Still Eat Conventional Meat?

Still Eat Conventional Meat or Poultry? Preservatives, Antimicrobials, Antifungals, and Viral Sprays Saturate Factory Farmed Sources

70 percent of all beef and chicken sold in the United States, Canada, UK and Australia and many other countries contain a growing number of preservatives, meat glues, and antibacterial/antifungal/antiviral sprays. They also are commonly treated with carbon monoxide gas injections to make meat appear more fresh than it actually is.

Synthetic preservatives are added to 70 percent of all factory farmed meat and poultry to prevent spoilage, rancidity and mould growth.

Sodium Benzoate, Sodium Proprionate and Benzoic Acid

The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has amended regulations that once banned the use of sodium benzoate, sodium propionate and benzoic acid in meat and poultry products, the Food and Drug Administration has announced.

In combination with ascorbic acid (vitamin C, E300), sodium benzoate and potassium benzoate form benzene, form known carcinogens. If a individual happens to consume any of these toxins after consuming ascorbic acid, a carcinogenic process may initiate.

The three preservatives had been on the list of prohibited antimicrobial substances the FSIS considered to have the potential to conceal damage or inferiority in meat and poultry.

The change follows a petition by Kraft Foods Global Inc., which wants to use the substances to help inhibit the growth of bacteria.

After consideration, the FSIS said it has "determined that sodium benzoate, sodium propionate and benzoic acid, under the conditions proposed in the petitions, are both safe and suitable for use as antimicrobial agents in certain RTE (Ready-to-Eat) meat and poultry products."

Nitrites/Nitrates

Nitrites and nitrates are also added to meat products during processing to inhibit the growth of bacteria and enhance color. Nitrites may be added directly to the meat product, but more frequently nitrates are added. Nitrites are used in pork, beef and poultry products to enhance colour. For example, nitrates are added to ham and bacon, giving them their characteristic pink colour. Some countries even permit the use of nitrites in fish products.

When nitrites combine with certain amino acids, N-nitroso compounds or nitrosamines are formed and these have been shown to be carcinogenic (cancer-causing). Our primary source of exposure to nitrates and nitrites is through the food we consume, however exposure to these compounds can also occur through drinking water.

Sulphites

They are used widely as preservatives in food to maintain food colour and prolong shelf-life. Sulphites can also be used in some pharmaceutical medications as a way of maintaining their potency.

Sulphites can trigger asthma or an anaphylactic-type reactions. Certain individuals, particularly those with asthma, may react to sulphites with allergy-like symptoms. It's one reason most pre-packaged foods are required to have an ingredients listing on the presence of sulphites on the label. The pre-packaged food product label will state “may contain” or “may contain traces of” sulphites and sulphite derivatives.

It is important to always read the ingredients’ lists and remember that sulphite derivatives exist and may be listed as:

E 220, E 221, E 222, E 223, E 224, E 225, E 226, E 227, E 228 (European names)
Potassium bisulphite/metabisulphite
Sodium bisulphite/dithionite/metabisulphite/sulphite
Sulfur dioxide
Sulphiting agents
Sulphurous acid

Meat Glue

Produced as Activa by Japan's Ajinomoto Company, it's scientific name is "transglutaminase" and it belongs to the family of clotting enzymes which are eight in number.

Meat glue is thrombin, a coagulation protein which together with the fibrous protein fibrin can be used to develop a "meat glue" enzyme that can be used for sticking together different pieces of meat. It can be made from blood taken from either cows or pigs.

The European Parliament had voted to ban bovine and porcine thrombin. The House said the meat glue has no proven benefit for consumers and might mislead them instead. One year later, all but one of the European Union nations voted in favor of using Thrombian, or Transglutaminase (TG). They now joining other developed nations such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia who approved the product.

