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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Sweet Potatoes -- better than potatoes

Sweet Potatoes: Japanese, Jewel, Okinawa, and Garnet

Sweet Potatoes are sweet. But they aren't potatoes. They're better. They raise your blood sugar and insulin a lot less than real potatoes do. Sweet potatoes have a low glycemic indexof 54, while baked potatoes have a high glycemic index of 85....

This can be important if you are diabetic or pre-diabetic, have heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or triglycerides. Because, as I've learned, a lot of damage to your heart happens right after a meal that raises your blood sugar too much. And Sweet Potatoes are good sources of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, B6, iron, potassium, and fiber.

Sweet potatoes are not yams, though orange-fleshed sweet potatoes are often called yams. Some people don't like the "pumpkin" flavor and moist, soft texture of orange sweet potatoes. Fortunately, there are other sweet potato choices, from the white-fleshed "Japanese" or "Kotobuki", to the pale yellow "Jersey", to the purple-fleshed "Okinawan". These all have a drier, fluffier flesh, with a mild to slightly nutty flavor.

Sweet potato muffins are still a big favorite of mine, but, more and more, I'm buying the Jerseys and the Japanese to replace baked or roasted potatoes at the dinner table. I think the Japanese "Kotobuki" would make a nice fluffy mash, but I haven't tried it yet.

A 100-gram serving of baked sweet potato has the same amount of carbohydrates (21g) as a 100g serving of baking potato. But the sweet potato has 3g of fiber, 6.5g of sugar, and 7g of starch (is it just me, or are there about 4g of carb missing from that equation?), while the baking potato has 2g of fiber, 1.2g of sugar, and 17.3g of starch.

Photo from Nakashima Farms, Ditty's Saturday Market, Livingston, CA.

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Whole foods -- not a brand name

Highly processed commodity foods and ingredients have been in the news, starting with all the bad news about Chinese food ingredients. At the same time, there is a debate going on about the advisability of concocting "functional" foods out of isolates, extracts, phytochemicals, and derivatives of foods. Many of these highly-processed foods are labelled "healthy" and even "organic".

At one time, eating organically was supposed to be the antidote to some bad food choices. Fresher, more nutritious, less tainted, grown in a way that is less depleting to farmland. Sounds good, right? But what's the point of eating "organic" versions of popular highly-processed foods?Is an organic Twinkie really what we are aiming for? If you can mix up some organic vegetable protein isolates with some natural flavoring extracts and beet juice concentrate for color, would the resulting organic meal replacement bar really be a good replacement for a meal?

What's wrong with red beans (30 minutes in the pressure cooker), brown rice (30 minutes on the stovetop), a side of carrots (20 minutes), or broccoli (10 minutes) and quick green salad with tomatoes, and maybe a nice little piece of blackened fish? For dessert, how about a nice piece of fruit or even an apple crisp (30 minutes in the oven). Now THAT sounds like a meal. It's the kind of food that, studies show, helps us stay healthy.

It is hard to substitute toxic chemical scrap for any of these foods -- you recognize these foods when you handle them. And you recognize them when you eat them. You don't need to add coloring or flavoring extracts (organic or pseudo-organic). You can cook it in quantity and freeze portions for your later convenience. You'll have something that tastes good, something you can take pride in preparing and enjoy sharing with other people.

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