Scary Chinese Fortune Cookie

Not that they want anyone to get really worried, but the FDA has just ordered that all shipments of food products (for both humans and pets) must be tested first for melamine.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the FDA acted after 60 or so tests of Chinese candy and crackers tested positive for the additive, which has sickened tens of thousands of Chinese children, and caused at least four deaths.

Melamine is a particularly nasty chemical substance that has many industrial uses, but is toxic to humans, especially infants and children. Food suppliers have been illegally using it as a cheap filler.

The New York Times reports that in addition to the previously reported White Rabbit candy, consumers are being urged to worry about breaded shrimp, dietary supplements, and protein powders and shakes.

Consumer advocates are pleased that their worrying is being heard, but urges the testing to expand to cover egg and fish products, foods that have recently been found to contain the harmful additive.

Beware the White Rabbit - Tainted Candy Found in US Stores

The tainted Chinese dairy product scandal has finally hit the U.S. Bags of the popular Chinese White Rabbit candy tainted with Melamine have been found on store shelves in Connecticut.

According to the International Herald Tribune

Melamine is a chemical additive at the heart of China's contaminated dairy scare. It is used to make plastics and fertilizers, but it is sometimes illegally mixed into food products, including milk, because its high levels of nitrogen can help fool tests that measure protein levels.

In September, Chinese authorities acknowledged that more than 53,000 Chinese infants had been sickened after consuming powdered baby formula that had been contaminated with melamine. Of that total, 13,000 were hospitalized and four have died.

Please don't feed your head.

NY Times follows up on my Vitamin D story

The New York Times did a follow-up story to my earlier post about the dangers of too little vitamin D.

According to the Times, medical types have noticed an increase in the number of babies with problems they suspect are the result of too little vitamin D, including rickets, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

Doctors suspect multiple causes, including exclusive breastfeeding (since the mothers are vitamin D deprived themselves), children drinking soda and juice instead of milk, and not enough time spent outdoors in the sun. Because we know that exposure to the sun will cause instant death, the recommended solution is to feed your baby vitamin supplements and cod liver oil.



But wait! According to Sydney Spiesel, a pediatrician and professor at Yale University School of Medicine, too much cod liver oil will actually do damage to your bones. Overdo the cod liver oil and you're likely to get too much vitamin A, which can lead to "liver damage to nervous-system symptoms that resemble the effects of a brain tumor," as well as bone mineral loss leading to osteoporosis.

Well, that certainly clears things up.

Restaurant Food Isn't Good For Your Kid

Put this in the "hardly shocking, but still good to keep in mind" folder:

A new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report that showed that of the 13 largest restaurant chains, 93% of the possible kids' food combos contained a third of the total calories that kids 4-8 should consume in a day. Not too terrible in itself. However, for many of the places, though, almost all of the value-priced kids combos packed an entire days calories into a single meal.

The fast-food joints did about as poorly as you might expect (with the exception of Subway, mostly because they push milk instead of soda--ahhh!! milk!!!), but the big chains like Chili's and Denny's were some of the worst offenders. Many other chains don't make their nutrition info public.

We're bummed because one of our favorite neighborhood burrito joints, Boloco (with lots of cheap, fresh food on the menu), just closed the shop closest to our house. And, of course, it was the one location with a kids play area.

How are you supposed to feed your kid on the run without packing up half the fridge in your pack?

Low Fat and Skim Milk Does a Body Bad

Cinderalla wants a little sibling to kick around. This means that the Wife and I have to think about reproduction. Fertility = worry times 1 gazillion.

Turns out, according to people in white coats at Harvard, drinking less than full fat milk can reduce fertility. In an 8-year study of over 18,000 women between the ages of 24-42 (married, premenopausal with no history of infertility), those

who ate more than two portions a day of low fat dairy foods were 85 per cent more likely to be infertile due to ovulatory disorders than those who only ate it less than once a week.

Conversely they found that women who ate full-fat dairy foods, including ice cream, more than once per day had a 25 per cent reduced risk of infertility due to ovulatory disorders compared to those who ate full-fat dairy foods only once a week

The authors concluded that women trying to get pregnant should increase their intake of full-fat dairy, but keep their overall calorie intake the same. Good luck with that!

Other white coated people who couldn't get a job at Harvard have also done similarly huge studies of men and reported that men with diets heavy in low-fat dairy show a higher malignancy risk of prostate cancer compared with those who consume more full-fat dairy.