This sort of thing has been a boon to the food industry, which can now treat all sorts of proteins like meat or fish as just another material to be processed, but in the hands of molecular gastronomists it's become a way to manipulate food in a way that would have been previously impossible. It's possible, for example, to make tenderloin rolls wrapped in bacon that hold together perfectly without the need for twine or toothpicks.

Viral Sprays

The FDA also approved a virus-cocktail spray that might prevent listeriosis. The spray, called LMP 102, is a mixture of six different special viruses called bacteriophages -- viruses that infect only bacteria, not people, animals or plants.

Bacteriophages, like all viruses, contain protein. These proteins can cause allergic reactions, just like milk proteins cause milk allergies.
The bacteriophages might also get into battle with the friendly bacteria in the digestive system, making it harder for the body to digest food. But that's a risk the FDA already takes by allowing the use of antibiotics on farms.
The FDA currently allows bacteriophages to be used in pesticides, including those sprayed on crops. But this is the first time that the FDA has regulated the use of bacteriophages as a food additive. Other countries actually use bacteriophages in antibiotic drugs.

The idea here is that these six bacteriophages will infect and kill any listeria bacteria that might linger on meats.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, use of this spray will have to be marked on the food just like any other ingredient on the label.
Consumers might soon see the words "bacteriophage preparation" on cold cuts. As always, although the virus spray is intended to make food safer, it does not come without its own risks.
Carbon Monoxide Treatment

Carbon monoxide (often referred to as CO) is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, one measly oxygen molecule away from the carbon dioxide we all exhale. But that one molecule makes a big difference in that it does very, very bad things to the human body at very, very low concentrations.
CO is toxic because it sticks to hemoglobin, a molecule in blood that usually carries oxygen, even better than oxygen can. When people are exposed to higher levels of CO, the gas takes the place of oxygen in the bloodstream and wreaks havoc. Milder exposures mean headaches, confusion, and tiredness. Higher exposures mean unconsciousness and death, and even those who survive CO poisoning can suffer serious long-term neurological consequences.
Keeping meat at healthy temperatures is very challenging for grocery retailers. The actual surface temperature of displayed fresh meat is often much higher than the thermometer of the display case due to UV radiation from the display case lighting which penetrates the meat packaging and heats the surface just as the sun can cause a sunburn on a cold winter day. Various studies have found that the internal temperature of meat from display cases does exceed 50 degrees Celsius which is more than 10 degrees higher than recommended temperatures.

The meat consequently decomposes very quickly, so the meat industry heavily invested in modified atmospheric packaging which utilizes carbon monoxide gas to extend the shelf life and resist spoilage.

In a carbon monoxide system, with low oxygen, the carbon monoxide will react with the myoglobin and give the meat a bright red colour. The low oxygen mixture artificially limits the growth of spoilage organisms that are commonly caused by increased levels of heat in display cases.

So although carbon monoxide is a gas that can be fatal when inhaled in large quantities, the meat industry insists that it is not harmful to human health when ingested via atmospheric packaging.

This is not true of course since C. perfringens bacteria, the third-most-common cause of food-borne illness, has been proven to grow on what is considered fresh meat right out of the supermarket that is well within the expiry dates on the labels. Marissa Cattoi a lab tech who analyzes meat samples for a health and safety agency says the bacteria are commonly found on fresh grocery meat. "We commonly test for C.perfringens bacteria and about half of the fresh meat products that come in are positive despite them being within the expiry period. 100% of the these cases come from packagers who adopted atmospheric packaging methods such as the use of carbon monoxide gas," she stated.

Most atmospheric packaging will not be labeled. There also many foods that do not have to declare the presence of preservatives, unless the amount of the preservative is naturally occurring in, or added to, the product exceeds a certain concentration.

Do Antibiotics Permanently Kill Off Beneficial Bacteria?

It’s an accepted concept by now that taking antibiotics in order to quell an infection disrupts the personal microbiome, the population of microorganisms that we all carry around in our guts, and which vastly outnumbers the cells that make up our bodies.

