Food irradiation - 'protecting' us?

Better Nutrition, Feb, 1998 by James J. Gormley

The recent mass-media coverage of food irradiation has obscured the real issues. In truth: 1) the answer to a safe food supply depends on whether the mainstream food industry accepts its responsibility to clean up its act -- for good; 2) the fact that irradiation doesn't turn our food radioactive is not a relief considering its real dangers; and 3) the public is rightfully suspicious of this bizarre solution to very real problems with our food supply.

Toxicologist Marcia van Gemert, Ph.D., chaired a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) committee that investigated 441 studies on irradiated foods in the 1980s. In 1993, Dr. van Gemert issued a statement outlining why "those studies were inadequate to evaluate the safety of irradiated foods." These are the studies which underpin the FDA's December 2nd decision approving the irradiation of red meat.

A 1975 clinical study in India, which appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at 15 malnourished children who were fed either irradiated or non-irradiated food. Eighty percent of the children fed irradiated food developed a pre-cancerous chromosomal disorder called polyploidy. A more recent study on 70 students in China (Chinese Medical Journal, 1987) also showed an increased rate of chromosomal abnormalities.

In addition, the "unique radiolytic products" (URP's), or toxins, produced through irradiation include: known carcinogens such as formaldehyde (used in embalming) and naphthalene (used in moth repellents), and others. If this were not enough, essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids are also destroyed at varying levels.

And what about long-term effects? With carcinogens like formaldehyde, "It will take 30 years before you see increases in neoplasias -- leukemias and lymphomas," warned George Tritsch, Ph.D., retired researcher from the Roswell Park Memorial Institute and the New York State Department of Health.

Whether it's Olestra yesterday, or irradiated food today, the FDA is sending a message to consumers that the public is not trusted to exercise personal responsibility or to observe the most basic food-preparation hygiene practices, respectively. More ominously, food processors will see this as the green light to continue to run filthy plants, to ignore sanitary food-preparation regulations, and to use their record of tragic poisonings and fatalities to force widespread irradiation on us.

If public "demand" is in question, an August 25th CBS News poll found that, nationwide, 73 percent of those polled oppose food irradiation, and 77 percent say they would not eat irradiated food.

So what will irradiation accomplish? 1) It will offer short-term litigation "protection" to food-processors, and will help them win huge food-chain contracts, 2) It will make irradiation companies very happy; and 3) It will fulfill the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) stated goal, through its Byproducts Utilization Program, to unload its stockpile of radioactive cesium 137 in order to drive Canadian cobalt 60 out of the market.

"Irradiation of food is not a story of protection of the American public," said Gary Gibbs, D.O., in his prophetic 1993 book, The Food That Would Last Forever: Understanding the Dangers of Food Irradiation (Avery Publishing, phone: 1-800-548-5757). "Rather it is a story of money, politics, and the embalming of the American diet. Food irradiation is a toxic time bomb."