Melamine is still in our foods

A year and a half ago, I said pretty much all I wanted to say about cheap imported food ingredients -- avoid them. It's too easy to sneak in powdered melamine scrap in place of vegetable protein powders, isolates, and concentrates, or powdered milk or eggs. Too easy to replace glycerine with antifreeze. This means avoiding all the processed foods made with these ingredients, too. You can't know where they came from. And the FDA has just blocked the import of all milk products from China, along with pet and laboratory animal feeds.

Hong Kong and South Korea are turning away eggs and egg products because they are contaminated. It isn't clear whether the powdered eggs rejected by South Korea were directly contaminated, or if they were simply came from chickens fed contaminated feed. The levels of melamine in the flesh, milk, or eggs of an animal fed contaminated feed are likely to be much less than the levels of food ingredients directly contaminated with melamine.

product	contamination level
Sanlu milk, reconstituted	~360 ppm
Recalled 2007 pet food	60-70 ppm
Recalled Chinese vegetable proteins	>70 ppm
Egg powder, South Korea	.1ppm - 4 ppm
Hong Kong eggs	3.5 ppm

The FDA says 2.5ppm is the level of concern, except for in baby formula where none (or 25ppb, the limit of detection) is tolerable. This is based on evidence that 50ppm is tolerable (from animal studies?), up from a 2007 LOC of 194ppb to 450ppb, based on a TDI of .63 mg/kg/day, with a "100-fold safety factor".

Using the EU's TDI of .5mg/kg/day, the WHO concludes that the LOC for milk is 25ppm -- 10 times as high as the FDA's LOC.

How about a nice home-made Chipotle-Squash soup instead?

• FDA Melamine Contamination information page
  

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Chinese Ingredients -- Dangerously Unregulated

It isn't just dangerous chemical scrap in pet foods¹. Chinese companies intentionally sold a poison in place of a common cold-medicine ingredient. At least 100 Panamanians died before the 260,000 bottles of medicine could be destroyed.² And China has become "the source of most of the world’s fake drugs."⁵

In the US, we have come to depend on the FDA to ensure that our foods and medicines actually contain the ingredients claimed on the labels, that they are free of dangerous levels of chemical or biological contamination. But now we are importing large quantities of commodity ingredients from countries that don't share our history or expectations -- China never prosecuted or even closely examined any of the glycerine companies for their role in the Panamanian deaths.² So we have to take action. The FDA has recommended drug makers to test every shipment of glycerine.⁶ A good idea.

In March, the FDA refused admissions for all vegetable protein products from China.³ One week later, China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine promised to begin inspection of vegetable proteins for export.⁴. This could help pet food makers (and perhaps human food and dietary supplement makers) feel more confident that they are getting what they paid for. They still might need to pay for more expensive protein assays that won't be fooled by high-nitrogen, non-protein additives like melamine scrap in their low-cost imported ingredients.

According to counterfeiting experts, "no amount of enforcement is going to stop" the distribution of counterfeit prescription drugs.⁵

If we suddenly had to stop importing all Chinese food and medicine ingredients, we would be unhappy with the effect on the economy. But it does make you stop and think. Why are these commodity ingredients such a big part of the global economy? Glycerine, vegetable protein concentrates, amino acid supplement powders. These are not whole foods. How about a bowl of New Orleans red beans and rice instead of some highly processed snack made with TVP and rice gluten?

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1. Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China, New York Times, April 30, 2007

2. From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine, New York Times, May 6, 2007

3. IMPORT ALERT #99-29, "DETENTION WITHOUT PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OF ALL VEGETABLE PROTEIN PRODUCTS FROM CHINA FOR ANIMAL OR HUMAN FOOD USE DUE TO THE PRESENCE OF MELAMINE AND/OR MELAMINE ANALOGS", US FDA, 4/27/07

4. "2 companies blamed for tainted pet food", China Daily, 2007-05-08.

5. "In the World of Life-Saving Drugs, a Growing Epidemic of Deadly Fakes", New York Times, February 27, 2007.

6. "FDA Advises Manufacturers to Test Glycerin for Possible Contamination", US FDA, May 4, 2007.

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