Despite media exposes and a public backlash, a lot of meat today continues to be treated with gasses to keep it looking red. Like mercury in tuna, just because the risks are exposed and the public is outraged doesn’t mean the producers change anything. They know the furor will die down and the public will forget.
Treating meat with carbon monoxide keeps its oxymyoglobin, what makes it red, from turning brown or gray. In defending the use of gasses to keep meat looking fresh, the meat industry says that meat turning brown is no different than apples turning brown when exposed to the air–a harmless discoloration that does not affect wholesomeness. Right. But the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Food have voiced concerns about meat food appearing fresher than it is because of the artificial hues.
Another method the meat industry uses to keep food looking fresh is curing it with nitrites and nitrates. Most processed meat from bacon, Slim Jims and lunch meat to canned hams, is made with the chemicals which give it color, flavor, a long shelf life and protection against bacterial growth. The problem is nitrite and nitrate have strong links to cancer and the American Cancer Society discourages their consumption. Eating just one hot dog a day increased the risk of developing colorectal cancer by as much as 21 percent in a 2008 report from the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund. Nitrite and nitrate, which become nitrosamines in the body, are linked to colorectal cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer, stroke, coronary heart disease and diabetes mellitus. Like cigarettes, people disregard the risks of processed meat, because it tastes good.
Poultry, of course, isn’t supposed to look red. But coloration is also important to sales and the FDA permits chicken and turkey to be given feed that has arsenic in it for this reason. Yes, the FDA allows arsenic in the birds’ feed for feed efficiency and weight gain to control parasites and…to improve the birds’ pigmentation. In 2011, the FDA announced that it found higher levels of arsenic in the livers of chickens treated with arsenic-laced feed and Pfizer, the drug company which also makes many animal drugs, withdrew the product. The problem is–other commercial poultry feed with arsenic in it is still sold and presumably in commercial poultry eaten.
Of course, the poster child for food artificially colored to make it look fresh and appealing is farmed salmon. Almost all farmed salmon is dyed with the chemicals astaxanthin and canthaxanthin to make it an appealing pink instead of gray. Salmon farm operators can even choose the exact color they want. Canthaxanthin at high dosages has been linked in humans to retinal damage, partial loss of vision and a serious blood disorder called aplastic anemia. Why isn’t farmed salmon pink like wild salmon? In the wild, salmon eat crustaceans and algae which makes them pink. It is a far cry from the food they are given on salmon farms.
Martha Rosenberg is a columnist/cartoonist who writes about public health. Her first book, titled Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, has just been released by Prometheus Books. She can be reached at: martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net. Read other articles by Martha.
This article was posted on Thursday, May 9th, 2013 at 8:00am and is filed under Fishing/Fish farming, Food/Nutrition.
Book Review
‘Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health’
by Martha Rosenberg
Prometheus Books
Born with a Junk Food Deficiency is a thoroughly researched and documented exposé of what Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Pharma are doing to us, to animals, to the environment, and to our ways of practicing business, medicine and democracy, all in the name of Big Profit. The author, independent investigative journalist Martha Rosenberg, told me in a telephone interview that she took seven years to do the research and another year to write and illustrate the book. What emerges from Rosenberg’s research is a no-holds-barred indictment of corporate control over some of the most intimate aspects of our lives: The food we eat and the medicines, especially psychiatric medicines, we take.
Despite the title, the first part of Born with a Junk Food Deficiency is all about prescription drugs. The first chapter, “When the Medication is ready, the Disease (and Patients) will appear—OR when TV makes you sick,” takes us on a journey through the history of pharmaceutical advertising, from ads in professional journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in the ‘50s and ‘60s, though the current Direct-To-Consumer advertising (DTCA) on television touting medications for every condition from seasonal allergies to bipolar disorder. DCTA is legal only in New Zealand and the United States, which first allowed it in 1997. Rosenberg shows that these ads are heavily sexist and ageist and that in the effort to develop new markets, the pharmaceutical industry has developed a population that sees itself as ill. People self-diagnose on websites, then report to their doctors demanding the latest advertised drug, sometimes with a coupon in hand.
