Thread: Why should the government tell you what you can eat ?

ITA, I am a SAHM and cook dinner almost every night(we may eat out once a month) It is way cheaper than fast food to cook it yourself.

You know what it is about ALL of this?


Everything IN MODERATION

Chef Wolfgang Puck bans foie gras
39 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES - Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck is cooking up kinder, gentler menus. As part of a new initiative to fight animal cruelty, Puck said Thursday he will no longer serve foie gras, the fatty liver produced by overfeeding ducks and geese.

His 14 fine-dining restaurants, more than 80 fast-casual eateries and 43 catering venues will use only eggs from hens that have lived cage-free; veal from roaming calves; and lobsters that have been removed from their ocean traps quickly to avoid crowded holding tanks.

Puck said guests at his restaurants want to know their food is made with fresh, organic ingredients and that the animals were treated well. "We want a better standard for living creatures. It's as simple as that," Puck said.

The move came after three years of protests by Farm Sanctuary, an animal-rights group that launched http://www.wolfgangpuckcruelty.org — relabeled Wolfgang Puck Victory as of Thursday — and organized a leaflet campaign outside Puck's restaurants.

Puck worked with the Humane Society of the United States on the new initiative. He said he wasn't responding to pressure from animal welfare advocates, but instead believes the best-tasting food comes from animals that have been treated humanely. "We decided about three months ago to be really much more socially responsible," he said. "We feel the quality of the food is better, and our conscience feels better."

Chicken and turkey meat served at Puck's restaurants will come from farms that are compliant with progressive animal welfare standards, and menus will feature more vegetarian selections, he said.

The venues also will only serve certified sustainable seafood.

Puck's chefs will continue to kill lobsters by cutting them in half while they're still alive, rather than by using stun guns. And stingray-like skate and Russian caviar, both of which are on an "avoid" list compiled by Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, remain on his menus. His restaurants include Spago and Wolfgang Puck Gourmet Express.

The Humane Society applauded the efforts. "Wolfgang Puck's policies send a strong message to the agribusiness industry that it needs to start phasing out its most abusive practices," said Wayne Pacelle, the group's president and chief executive.

Banning any food, especially luxury ingredients, has been a thorny issue for chefs, who generally defend their right to use whatever they want.

Still, as Americans have had eating healthier food, many chefs at high-end restaurants, some smaller food-service chains and grocery chains like Whole Foods have refused to buy meat and eggs unless animals were raised under certain conditions.

In 2000, McDonald's became the first major American food company to impose minimum animal-welfare standards such as increasing cage size on its egg producers.

California has decided to ban the production and sale of foie gras starting in 2012. Chicago imposed a ban last year, and bans are being promoted in Illinois, New Jersey and New York.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070322/...RVsz5InjOs0NUE



No grisly food details, please -- we're British
Tue Mar 6, 11:21 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - British consumers increasingly take animal welfare into account in food purchases, but they don't want to know the gory details, a report said on Tuesday. "We are a nation of animal lovers and concerns over welfare standards are helping to shape the content of our shopping baskets," Julie Starck, senior consultant with international food and grocery research body IGD, said in a statement.

The IGD's report showed that 64 percent of consumers have considered animal welfare when buying food, although only 10 percent claimed they buy all higher welfare foods. The research found increased interest among consumers in the food they eat and how it was produced, a trend that also has sparked rising demand for organic and fairtrade products. "Food has begun to provide an emotional as well as functional role in consumers' lives," the report said.

The IGD research was sponsored by Freedom Food, a food labelling scheme aimed at improving animal welfare standards which has been set up by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The report noted that many consumers felt guilt about eating meat and were reluctant to explore welfare issues. "As consumers deliberately reject information on animal welfare due to the emotional response it provokes, it will be difficult to raise awareness of the issue, particularly at the point of purchase," the report said.

The report also linked the growth in demand to rising affluence among consumers. "A strategy must be developed to ensure that current purchasers maintain their support even if an economic downturn results in lower levels of disposable income," the report said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070306/...tain_welfare_1

The city of New York is not banning MODERATION they are banning trans fat.

Does less trans fat make food healthier?
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
Mon Apr 16, 7:55 PM ET

WASHINGTON - A major change in the national diet is under way: Heart-damaging trans fat is rapidly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant food, too. But are its replacements really healthier?

It's a tricky time for consumers, because the answer depends on the food — and some are losing trans fat only to have another artery clogger take its place, that old nemesis saturated fat. "Right now the public has to be very careful ... if something says 'trans fat-free,' what else is in it?" warns Dr. Robert Eckel, past president of the
American Heart Association.

Trans fat has become the new fall guy for bad nutrition. Chain restaurants are struggling to get it off the menu after New York City and Philadelphia required restaurants to phase it out by next year. Bills to restrict or ban trans fat in restaurants or school cafeterias have been introduced in at least 20 states.

