The Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lobbying group has created a coalition and they have drafted a petition demanding that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban eight food additives they believe are carcinogens, in the interests of public health.The problem is that many of these are natural, which is one reason why they have never been banned. The other reason is they haven't...
read moreAt the Biotech Literacy Project Boot Camp, held a week ago at the U.C. Davis World Food Center, I was on a journalism roundtable with Brooke Borel, Keith Kloor and Razib Khan, moderated by Professor Kevin Folta, and I was asked about the most important thing for scientists to keep in mind regarding increasing science acceptance.It's always difficult to pick just one but given the nature of the...
read moreMost people don't realize it, but "GMO" is essentially a legal definition and only a vague scientific one. After all, what food has not been 'genetically modified' by now? When is the cut-off date that food remains "organic" and when it becomes icky science?GMOs are in some instances banned in Europe, for example, but they did not want to put European farmers out of business in their zeal to...
read moreFast food often won't be great for you if you eat it too often but some options are okay. An article in Buzzfeed recently identified 26 things that were healthier than regular fare at just about every chain. Most are common sense and only one (trans fats) reads like the kind of thing Buzzfeed writers educated by Google searches would say.• Low in calories: For lunch, that means about 500...
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