According to data mentioned in an article on DTCA in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the top 25 best-selling advertised drugs grew 43% in sales compared to a little over 13% for all other drugs. Rosenberg states in her book that doctors have had to take classes in refusal skills to deal with these patients. The physicians who effectively use what they have learned in those classes may find themselves losing patients (i.e. customers) as the rise in Internet pharmacies allows patients an end-run around recalcitrant physicians. Patients requesting advertised drugs add to total US healthcare costs because these advertised drugs are typically more expensive than generics or non-advertised brands. But a more important and disturbing trend is the American tendency to seek answers in a pill. According to About.com, nearly 4 billion prescriptions were written in the United States in 2010. Rosenberg says that there are many lifestyle changes, political activities and other non-medical solutions to our problems. Born with a Junk Food Deficiency will make a significant impact if it gets people to realize that medicalizing our social ills is the wrong prescription.
Succeeding chapters titled “Fragile Handle with Risperdal…and Seroquel and Zyprexa and Geodon” and “Weapons of Hormonal Therapy” raise two serious questions: Are we pathologizing normal childhood and old age, especially menopause? According to Rosenberg, a substantial percentage of youth and adolescents are long-term users of prescription drugs. If you are over 40, just consider the number of ADHD (Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder) diagnoses that have been made in your lifetime—perhaps your children or their classmates are among them. Do daydreaming or fidgety kids really need expensive drugs that change their brain chemistry and are difficult to withdraw from? Rosenberg writes that the incidence of breast cancer in the US dropped in tandem with the drop in women pursuing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) after findings of studies were released in 2002 and 2003 linking the therapy with increases in that disease and several others. Why should women take drugs linked to cancer, stroke, heart attacks and blood clots, just because they are growing older?
Of course, sometimes people really do become ill, due, in part, to our junk food diets. But the problem is not just too much soda and a sedentary lifestyle. Sometimes the problem is the chemicals with which Big Ag has adulterated our foods, especially our animal products, to make the most money in the shortest amount of time. A recent Agence France Press article, about the southern region of the U.S. being the most obese in the country, cast the blame on “cliché” Southern foods such as fried chicken and fried okra. As I pointed out to Rosenberg in our interview, these foods had been popular in the South long before the obesity epidemic. She agreed with me, and pointed out a particular fact she reported in Chapter 9 of her book, which is titled “The drugstore in your meat”: “…[C]hickens were once slaughtered at 14 weeks old, when they weighed about two pounds, but by 2001, they were slaughtered at seven weeks, when they weighed between four and six pounds.” (Hint: cooking does not rid the meat of growth-promoting hormones, and the antibiotics the animals are fed.)
Drugs in our food are a major health concern for the people who eat them. In the chapter “The Drugstore in Your Meat”, Rosenberg writes about the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA), which was introduced by the late Sen.Ted Kennedy (D-MA). Rosenberg states that, according to the bill, over 70 percent of antibiotics go to livestock, not to people. This overuse of antibiotics in agriculture later renders the drugs useless for people who have been ingesting them unknowingly. Even vegetarians are not able to avoid these antibiotics; researchers are finding them in soil. Crops such as corn, lettuce, potatoes, green onions and cabbage have been found in university studies to harbor antibiotic residues. Rosenberg has read the studies, has talked to some of the researchers, has paid attention when news media has covered stories such as the resistant MRSA bacteria and has thoroughly documented her findings. She explains in plain English what would be difficult for a non-scientist to understand from a technical report.
Rosenberg, herself a vegan, devotes Chapter 8 of Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, titled “‘Eggsposés’ and Teflon Chicken Dons” to the cruelty involved in the egg and chicken industries as well as the health problems associated with eating eggs. The actual health benefits and deficits of eggs are controversial matters, but animal cruelty is not. Rosenberg describes in detail debeaking, battery cages and denying hens food to jump-start another egg-laying cycle, a practice known as forced molting, as well as other conditions on factory farms. That chapter gives even a dedicated chicken eater like me pause to question whether I am doing the right thing, for my health and my sense of ethics.
