPI now is opposed to the usage of trans fats, it has never owed up to its responsibility in promoting it as part of the American diet in the first place.) CSPI may have been suckered into promotion of trans fats, but others may not have been so blind. One noted player would have to be Archer Daniels Midland, the food titan that is the major processor of soybeans, which were used to make eighty percent of all hydrogenated oils in processed foods. The promotion of trans fats literally had billions of dollars riding on the outcome.

Despite the pro-hydrogenation propaganda, most natural health advocates (such as Harvey and Marilyn Diamond in their Fit for Life book series, authors Paul and Patricia Bragg, and Julian Whitaker of the Whitaker Institute) were never fooled. They warned that artificial trans fats had no history of being consumed by humans, and thus our digestive system was unprepared for this foreign invader. The evidence has proved them correct: in 1994, it was estimated that 30,000 deaths were caused each year in the US due to heart disease caused from trans fat consumption, or ten times the deaths on 9/11 every year.

The good news is, thanks to the bad PR trans fats have received, they are rapidly being removed from the American food supply. (It's hard, after all, to defend using a deadly product in foods when it is inferior in taste to other options, as anyone who has consumed both butter and margarine can attest.) Most processed food products have reduced trans fats to under a half gram per serving due to publish pressure. Leading the charge: the all-American Oreo cookie, which now has no hydrogenated oils in its ingredients. Among the food servers who have removed or restricted trans fats from their foods are all Disney theme parks, Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Arby's, Wendy's, Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King and, of course, McDonald's. This was fueled by New York City's banning of trans fats in all NYC restaurants. Joining the Big Apple are Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Montgomery County, Maryland with Chicago and the states of California and Vermont having proposals to enforce their own bans. Crisco itself has been reformulated to have less than one gram of trans fats per serving. Even the Indiana State Fair banned their usage in tasty snacks such as french fries, corn dogs and deep-fried Oreos, Snickers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

In the end, how trans fats have gone from a household product to a dirty word is a story with a happy ending. If consumers vote with their dollars, food products can and will change. The downside to the story is the fact that trans fats even became an American food staple in the first place. Undoubtedly the list of food beasts will continue to have new additions, and the battle has just begun.

In any case, we salute trans fats (and those behind it) as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, dudes!!!

Sources:

Enig, Mary and Fallon, Sally. Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The Healthy Alternative to Trans Fats. New York: Penguin Group, 2005.

Enig, Mary G. Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol. Silver Spring: Bethesda Press, 2000.

Fallon, Sally and Enig. Mary G. Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. Winona Lake: New Trends Publishing, 1999.

The Weston A. Price Foundation <http://www.westonaprice.org/>.

Special thanks to Harvey & Marilyn Diamond for their Fit for Life and Fitonics for Life books, NewsTarget.com, Rense.com and the film Super Size Me for help on this article.

Some cool things to look at for more about SAD dangers:

Aspartame & Aspartame Poisoning Information: http://www.dorway.com/
The Atkins Diet: Atkins.com
Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream: BenJerry.com
Bragg Live Foods & Health Books: Bragg.com
Center for Science in the Public Interest: CSPINet.org
Dr. Whitaker: DrWhitaker.com
Fox BGH Suit: FoxBGHSuit.com
Trader Joe's: TraderJoes.com
The Zone Diet: ZoneDiet.com

The Ethanol Scam

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15635751/ethanol_scam_ethanol_hurts_the_environment_and_is_one_of_americas_biggest_political_boondoggles

The Ethanol Scam: One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles
From Issue 1032
JEFF GOODELL
Posted Jul 24, 2007

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

Three factors are driving the ethanol hype. The first is panic: Many energy experts believe that the world's oil supplies have already peaked or will peak within the next decade. The second is election-year politics. With the first vote to be held in Iowa, the largest corn-producing state in the nation, former skeptics like Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain now pay tribute to the wonders of ethanol. Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama pleased his agricultural backers in Illinois by co-authoring legislation to raise production of biofuels to 60 billion gallons by 2030. A few weeks later, rival Democrat John Edwards, who is staking his campaign on a victory in the Iowa caucus, upped the ante to 65 billion gallons by 2025.

The third factor stoking the ethanol frenzy is the war in Iraq, which has made energy independence a universal political slogan. Unlike coal, another heavily subsidized energy source, ethanol has the added political benefit of elevating the American farmer to national hero. As former CIA director James Woolsey, an outspoken ethanol evangelist, puts it, "American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism." If you love America, how can you not love ethanol?

Ethanol is nothing more than 180-proof grain alcohol. To avoid the prospect of drunks sucking on gas pumps, fuel ethanol is "denatured" with chemical additives (if you drink it, you'll end up dead or, at best, in the hospital). It can be distilled from a variety of plants, including sugar cane and switch- grass. Most vehicles can't run on pure ethanol, but E85, a mix of eighty-five percent ethanol and fifteen percent gasoline, requires only slight engine modifications.

But as a gasoline substitute, ethanol has big problems: Its energy density is one-third less than gasoline, which means you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of power. It also has a nasty tendency to absorb water, so it can't be transported in existing pipelines and must be distributed by truck or rail, which is tremendously inefficient.

Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog.