That recognition supports our understanding of Clostridium difficile disease — killing the beneficial bacteria allows C. diff room to surge and produce an overload of toxins — as well as the intense interest in establishing a research program that could demonstrate experimentally whether the vast industry producing probiotic products is doing what it purports to do.

But implicit in that concept is the expectation that, after a while — after a course of antibiotics ends — the gut flora repopulate and their natural balance returns.

What if that expectation were wrong?

In a provocative editorial published this week in Nature, Martin Blaser of New York University’s Langone Medical Center argues that antibiotics’ impact on gut bacteria is permanent — and so serious in its long-term consequences that medicine should consider whether to restrict antibiotic prescribing to pregnant women and young children.

Early evidence from my lab and others hints that, sometimes, our friendly flora never fully recover. These long-term changes to the beneficial bacteria within people’s bodies may even increase our susceptibility to infections and disease. Overuse of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma, which have more than doubled in many populations.

Among the findings he cites in support: The population-level observation that the incidence of infection with H. pylori, the bacterial cause of gastric ulcers, has declined over decades just as the incidence of esophageal cancer has risen. In addition, he offers his own research group’s observation that children who don’t acquire H. pylori are at greater risk of developing allergy and asthma, and their findings that eradicating H. pylori affects the production of the two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, that play a role in weight gain.

Are antibiotics to blame for the decline in H.pylori? Blaser points out that the organism is vulnerable to the same antibiotics that are prescribed to children for ear infections and colds — and that children routinely receive up to 20 courses of antibiotics before they reach adulthood. In addition, he says, one-third to one-half of women in the industrialized world receive antibiotics during pregnancy.

 Couple that with the increasingly large percentage of children born by Caesarean section — who by skipping their trip through the birth canal miss their first exposure to friendly bacteria — and the result, he says, is that “each generation… could be beginning life with a smaller endowment of ancient microbes than the last.”

Finally, he points to evidence that antibiotic use permanently changes the composition of the gut microbiome, altering the balance of bacterial species and maintaining resistant bacteria in the gut.

The function and influence of the microbiome — in the gut, on the skin and everywhere in the body — is a huge research issue right now, with the founding by the National Institutes of Health of the Human Microbiome Project, not to mention continuing debates over the accuracy of the “hygiene hypothesis” and speculation that altering gut flora could influence everything from obesity to depression.

 This proposal dovetails with those inquiries — and also (you knew I had to get there eventually) with ongoing concern about antibiotic over-use encouraging the emergence of resistant organisms.

It’s understood that antibiotics are already over-prescribed in adults and children; reining in over-prescribing is one of the most difficult tasks in controlling the spread of superbugs. This new hypothesis, Blaser says, ought to put more force behind the push to reduce antibiotic overuse, especially in early life:

We urgently need to investigate this possibility. And, even before we understand the full scope, there is action we should take.

Cite: Blaser MJ. Stop the killing of beneficial bacteria. Nature 476, 393–394 (25 August 2011). doi:10.1038/476393a


NOTE:

Pathogenic Bacteria and Antibiotics:

In an attempt to destroy all bacterial infections antibiotics were created, however they can not selectively kill only the bad bacteria.  Antibiotics are indiscriminate, they kill off the weaker bacteria too, often this is the beneficial bacterial that your body needs to keep the more harmful bacteria in check.

When the beneficial bacteria is destroyed this enables the antibiotic resistant bacteria to replicate without competition from the beneficial bacterial.

Whatever was making you sick before is still bothering you, but now you are also faced with antibiotic risks and the risks of long term antibiotic use.   The antibiotics have caused an imbalance to your body because the antibiotics have also killed the friendly bacteria, creating a bacterial imbalance.

Eventually the more pathogenic bacteria end up resistant to antibiotics.  When normal antibiotic use doesn't completely destroy the bacterial infection, then your body is really out of balance.

Bacteria are a highly intelligent and adaptable life form, like all life forms their goal is to survive.