For me, the best things about Born with a Junk Food Deficiency are the sometimes sarcastic, sometimes rhetorical, but unfailingly thoughtful questions Rosenberg poses throughout the book, such as the two at the top of this review. They prod the reader into thinking about the issues. Thinking may lead readers to action, whether it is changing buying and eating habits, seeking out more natural, holistic forms of treatment for physical or mental disorders, or engaging in forms of political activism for campaign finance reform, lobbying reform or other changes that will decrease the influence of corporations and their money on our political system. If you doubt the connection between campaign finance reform and lobbying reform on the one hand and government policies concerning our food and medical systems on the other, you need only read Rosenberg’s accounts of the relationships between Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma and the government that appear throughout the book. They’re chilling.
Taxpayers, veterans, and those considering entering the military should be aware of the fact that the Pentagon has become a dependent of Big Pharma. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are common results of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military response is to pass out expensive pills like Seroquel and Risperdal as if they were candy, whether or not they are truly effective. In her chapter, “The War after the War,” Rosenberg reports that according to the veterans’ advocacy group Lest We Forget, “Drug refills… arrive in the mail with no explanation, no doctor supervision, and sometimes no diagnosis, almost ensuring self-medication and overdoses.” This chapter alone is of great use to families and other advocates of veterans, and to peace activists, for whom medical (mis)treatment of combat veterans is another reason to be against war. Even taxpayer groups concerned about the national deficit should find the contents of this chapter to be a strong economic argument against expensive American militarism.
Certain books are for certain people. Born with a Junk Food Deficiency is for people who eat, use prescription drugs, have or intend to have children, or care for or expect to care for aged parents. People who are concerned about women’s health, veterans’ health, animal welfare, consumer rights, truth-in-advertising, state or federal budget crises, or the undue influence of corporate money on democratic governance also will want to read this book. Additionally, given that the food and pharmaceutical corporations that are mentioned in the book are transnational, I would recommend it to anyone in the world who reads English.
Martha Rosenberg’s articles can be read on Intrepid Report. Kellia Ramares-Watson, an Intrepid Report Associate Editor, is an independent journalist in Oakland, California.
Martha Rosenberg’s scrutiny of Big Pharma and agribusiness is so bleak and unrelenting, it sometimes seems to go beyond muckraking into something more closely resembling war correspondence. On one side of the battlefield are the pharmaceutical companies, depicted here as blockbuster-fixated marketing organizations that, having run thin of obvious diseases to treat, seek to convert the fixed circumstances of life—being young, being old, being male, being female—into medicable ailments. Their comrades-in-arms are Monsanto and other gene-tinkering research companies, whose overarching mission is to overwhelm and supplant nature with profit-driven science. Allied with both of them are revolving-door regulatory agencies and interest-conflicted professional associations, and much of the authority and knowledge structure of society, from the military to the university to the media.
On the other side is just… us, reduced to guinea pigs and passive inhabitants of an increasingly chemicalized reality. Only in America are prescription drugs treated as advertisable commodities, creating the widespread impression, after sufficient battering by pharmaceutical TV commercials, that every variety of human suffering and inadequacy is a preventable symptom of pill deficiency, and producing an irresistible pressure on even the most conscientious of physicians to prescribe, prescribe, prescribe.
Author Martha Rosenberg—an Evanston-based writer and cartoonist whose pithy if rough graphics dot the text—notes the predictable result of this unequal contest: Direct-to-consumer advertising means that the U.S. has the “sickest people in the world,” at least in our own media-chondriacal imaginations, while the glut of highly advertised junk food saps our vitality and leaves us vulnerable to such preventable conditions as obesity and type-II diabetes. According to Rosenberg, the agribusiness and pharma industries are locked in unholy commercial embrace, the food suppliers creating the chronic illnesses, unknown to less-affluent societies, that Big Pharma expensively prolongs, while the pharmaceutical companies supply the livestock antibiotics and growth hormones that make possible the humanitarian and health horrors of factory farming.
There are stories here to chill the blood of anyone who has ever placed trust in a doctor, government official or scholarly journal. We read that the drug companies aggressively target children, pathologizing behaviors that only yesterday were thought of as simply a phase, because kids make such fine customers in terms of compliance and longevity. “Few indeed are kids who start out diagnosed and treated for ADHD [and] bipolar disorder… who end up on no drugs,” notes the author. “Even if they outgrow their original diagnoses—a big ‘if’ with a mental health history that follows them—the side effects from years of psychoactive drugs on their physical health and on mental, social and emotional development take their toll.”
