Ramanisblog

Tag: fastfoods

  • Junk food reigns in ads on Web sites for kids

    Junk food manufacturers must remember that they also have kids.Money earned by spoiling children’s ( for that matter any one’s) health is Sin Money.
    True, parents can not monitor mouse click of children.Solution lies with the Government, which could block this ads or penalize the companies, journalists/media and most importantly with the manufacturers with a conscience.

    Amy Norton
    Tue Dec 15, 2009 9:40am EST
    NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Advertisements for junk food may be cluttering many of the Web sites most popular with children, a new study suggests.

    When researchers examined 28 of the Web sites most frequented by children, they found that the majority of food products advertised there met experts’ criteria for “foods to avoid.”

    Ads for sugar-laden cereals, candy, soda or fast food populated a majority of the Web sites, which included sites one would not readily associate with food, like those run by Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, among others, noted Dr. Lori Dorfman, director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group in California and one of the researchers on the study.

    In contrast, of the 77 advertised products across all the Web sites, only five were foods that children should be encouraged to consume, the researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health.

    Cartoon Network declined to comment on the study, and calls to Nickelodeon were not immediately returned. But a spokesperson for PBS Kids — cited for having “fast food brands represented” on its Web site — said that its representation in the study is “misleading.”

    PBS Kids does not accept advertising, and “it does not market food products to children,” said Lesli Rotenberg, senior vice-president of children’s media.

    Instead, the site carries, at the bottom of some pages, the logos of various PBS sponsors — which include fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. “Children will never see an image of a food product,” Rotenberg said.

    She also noted that PBS Kids has Web pages — Fizzy’s Lunch Lab and Don’t Buy It — designed to teach kids about healthy eating and avoiding media influences, respectively.

    When it comes to the issue of media influences on children, TV ads have long been under fire for marketing junk food to children and teenagers.

    But the Internet has provided a whole new outlet for advertisers — and companies are expected to keep increasing the proportion of their spending devoted to online marketing, according to Dorfman’s team.

    “The public health implications are serious,” Dorfman told Reuters Health in an email, “because digital marketing such as what we found on Web sites popular with kids is much different than TV advertising, which caused the alarm in the first place.”

    “Digital marketing,” she argued, “is immersive, interactive and incessant — rather than 30 seconds watching a TV commercial, children are spending 20 minutes deeply engaged with the brand.”

    A recent study found that food manufacturers’ use of “advergames” — online games that companies use to boost traffic to their Web sites and promote their brands — may indeed influence kids’ eating choices.

    When researchers had children play advergames that focused on cookies and chips, the kids wanted those same foods afterward. But when the games featured fruit and orange juice, the children tended to want those foods for a post-game snack.

    For the current study, Dorfman and her colleagues assessed the nutritional quality of foods and beverages advertised on the 28 top children’s Web sites between July and August of 2007.

    Of the 77 products they found, 49 met the “foods to avoid” criteria set by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an advisory body to the federal government. Another 23 products fell into the neutral category because they were neither junk foods nor nutritious enough to be encouraged; such products included lower-sugar cereals and certain baked snack foods.

    Only five of the advertised products — including oatmeal, milk and pure fruit juice — were foods that the IOM encourages children to eat.

    “Parents should be concerned because much digital marketing flies under their radar,” Dorfman said.

    But she also asserted that parents should not be given the job of monitoring the ads their kids see online.

    “The online environment is not like watching TV, something a family might do together,” Dorfman said. “It’s unreasonable, and unfair,” she added, “to think that parents could monitor every mouse click children make.”

    Instead, Dorfman argued, “food marketers and children’s media companies need to adhere to higher nutrition standards for the foods they market to children, especially when they do it out of earshot of parents.”

    SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, November 2009.

  • Eating Meat May Cause Sickness, Paralysis and Death.

    Published in AlertNet

    By Tom Laskawy, Grist.org. Posted October 12, 2009.
    http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/143136/warning:_eating_meat_may_cause_sickness,_paralysis_and_death/?page=entire

    This year almost half a million pounds of E. coli infected beef have been recalled and sadly the government is far more concerned with protecting companies than public health.

