“Now, boys and girls, many of you have been asking recently, “What is the purpose of food?
“Is food just something your parents give you so your mouth will be full and you won’t be able to tell your little sister that she is a crybaby and that she looks like a pig?
“Not at all.
“Food is important in building up your body.
“But before food can build up your body, it must itself be broken down into smaller parts that your body can use. That’s why you chew your food—to help break it down. And we have wonderful little happy helpers inside our bodies that break it down even more. Those happy helpers are called E. coli. They are bacteria.
“They’re called ‘E. coli’ because they live in the colon. The colon is a wonderful sort of factory in the middle part of your body. The E. coli help break down the food you eat into parts called molecules and atoms, which then help build you up. Those molecules and atoms build white teeth and strong muscles so that your mother can proclaim, ‘My little Kevin has the whitest teeth and the best-developed muscles of any young barbarian at Attila the Hun Elementary School!’
"Now, there are also bad E. coli which can make people sick. Food suppliers can irradiate food, so that the molecules are all jumbled up and the bad E. coli can’t break down the food.
"The only problem with that is that the good E. coli in your colon will also not be able to break down the food and you might as well be eating cardboard. And hasn’t your mother told you, probably more than once, that you shouldn’t eat cardboard?”
The point here is that irradiation doesn’t merely kill germs. If you want a food item to last a long time, you can heat it to kill the germs and then put it in a can. It will then last for years, although some nutrients may have been lost.
While the typical grocery chain executive doesn’t have the academic background to appreciate how crassly inappropriate irradiation of food may be, many who do have such a background lack the independence to speak out. University professor these days are often constrained by the wishes of their institutions or by other considerations.
l tried using Google with the phrase "irradiated food." The result was a mixture of government-produced material, along with a variety of other material produced by opposition groups.
I didn't find academic studies. Part of the reason for that lack may be that universities, heavily dependent on federal research money, don't like to contradtict anything the government might be saying.
In some areas of food marketing, food trucking, etc. there are people who are fine people, but whose education may be limited. In their minds, atomic power may be just the thing to help solve certain day-to-day problems.
But it won’t work as they may imagine and they aren’t the ones who should be making this decision.
Other than that, it's hard to figure out who would have stood to benefit from the new FDA regulaion that was proposed. Would it have been the grocery chains or food suppliers? I don’t imagine so, not to any great extent.
Instead, I imagined a coalition, perhaps an unknowing coalition, of nuclear energy geeks who’ve never studied biology and some shadowy fast-money people who wanted to cash in on a new process.
It was hard to identify the second class of individuals more precisely, because no reputable company seemed to be directly involved. if Kroger or Marsh, for example, were irradiation proponents, they weren’t saying so publicly. SureBeam is bankrupt. The fact that no one in the commercial sector seemed to be taking any responsibility was yet another red flag.
The statement that heterogeneous substances challenge the immune system is very simple. But it has a mathematical quality of producing corollaries. That may be because It is itself derived from mathematics, from information theory. A few simple first statements thus become much more numerous. They reproduce, as it were, by a quasi-axiomatic process. (MY GOD, THEY'RE ALIVE!) They therefore provide a commentary of one kind or another on about sixty per cent of food items sold in supermarkets.
They provide a commentary also on preservation methods. I think this new thinking can also produce much more precise testing methods and ways of quantifying favorable or unfavorable nutritional aspects of foods.
And it already provides a more precise statement than current vogue words such as “organic” or “antioxidant.”
Let me enlarge a bit on what has just been said. While it's generally acknowledged that “organic” isn't a completely precise designation, the term, ”antioxidant,” is bandied about with greater confidence.
In fact, the term "antioxidant" embodies a serious logical flaw. Oxidation is not in itself a bad thing. What is bad is oxidation leading to the production of sets of molecules which are heterogeneous and also not biochemically "orthodox."
There's what might be called a 'biochemical dictionary." I don't mean a work by a human author, but a subset of all the possible organic molecules--a subset that can be interpreted or interact biochemically, one way or another. Molecules in the subset can interact with other molecules also in the biochemical subset. One imagines all those molecules being listed somewhere in order to imagine the "dictionary."
Here is an important point: the molecular subset in this "biochemical dictionary" is much, much smaller than the total set of all organic molecules that can be formed.
Partial random oxidative processes are likely to lead to production of molecules that aren't in the dictionary. And those molecules, boys and girls, are likely to be bad molecules. Complete oxidation, on the other hand, will produce mostly water and carbon dioxide-- substances which are harmless as far as one's immune system is concerned.
However, one doesn't need to depend on my new ideas to understand why irradiation of food is a bad idea. Irradiation of food will cause the creation of free radicals in food. Any biochemist will tell you that free radicals cause cancer. See left.
IN SUMMARY, it looks to me as if my work can do one of two things. In a slow, smooth manner, it could improve product quality–or it could continue to provide sudden disagreeable Attilic jolts for those in the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, and government.
While I do plan to continue developing the subject and writing about it, I can’t force others to do as I might think best. Alas, the good old days are gone when Attila could impose order over what he probably saw the decadent, money-grubbing West. And while I, the kinder gentler Attila, don’t want to see more companies getting into trouble, I don’t think I should have to accept blame, even for very serious problems--providing I’ve tried to make myself understood beforehand.
I 've done that now by presenting the preceding discussion for free. There's a need for basic research in this important area. There's a potential for greater profits. My work can provide a starting point for such research, but I'm in need of individuals or companies that would like to cooperate.
As things stand now, it's legal for spices to be irradiated. Some spices have medicinal properties, which will perhaps be lost through irradiation. Herbal teas contain spices, so I phoned Lipton tea to ask them whether their herbal teas were irradiated. As of this writing (4/23/08), I hadn't had a "yes" or "no" response, so I've stopped buying their teas. Kroger hasn't responded to questions about Kroger brand spices. My habit at the time of this writing was to buy herbal teas and spices that state on the package that they aren't irradiated.
If any food company or grocery chain wants to talk to me, I’m available on a consultant basis.
(317) 523 6943
dave@davidgaus.com
David Gaus
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