Instrumental in legitimizing this marketing strategy are figures such as Dr. Joseph Biederman, “credited with ballooning the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children by as much as forty-fold.” Biederman created the Johnson & Johnson Center for the Study of Pediatric Psychopathology at the Harvard University-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, promising J&J that in exchange for its largesse, he would “support the safety and effectiveness of risperidone [Risperdal] in this age group.” Not content to pimp for the drug maker, Dr. Biederman also raked in millions in government research grants. In 2008, following congressional investigation of his activities, he promised to suspend his industry-linked experiments. But the damage was done, and has not been undone.
Another prime market for psychotropic drugs is the ailing elderly, who are in no position to question or resist their caregivers. The so-called “atypical anti-psychotics” introduced in the 1990s are frequently used off-label in nursing homes to pharmaceutically lobotomize “difficult” residents with dementia. The antipsychotics double mortality in older patients, meaning that perhaps 15,000 nursing-home inhabitants die each year from “improper” use of these drugs.
These prescribing patterns, notes the author, are encouraged by massive ad campaigns and sales reps who ply doctors with samples. Medical opinion is also subject to the influence of manufacturer-sponsored Astroturf advocacy groups, as well as ghostwritten journal articles and questionable continuing education courses that push the use of particular drugs while neglecting to discuss side effects or alternative therapies. Beyond hawking individual products, the multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign promotes a credulously pharma-friendly ideology that permeates professional circles and society at large.
The use of powerful psychotropic drugs as agents of control reaches its apogee in the Pentagon, which has created the world’s most heavily medicated army. Overwhelmed by cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, the military has become a major drug purchaser and prescriber, pushing every variety of psycho-panacea on shell-shocked GIs and returnees from Iraq and Afghanistan. Dozens of soldiers have died of accidental overdoses caused by lethal cocktails of anti-depressants, sedatives, anxiety relievers, painkillers and more, each drug counteracting the side effects of the last one, until the system collapses under the unrelenting chemical shock and awe.
Rosenberg has done commendable work in gathering soldiers’ tales, such as that of Corporal Chad Oligschlaeger, a marine suffering from PTSD after his Iraqi deployment. Plied with no fewer than nine mood-altering meds, Oligschlaeger felt his memory slipping, while the underlying trauma festered: “At a PTSD ‘therapy’ session, he was admonished not to talk about a firefight that was haunting him. ‘You can only discuss Iraq on Wednesdays,’ the group leader said, according to his mother.” Soon after his mother begged officers to keep an eye on her son, who was living alone in the barracks, Oligschlaeger was found dead from multiple-drug toxicity. Shown the records, a doctor from Texas A&M commented, “You realize the military killed your son, don’t you?”
Overdose and deadly interaction are by no means the only risks associated with these drugs. The accounts of drug-linked suicide and murder have become so legion that a Web site— “SSRIStories”—was created to archive the prescription medication-related havoc. It now contains over 5,000 published reports.
“The kind of energy, rage and insanity seen in a lot of crimes today was not seen before SSRIs appeared,” says the site’s founder, referring to Prozac and related drugs that—like cocaine and amphetamines—work by enhancing the neurotransmitter serotonin. From self-immolation to biting attacks to parents drowning their own children, SSRIStories’ tales constitute a real-life horror show. The violence reflects the paradoxical nature of psychoactive drugs, which, in manhandling the delicately and inscrutably complex workings of the brain, can induce or accentuate the very symptoms they are supposed to treat. The pharmaceutical companies’ response to the problem of psychotic drug reaction is to insist that criticism of their products or practices contributes to SSRI-phobia, leading to dangerous “noncompliance” among the pill-deficient multitudes. This claim is made in the name of science—even though, after decades of research, no firm causality has ever been established between serotonin levels and depression.
In case after case, Rosenberg documents how drugs meant to treat or prevent a condition actually worsen it. She reminds us of the long-running scandal of hormonal replacement therapy (HRT), in which estrogen derived from mare urine was given to women in order to mitigate menopausal discomfort. It began with a bestselling book of the 1960s, in which a drug-company-supported doctor named Robert A. Wilson referred to post-menopausal women as “flabby,” “shrunken,” dull-minded” and “desexed,” scaring the bejesus out of readers by stating that “No woman can be sure of escaping the horror of this living death.”