    It’s hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss’s New York Times blockbuster investigative piece on E. coli in industrial beef, which is centered on the plight of Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left comatose, near death and now paralyzed from eating a single Cargill hamburger. Of course, a “single hamburger” can include meat from hundreds, some would say thousands, of animals. As Moss puts it:

    Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

    This is why a food safety expert who helped develop tracking systems for E. coli in meat can declare that, “Ground beef is not a completely safe product.” No kidding. The problem, however, is not with E. coli in general. The problem is that the particular strain of E. coli which infected Smith — known as E. coli O157:H7 — is virulent, deadly, persistent and endemic in industrial beef. How virulent, deadly and persistent? This much:

    Food scientists have registered increasing concern about the virulence of this pathogen since only a few stray cells can make someone sick, and they warn that federal guidance to cook meat thoroughly and to wash up afterward is not sufficient. A test by The Times found that the safe handling instructions are not enough to prevent the bacteria from spreading in the kitchen.

    In other words, if a piece of infected meat ends up in your kitchen, you are almost guaranteed exposure to it no matter how carefully you handle it. And how endemic? This year alone almost half a million pounds of E. coli infected ground beef have been recalled nationwide (and that doesn’t include the 800,000 pounds of Cargill beef recalled for contamination with antibiotic-resistant salmonella). Indeed, if Moss’s work proves anything, it’s that the safety systems in industrial beef processing are both barely functioning and almost fully opaque. And while the government is able to peek behind the curtain at these massive slaughterhouses and processing facilities, it seems far more concerned with protecting companies’ intellectual property than with the public health:

    The meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets. While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets. Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation that could be learned only through copies of the documents obtained from other sources. Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets.

    In one of the most chilling, and I thought devastating, quotes in the entire piece, a top official at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service observed that his options were somewhat limited since he had to “look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.” Note the fact that his phrasing sets the meat industry’s needs at odds with ours — the two can’t be reconciled in his eyes. What does that say about the government’s ability to ensure a safe food supply? No matter how you structure it, the industry now appears too big and too powerful to be regulated. What other explanation is there for the fact that the top food safety job at the USDA remains unfilled if not regulatory paralysis — the meat industry seems to have veto power over its regulators and hasn’t found a federal overseer to its liking.

    One area that Moss does not cover is how E. coli O157 got into industrial beef in the first place. In fact it’s there because of the meat industry’s insistence on feeding cows corn — something they cannot easily digest — instead of grass. Among other things, corn feeding requires cows to be fed a steady dose of antibiotics, which has led to the rise of antibiotic resistance among various pathogens. But more importantly, it has caused very real changes in the cow’s gut which has allowed this toxic strain of E. coli to take hold, a strain that research suggests cannot survive in the gut of cows that eat only grass.

    In short, E. coli didn’t just “happen” to the meat industry — it’s a consequence of industrial practices. But nowhere in the article (or in the halls of the USDA or the largescale beef producers for that matter) is the possibility of moving away from this corn-based system raised as a solution for the industrial system. Surprisingly, the article includes virtually no proposed solutions for this crisis — just vague assurances that the USDA isn’t “standing still” on the issue. In reality, the industry focuses exclusively on “managing” the ongoing presence of E. coli O157 though the development of an E. coli vaccine for cows, and irradiation or chemical washes for the meat. All of which are attempts to mask the risks of a failed system and represent an institutionalizing of the underlying failures. And none of which make me ever want to touch industrial meat again.

    Indeed, if there ever was a powerful argument for eating only grass-fed beef from small producers, this article is it. The only conclusion worth drawing from this expose is that industrial ground beef simply isn’t worth the risk. And without wholesale industry and regulatory reform — neither of which appears likely or even possible, it may never be.
    Comment:
    When one eats nen vegetarian food,the animal proteins are converted into vegetable proteins and only then is ingested by human system.Why then go for non veg. food?

    Remember, animal’s meat ,which we eat, gain their nourishment from vegetables and grass.

    Why don’t we go to the source as animals do?

    Also meat has a chance of being infected as is evidenced in this case.