Some bacteria are naturally immune to antibiotics and others quickly adapt a resistance in order to survive.

Through pharmaceutical use we have created highly adaptable, antibiotic resistant bacteria, they do this through evolutionary trial and error.

Bacteria create new generations 500,000 faster than humans
replicating every 20 minutes.

The pathogenic bacteria become stronger and more resistance to an increasing number of antibiotics, more potent, more dangerous and creating body imbalances that are more difficult to restore.

Learn more:  http://www.natural-health-home-remedies.com/bacteria.html

Jurassic Park In Petri Dish?

A 500 million-year-old bacteria has been brought back to life in a laboratory at Georgia Tech in an experiment with echoes of Jurassic Park’s disastrous recreation of the dinosaurs.

The researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene and inserted it into a modern E Coli bacteria.

The ‘Frankenstein’ germ has thrived. In the lab, the creation has now lived through 1,000 generations.

The scientists hope to find out whether the ‘ancient’ bacteria will evolve the same way it did ‘first time round’ – or whether it will evolve into a different, new organism.

‘This is as close as we can get to rewinding and replaying the molecular tape of life,’ said scientist Betül Kaçar, a NASA astrobiology postdoctoral fellow in Georgia Tech.

The new ‘chimeric’ bacteria has mutated rapidly – and some have become stronger and healthier than today’s germs.

‘The ability to observe an ancient gene in a modern organism as it evolves within a modern cell allows us to see whether the evolutionary trajectory once taken will repeat itself or whether a life will adapt following a different path.’

‘The altered organism wasn’t as healthy or fit as its modern-day version, at least initially,’ said Gaucher, ‘and this created a perfect scenario that would allow the altered organism to adapt and become more fit as it accumulated mutations with each passing day.’

The growth rate eventually increased and, after the first 500 generations, the scientists sequenced the genomes of all eight lineages to determine how the bacteria adapted.

Not only did the fitness levels increase to nearly modern-day levels, but also some of the altered lineages actually became healthier than their modern counterpart.

When the researchers looked closer, they noticed that every EF-Tu gene did not accumulate mutations.

Instead, the modern proteins that interact with the ancient EF-Tu inside of the bacteria had mutated and these mutations were responsible for the rapid adaptation that increased the bacteria’s fitness.

In short, the ancient gene has not yet mutated to become more similar to its modern form, but rather, the bacteria found a new evolutionary trajectory to adapt.

These results were presented at the recent NASA International Astrobiology Science Conference. The scientists will continue to study new generations, waiting to see if the protein will follow its historical path or whether it will adopt via a novel path altogether.

‘We think that this process will allow us to address several longstanding questions in evolutionary and molecular biology,’ said Kaçar.

‘Among them, we want to know if an organism’s history limits its future and if evolution always leads to a single, defined point or whether evolution has multiple solutions to a given problem.’

DHS To Release Bacteria Into Boston Subways To Test On People ~ Like It Or Not!

The Department of Homeland Security has announced their intentions to release bacteria into Boston area subways to “test” their biological sensors, this despite the US governments long history of testing dangerous bio weapons on unsuspecting Americans throughout the country.

The announcement came in a short news report that literally acted as if this is simply an everyday normal occurrence.

“The DHS has installed sensors in the MBTA system to detect biological agents and they’ve been testing to see how the air moves. Now they want to release particles in the tunnels to see how well the sensors work,” reported CBS Boston.

Officials, many with a long history of lying, have claimed that they will be releasing a dead bacteria called B-subtilis which is apparently used in food supplements and has been “rigorously” tested and shown to have no adverse health effects in healthy people.

Rigorously tested by the same agencies who have also approved the use of deadly chemicals on American citizens or the use of the toxic artificial sweetener known as aspartame?

How will this effect unhealthy people who happen to get dosed with DHS approved bacteria?

In an article on Infowars.com, Paul Joseph Watson documented the stupidity of actually believing that any bacteria any government agency releases is safe.