At grocery stores, the government began forcing food labels to disclose the amount of trans fat in packaged foods last year, and the race was on to see which manufacturers could eliminate it first.

The irony: Americans eat about five times more saturated fat than trans fat. And while gram-for-gram, trans fat is considered somewhat more harmful than its cousin, too much of either greatly increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other ailments.

Trans fat is created when companies add hydrogen to liquid cooking oils to harden them for baking or for a longer shelf-life, turning them into "partially hydrogenated oils."

There is no single substitute. So food chemists and chefs are taste-testing their way through different cooking oils and fats — both naturally occurring ones and chemically modified ones — to find replacements that don't alter each food's taste or texture.

What are the options? There are some heart-healthier oils, called monounsaturated and polyunsaturated oils — such as olive, canola or soybean oils. Unlike trans and sat fats, these liquid oils don't raise levels of so-called bad cholesterol, or LDL cholesterol.

Frying chicken in canola or soybean oil instead of partially hydrogenated shortening is an easy switch. But you can't make, say, a pie crust with olive oil. Industry is finding that the toughest foods to rid of trans fat are baked goods, such as pastries, cookies, pizza crusts.

Substituting animal fats, such as butter or lard, or tropical oils such as palm or coconut oil may keep the taste, but they are super-high in saturated fat. "You need to find a replacement for a solid fat that doesn't have the health implications, and that's the tougher battle," says Susan Borra of the International Food Information Council. "We are changing the entire fatty acid profile of the food supply, and we're not sure we know what it's going to look like at the other end."

And that's where the concern comes in. Merely substituting saturated fat for the trans doesn't give the food more bad fat altogether than before, but it doesn't make it a healthy choice either, Eckel explains.

So the heart association is beginning a major campaign to teach consumers about the different fats and how to tell what foods they're in. (It's partly funded by a 2005 court settlement in which McDonald's was accused of being too slow to remove trans fat.)

How much fat is too much?

Federal guidelines say between 25 percent and 35 percent of total daily calories should come from fats, but the bad fats should make up only a fraction of that. The heart association says less than 7 percent of total calories should be saturated fat — the average American gets about 11 percent now. Trans fat should be less than 1 percent of calories, half today's average.

A centerpiece of the heart campaign is a Web-based calculator — at http://www.americanheart.org/facethefats — so consumers don't have to do that math. It tallies just how many grams of fat people of different ages and exercise habits can fit into a day, with lists of foods that fit the bill.

For some people, a single meal of a cheeseburger and small fries would just exceed the daily limit of bad fats. Others who are taller and more active could fit in two burgers and be OK.

Many companies are searching for trans fat alternatives that are healthier than saturated fats, Borra stresses. Indeed, the heart association brought together food makers, food chemists and health experts to explore all the options last fall, and among those generating interest are different ways to blend liquid and harder fats, in hopes of reducing the artery-clogging portions.

For now, reading the food label — the Nutrition Facts panel on the back of the package, not just the "trans-free" icon on the front — is key, says Michael Jacobson of the consumer advocacy Center for Science in the Public Interest.


EDITOR'S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070416/...bbwndIzFms0NUE

Ahhh... the irony ..

Geese get revenge: Pate may cause rare disease
2 hours, 38 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Geese force-fed and then slaughtered for their livers may get their final revenge on people who favor the delicacy known as foie gras: It may transmit a little-known disease known as amyloidosis, researchers reported on Monday.

Tests on mice suggest the liver, popular in French cuisine which uses it to make pate de foie gras and other dishes, may cause the condition in animals that have a genetic susceptibility to such diseases, Alan Solomon of the University of Tennessee and colleagues reported. That would suggest that amyloidosis can be transmitted via food in a way akin to brain diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, which can cause a rare version of mad cow disease in some people who eat affected meat products or brains.

Amyloidosis can affect various organ systems in the body, which accumulate damaging deposits of abnormal proteins known as amyloid. The heart, kidneys, nervous system and gastrointestinal tract are most often affected but amyloidosis can also cause a blood condition.

The researchers used mice genetically engineered to be susceptible to amyloidosis, which can be inherited. "When such mice were injected with or fed amyloid extracted from foie gras, the animals developed extensive systemic pathological deposits," Solomon's team reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sometimes Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, is described as a type of amyloidosis as well.

Symptoms are often vague and range from fatigue and weight loss to swelling and kidney damage.

Like CJD, mad cow disease, scrapie and related diseases, amyloidosis is marked by abnormal protein fragments. In the case of CJD, the proteins are called prions. "On this basis, we posit that this and perhaps other forms of amyloidosis may be transmissible, akin to the infectious nature of prion-related illnesses," the researchers added.

"In addition to foie gras, meat derived from sheep and seemingly healthy cattle may represent other dietary sources of this material."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070619/...8hbuS9kOYuQE4F