MRSA Bacteria in Your Grocery Store’s Meat Products
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (MRSA), which can cause serious, life-threatening infections of the bloodstream, skin, lungs, and other organs, and is resistant to a number of antibiotics, has been found to be more prevalent in grocery store raw pork products than previously thought.
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Genetically modified corn losing resistance to major pest
Bt corn, one of the nation’s most widely produced crops, is thought to be losing its natural resistance to the western corn rootworm, a pest that feeds on the roots of corn and could potentially wreak economic havoc if it continues to spread.
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EarthTalk: What became of the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act?; and Mississippi River floods and organic farms
Dear EarthTalk: Can you explain the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act? What does it purport to do and has it been signed into law?
– Megan Wilson, Austin, TX
The Safe Cosmetics Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in July 2010 by Democrats Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. But it never got past committee reviews and thus never came up for a vote.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has only limited
say in what cosmetics manufacturers can and cannot
put into their products. And the cosmetics industry
has essentially been regulating itself for some three
decades. But critics argue that self-regulation isn’t
appropriate for an industry trading in potentially
carcinogenic products.
Photo credit: Jupiter Images, Thinkstock
The proposed bill aimed to ensure that all personal care products for sale in the U.S. would be free of harmful ingredients and that all ingredients would be fully disclosed. The bill would’ve given the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to prohibit the use of certain ingredients, including carcinogens and reproductive and developmental toxins, to recall products that fail to meet safety standards, and to require product labels to name each ingredient.
The FDA has only limited say in what cosmetics manufacturers can and cannot put into their products. And the cosmetics industry has essentially been regulating itself for some three decades, and would like to keep it that way. In response to failed efforts in the 1970s to force the FDA to regulate cosmetics more like drugs—with required pre-market safety assessments—the industry decided to take matters into its own hands, creating the Cosmetics Industry Review Panel to judge the safety of various ingredients.
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The next agricultural revolution may be sparked by fungi
The use of fungi on crops may help to greatly increase food production for the growing needs of the planet without the need for massive amounts of fertilizers.
Mycorrhizal fungi, a type of fungus that can live in symbiosis with plant roots, help plants grow larger by acquiring the essential nutrient phosphate, a key component of fertilizers, for the plant.
“The United Nations conservatively estimates that by the year 2050 the global human population is expected to reach over 9 billion. Feeding such a population represents an unprecedented challenge since this goes greatly beyond current global food production capacity,” says Ian Sanders of the University of Lusanne, Switzerland.
Sanders spoke at the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans yesterday and told the audience that phosphate levels in the soil are rapidly being depleted and that in most tropical soils, plants have enormous difficulty in obtaining phosphate.
Increasing demand for the nutrient is driving up prices and farmers are having to spend a huge amount of money on phosphate fertilizer. Some countries are now stockpiling phosphate to feed their populations in the future, according to Sanders.
Recent biotechnological breakthroughs now allow scientists to produce massive quantities of the fungus that can be suspended in high concentrations in a gel for easy transportation.
Sanders and his colleagues are currently testing the effectiveness of this gel on crops in the country of Colombia where they have discovered that with the gel they can produce the same yield of potato crop with less than half the amount of phosphate fertilizers.
“While our applied research is focused on Colombia it could be applied in many other tropical regions of the world,” says Sanders.
Green roofs save energy and protect environment
Green roofs – like the one pictured above at the Con Edison building in New York City – protect the environment by absorbing pollution and capturing rain water, which helps prevent runoff from clogging sewer systems.
Columbia University researchers have been studying the beneficial impact of green roofs, and note that if New York City’s 1 billion square feet of roofs were transformed into green roofs, it would be possible to keep more than 10 billion gallons of water a year out of the city sewer system, according to the study led by Stuart Gaffin, research scientist at Columbia’s Center for Climate Systems Research.
New York City, like other older urban centers, has a combined sewer system that carries storm water and wastewater. When sewer overflow happens during heavy rains, the system must discharge a mix of storm water and sewage into New York Harbor, the Hudson River, the East River and other waterways. The green roof is a more cost-effective way of preventing overflow of the city’s storm drains.
The green roof atop the Con Edison building holds 21,000 plants on a quarter of an acre and retains about 30 percent of rainwater. It saves energy by providing insulation – keeping the roof cool in the summer and the building warm during winter – and reducing urban air temperatures. The Columbia University study concluded that based on the cost of building and maintaining a green roof it costs as little as 2 cents a year to capture each gallon of water.
U.S. corn belt experiencing rapidly depleting topsoil
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reports that Iowa farms are rapidly losing topsoil, up to 12 times faster than government estimates. Their report is based on data accumulated by Iowa State University (ISU), whose methods provide an unprecedented degree of precision in monitoring soil erosion.
EWG provided additional data in their report based on aerial surveys they conducted over the affected regions, along with information gathered from interviews with Corn Belt experts, that indicate soil erosion and polluted runoff are likely far worse than even the disturbing ISU numbers suggest.
“What is happening on Iowa farm fields is shocking but goes largely unnoticed,” said Craig Cox, who manages EWG’s agriculture programs from its Ames, Iowa office. Cox is the lead author of Losing Ground.
“We’ve grown complacent thinking we have the soil erosion problem under control, but instead it looks as if we are losing ground in our decades-old fight against this most fundamental and damaging problem in agriculture,” Cox said.
See the full report here: “Losing Ground” by Environmental Working Group
EarthTalk: Soil depletion and nutrition loss; and is it too late for the polar bears?
– Esther G., Newark, NJ
It would be overkill to say that the carrot you eat today has very little nutrition in it—especially compared to some of the other less healthy foods you likely also eat—but it is true that fruits and vegetables grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today. The main culprit in this disturbing nutritional trend is soil depletion: Modern intensive agricultural methods have stripped increasing amounts of nutrients from the soil in which the food we eat grows. Sadly, each successive generation of fast-growing, pest-resistant carrot is truly less good for you than the one before.
Although fruits and vegetables are still
our best source of nutrients, those
grown decades ago were much richer
in vitamins and minerals than the
varieties most of us get today. The
main culprit in this disturbing
nutritional trend is soil depletion.
Photo credit: Martin Poole, Digital
Vision/Thinkstock
A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.
“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly,” reported Davis, “but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.” There have likely been declines in other nutrients, too, he said, such as magnesium, zinc and vitamins B-6 and E, but they were not studied in 1950 and more research is needed to find out how much less we are getting of these key vitamins and minerals.
The Organic Consumers Association cites several other studies with similar findings: A Kushi Institute analysis of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12 fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels 21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal, found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19 percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.
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