The ethanol boondoggle is largely a tribute to the political muscle of a single company: agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. In the 1970s, looking for new ways to profit from corn, ADM began pushing ethanol as a fuel additive. By the early 1980s, ADM was producing 175 million gallons of ethanol a year. The company's then-chairman, Dwayne Andreas, struck up a close relationship with Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, a.k.a. "Senator Ethanol." During the 1992 election, ADM gave $1 million to Dole and his friends in the GOP (compared with $455,000 to the Democrats). In return, Dole helped the company secure billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks. In 1995, the conservative Cato Institute, estimating that nearly half of ADM's profits came from products either subsidized or protected by the federal government, called the company "the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history."

Today, ADM is the leading producer of ethanol, supplying more than 1 billion gallons of the fuel additive last year. Ethanol is propped up by more than 200 tax breaks and subsidies worth at least $5.5 billion a year. And ADM continues to give back: Since 2000, the company has contributed $3.7 million to state and federal politicians.

The Iraq War has also been a boon for ADM and other ethanol producers. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was pushed by Corn Belt politicians, mandated the consumption of 7.5 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012. After Democrats took over Congress last year, they too vowed to "do something" about America's addiction to foreign oil. By the time Sen. Jeff Bingaman, chair of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, proposed new energy legislation this spring, the only real question was how big the ethanol mandate would be. According to one lobbyist, 36 billion gallons became "the Goldilocks number -- not too big to be impractical, not too small to satisfy corn growers."

Under the Senate bill, only 15 billion gallons of ethanol will come from corn, in part because even corn growers admit that turning more grain into fuel would disrupt global food supplies. The remaining 21 billion gallons will have to come from advanced biofuels, most of which are currently brewed only in small-scale lab experiments. "It's like trying to solve a traffic problem by mandating hovercraft," says Dave Juday, an independent commodities consultant. "Except we don't have hovercraft."

The most seductive myth about ethanol is that it will free us from our dependence on foreign oil. But even if ethanol producers manage to hit the mandate of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, that will replace a paltry 1.5 million barrels of oil per day -- only seven percent of current oil needs. Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use.

Another misconception is that ethanol is green. In fact, corn production depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel -- not just the diesel needed to plow fields and transport crops, but also the vast quantities of natural gas used to produce fertilizers. Runoff from industrial-scale cornfields also silts up the Mississippi River and creates a vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. What's more, when corn ethanol is burned in vehicles, it is as dirty as conventional gasoline and does little to solve global warming: E85 reduces carbon dioxide emissions by a modest fifteen percent at best, while fueling the destruction of tropical forests.

But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor," University of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year.

Thanks in large part to the ethanol craze, the price of beef, poultry and pork in the United States rose more than three percent during the first five months of this year. In some parts of the country, hog farmers now find it cheaper to fatten their animals on trail mix, french fries and chocolate bars. And since America provides two-thirds of all global corn exports, the impact is being felt around the world. In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide.

Despite the serious drawbacks of ethanol, some technological visionaries believe that the fuel can be done right. "Corn ethanol is just a platform, the first step in a much larger transition we are undergoing from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a carbohydrate-based economy," says Vinod Khosla, a pioneering venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Next-generation corn- ethanol plants, he argues, will be much more efficient and environmentally friendly. He points to a company called E3 BioFuels that just opened an ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska. The facility runs largely on biogas made from cow manure, and feeds leftover grain back to the cows, making it a "closed-loop system" -- one that requires very few fossil fuels to create ethanol.

Khosla is even higher on the prospects for cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel that can be made from almost any plant matter, including wood waste and perennial grasses like miscanthus and switchgrass. Like other high-tech ethanol evangelists, Khosla imagines a future in which such so-called "energy crops" are fed into giant refineries that use genetically engineered enzymes to break down the cellulose in plants and create fuel for a fraction of the cost of today's gasoline. Among other virtues, cellulosic ethanol would not cut into the global food supply (nobody eats miscanthus or switchgrass), and it could significantly cut global-warming pollution. Even more important, it could provide a gateway to a much larger biotech revolution, including synthetic microbes that could one day be engineered to gobble up carbon dioxide or other pollutants.

Unfortunately, no commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants exist today. In one venture backed by Khosla, a $225 million plant in central Georgia is currently being built to make ethanol out of wood chips. Mitch Mandich, a former Apple Computer executive who is now the CEO of the operation, calls it "the beginning of a real transformation in the way we think about energy in America."

Maybe. But oil-industry engineer Robert Rapier, who has spent years studying cellulosic ethanol, says that the difference between ethanol from corn and ethanol from cellulose is "like the difference between traveling to the moon and traveling to Mars." And even if the engineering hurdles can be overcome, there's still the problem of land use: According to Rapier, replacing fifty percent of our current gasoline consumption with cellulosic ethanol would consume thirteen percent of the land in the United States - about seven times the land currently utilized for corn production.

Increasing the production of cellulosic ethanol will also require solving huge logistical problems, including delivering vast quantities of feedstock to production plants. According to one plant manager in the Midwest, fueling an ethanol plant with switchgrass would require delivering a semi-truckload of the grass every six minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Finally, there is the challenge of wrestling the future away from Big Corn. "It's pretty clear to me that the corn guys will use all their lobbying muscle and political power to stall, thwart and sidetrack this revolution," says economist C. Ford Runge.

In the end, the ethanol boom is another manifestation of America's blind faith that technology will solve all our problems. Thirty years ago, nuclear power was the answer. Then it was hydrogen. Biofuels may work out better, especially if mandates are coupled with tough caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. Still, biofuels are, at best, a huge gamble. They may help cushion the fall when cheap oil vanishes, but if we rely on ethanol to save the day, we could soon find ourselves forced to make a choice between feeding our SUVs and feeding children in the Third World. And we all know how that decision will go.