Or perhaps there was a way to avoid this unspeakable fate, also known as reaching middle age. Dr. Wilson and others modestly proposed that, rather than natural aging producing hormone loss, it was hormone loss that produced aging. HRT was a fountain-of-youth fantasy that would have made Ponce de Leon think twice. But backed by the conjoined power of Big Science and Big Business, it caught on, in part because of claims that it prevented memory loss and other age-related “diseases.”
As even children and other non-scientists know, the flow of time is not so easily reversed, nor is nature cheerfully defied. A 2002 study found that HRT doubled the risk of developing blood clots and dementia, while increasing the likelihood of breast cancer by twenty-six percent, heart attacks by twenty-nine percent and strokes by forty-one percent. The results were so clear and devastating that the study had to be shut down early for safety reasons.
None of the earlier, discredited research—much of it ghostwritten on Big Pharma’s dime—has been retracted. Nor have the peer-reviewed journals bothered to draw conclusions from the fact that the year after HRT slunk away from the marketplace, breast cancer rates dropped seven percent—the first significant dip in morbidity ever recorded. Fourteen-thousand women who likely would have developed breast cancer in 2003 did not, because their doctors had not prescribed a toxic pseudo-cure for a well-hyped non-disease. Despite all the suffering and death, horse-pee marketer Wyeth and its retinue of co-opted researchers still extol the miracle of estrogen replacement, a “therapy” that continues to rise ghoulishly from the intellectual graveyard of greed-driven junk science.
Having dealt decisively with Big Pharma in Part I of her book, Rosenberg then aims her fire at the agribusiness complex, which is responsible for what she calls “the drugstore in your meat,” not to mention the animal concentration camps known as factory farms, and the vast and uncontrolled biotech experiment called genetic modification.
We read here about the “AquAdvantage salmon,” a Frankenfish engineered to achieve full growth in half the usual time. It does this by eating five times as many little fish as ordinary Atlantic salmon, something to keep in mind if any of the finny gluttons escape captivity and breed with their wild cousins, which apparently they can. In its bureaucratic wisdom, the FDA declared the modified fish a “new animal drug” rather than a food—which in turn means that approval rests upon a panel consisting largely of veterinarians, not human doctors. If AquAdvantage ever does come to market, it will be consumers who serve as test animals for these possibly allergenic and maybe even carcinogenic mutants of the deep.
As the world’s fisheries collapse due to over-harvesting, pollution and climate change, the AquAdvantage salmon is touted as a solution to the coming food crisis. But what are the ethical, environmental and health implications of raising voracious faux fish in hideously overcrowded pools swarming with up to 100 salmon per cubic meter? Is further, ever more radical destabilization of nature really the answer to the ongoing disruption of the oceanic and terrestrial ecologies that anchor the chain of life? Who but a madman—or an adman—could think so?
The larger and deeper story told here is about corporate science, activated by avarice and PR and unrestrained by any precautionary principle, which has itself mutated into something reckless, grandiose, delusional and dangerous—in a word, insane. Lacking a tough, well-funded and independent regulatory apparatus, the public confronts this berserk, high-tech Goliath without even a sling. We are thrown upon our own resources and have no choice but to fight for safety and sanity by becoming our own researchers, advocates, activists and organizers.
If there is one lesson that the author drives home, it is that an atomized and powerless consumer culture cannot be a healthy culture. The drug and junk-food industries advertise because advertising works so well within the context of our time, generating specious needs and deficiencies out of the thin, frayed fabric of our social insecurities and isolation. “Born with a Junk Food Deficiency” is an essential reminder that unless the humane and life-affirming “genes” of accountability, integrity, solidarity, humility and compassion are re-inserted into our society and institutions, the prognosis for our collective well-being is grim. (Hugh Iglarsh)
Martha Rosenberg discusses her book Thursday, August 16 at 7 pm at the Evanston Public Library,1703 Orrington Avenue, Evanston, (847)448-8630.
“Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health”
By Martha Rosenberg
Prometheus Books, 373 pages, $24