Slashdot Mirror
Watchdog Report Finds Alarming 20 Percent of Baby Food Tested Contains Lead (arstechnica.com)
According to an analysis released Thursday by the nonprofit advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Fund, twenty percent of 2,164 baby foods sampled between 2003 and 2013 by the Food and Drug Administration tested positive for lead. Ars Technica reports: Lead is a neurotoxin. Exposure at a young age can permanently affect a developing brain, causing lifelong behavioral problems and lower IQ. Though the levels in the baby food were generally below what the FDA considers unsafe, the agency's standards are decades old. The latest research suggests that there is no safe level of lead for children. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency this year has estimated that more than five percent of U.S. children (more than a million) get more than the FDA's recommended limit of lead from their diet. The products most often found to contain lead were fruit juices, root vegetable-based foods, and certain cookies, such as teething biscuits, the EDF reports. Oddly, the presence of lead was more common in baby foods than in the same foods marketed for adults. For instance, only 25 percent of regular apple juice tested positive for lead, while 55 percent of apple juices marketed for babies contained lead. Overall, only 14 percent of adult foods tested contained lead. The findings come from data collected in the FDA's annual survey of foods, called the Total Diet Survey, which the agency has run since the 1970s. Each year, the agency samples 280 types of foods from three different cities across the country, tracking nutrients, metals, pesticides, and other contaminants.
I completely disagree. An actual free market would be nice right now, where people would make decisions that they are informed upon not based on any government rules, laws and taxes but based on independent testing done by rating agencies, which would make certain foods marginally more expensive than others because they would be tested that way and the brand name of the rating agency would be at stake.
You can't handle the truth.
Nonsense. Food safety laws, like all other laws are never stopped by existence of working systems, they are implemented because the mob (the masses, the lowest common denominator) does not want to think and to bother, so they demand 100% safety, 100% compliance, 100% of everything. Laws are implemented to cover edge cases and there are *always* edge cases. Laws are *always* unnecessary power grab and they never solve anything, but they do make the mob feel better, because 'something must be done, this is something, ergo this must be done'.
As to the rating agencies, under the existing system and with all of the laws, the rating agencies that exist all except one (Egan Jones) recommended mortgage backed securities (derivatives) as triple A rated debt until the very moment the market crashed.
This happened because the government backed these securities with laws sanding low borrowing standards (FHA, Freddie and Fannie, everyone should have a home, etc) and with insurance promises.
Egan Jones didn't and Egan Jones also rated government bonds as junk and its license to rate government debt was revoked, while all other government supporting agencies lied knowingly.
Sure, the liars are making money... Under the current system *only* the liars are making money.
You can't handle the truth.