“During a Senate hearing in 1977, it was revealed that the Pentagon had conducted numerous secret germ “attacks” on cities without public knowledge in an effort to test the threat posed by biological agents. These tests “may have caused outbreaks of disease which occurred in some of the test areas,” writes Leonard A. Cole, citing the Senate inquiry.

Since the 1940′s, the military and the CIA have conducted numerous “tests” on the American people, including the release of dengue fever carrying mosquitoes in Georgia and Florida, biological warfare tests on the civilian population in Puerto Rico, the release of bacillus globigii from a submarine on the port of Oahu, Hawaii, and dozens of other incidents, most of them classified.

The history of U.S. government and military experimentation on American citizens and the innumerable deaths and illnesses that occurred as a result underscore the fact that trusting the Department of Homeland Security, which has proven itself to be one of the most corrupt and secretive federal agencies in existence, to carry out such tests in public, no matter how “safe” the DHS claims them to be, is the height of stupidity.”

Let us hope an agency that is part of a government that has pathologically lied in regards to testing of all sorts of deadly weapons are somehow going against history and telling the truth as to what they are actually releasing.

NOTE: Hey why not encourage DHS to release bacteria into their buildings for enhanced testing?

GMO Corn In Danger

Nature herself may be the best opponent of genetically modified crops and pesticides. Not only plants, but insects are also developing resistance. The Western rootworm beetle – one of the most serious threats to corn – has developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt-corn, and entire crops are being lost.

Farmers from several Midwest states began reporting root damage to corn that was specifically engineered with a toxin to kill the rootworm. Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann recently confirmed that the beetle, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera, has developed resistance to the Bt protein, Cry3Bb1.

Bacillus thuringiensis – Bt – is a bacterium that kills insects. Different proteins are engineered into cotton as well as corn plants.


NOTE:


Nature will always win, against anything "engineered"

Bacteria are a highly intelligent and adaptable life form, like all life forms their goal is to survive. In my opinion, bacteria are more intelligent than GMO engineers. Bacteria are part of nature, while engineers work against nature, eventually they will lose.

Some bacteria are naturally immune to antibiotics & pesticides and others quickly adapt a resistance in order to survive.

Through pharmaceutical use we have created highly adaptable, antibiotic resistant bacteria, they do this through evolutionary trial and error.

Bacteria create new generations 500,000 faster than humans,replicating every 20 minutes.

The pathogenic bacteria become stronger and more resistance to an increasing number of antibiotics and pesticides, which are more potent, more dangerous and creating imbalances that are more difficult to restore.

Bacteria also communicate their survival skills with other bacteria, they exchange antibiotic resistance information, teaching other bacteria how to resist, avoid and override antibiotics, or GMO pesticides.

Isn't nature amazing?

Bacteria share their information to resist pharmaceuticals or pesticides via a mechanism of copying the resistant bacteriums DNA, thus passing the resistance onto the next generation of bacteria.

The next generation of bacteria has learned from past generations and is now more efficient on how to over throw any pharmaceutical drug, or GMO pesticide, thrown at it!

If that weren't wonderful enough, bacteria also emit pheromones that attract other bacteria to them to share more information against fighting antibiotics , or GMO pesticides, that would threaten their survival.

Almost in anticipation of new antibiotics, or GMO & pesticides, bacteria also develop resistance to antibiotics and pesticides that they have never encountered.

Let's help out the Bettle by REJECTING ALL GMO & Voting our dollars with nature!

Rick Perry And Bank Of America

Should we be surprised, frightened, disgusted or simply say "we knew it", that in the informal mixer just after Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry spoke at a Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford, New Hampshire, an unknown gentlemen approaches a casual Perry like an Ian Flemming character, and proceeds to dead drop the following: "Bank of America... We will help you out"... and silently moves on. At least we know now who is funding what, and whose interests potential future president Perry will be paid to defend.