Did you know that your drink might contain an ingredient that is not used in beverages in 100 countries around the world?

Brominated vegetable oil (also known as “BVO”) is found in sports drinks and citrus-flavored sodas.  It is a chemical that keeps two liquids mixed together.  It acts as a binding agent, also known as an emulsifier, and it prevents the flavoring and other ingredients found in our drinks from separating and floating to the surface.

It makes sense , on one level, as we don’t want our drinks to look like a separated salad dressing with ingredients floating to the top!  But this appearance might come with a hidden side effect.  According to SHAPE magazine and nutritionist Mira Calton and her husband Jayson Calton, Ph.D., “Because it competes with iodine for receptor sites in the body, elevated levels of the stuff may lead to thyroid issues, such as hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease, and cancer,” Calton says. As if that wasn’t scary enough, BVO's main ingredient, bromine, is a chemical that is considered toxic. It's been linked to all kind of health concerns, including organ system damage, birth defects, schizophrenia, and hearing loss, which explains why it's been removed or banned from food and drinks in more than 100 countries.

These health concerns and the fact that so many countries have removed BVO from their beverages was so concerning to one 15 year old that she launched an online petition that landed her in the New York Times in which she called for the removal of this ingredient from American beverages, as it’s been removed from products around the world.

Want to opt out of brominated vegetable oil here in the United States? Skip the sports drinks and choose water.  And if you’re filling up your cup at the soda fountain, instead of the lemon-lime and citrus flavored drinks, consider drinking something else.

Remember, while none of us can do everything, all of us can do something.  Focus on progress not perfection, and do what you can, where you are with what you have, remembering not to make “the perfect” the enemy of “the good.”

 Follow Robyn on Twitter @unhealthytruth or on Facebook.

Fifteen year ago, if someone had suggested that I'd be writing this column, I'd have asked what planet they were on.

I was working as a financial analyst that covered the food industry.  My day to day consisted of meeting with management teams, taking factory and store tours and cranking out reports on companies like Kroger, Safeway, Costco and Whole Foods.  I wasn't a foodie, and I couldn't cook.

My job included crunching the numbers, learning business models and evaluating the costs of production and distribution of our food supply.

Thank goodness.

Because today, that experience has served a greater purpose: the ability to look at the current state of our food system, the financial engineering of the science behind it and the economically motivated decisions that food industry executives make to meet their fiduciary duty to drive shareholder return and sheds light on how these decision are affecting the health of our families.

And it's becoming increasingly obvious that we've got a broken economic model at work in our food system.  Farmers are rewarded with taxpayer funded resources called subsidies for growing crops in a chemically-intensive, genetically and financially engineered kind of way to drive shareholder return for the chemical companies.  While on the other hand, farmers that are growing things organically, which means by law without the use of synthetic pesticides and crops genetically engineered to require increasing doses of toxic weed killer, have to pay fees to prove that their crops are safe, then fees to label those crops with the "USDA Organic" seal and then they don't receive the same crop insurance and marketing assistance programs that the other farmers do.

Add to that the fact that American companies formulate their products one way for eaters over seas, without the use of artificial colors, genetically engineered ingredients, high fructose corn syrup, and it's enough to get anyone going.  But the fact of the matter is that what we have to label as "organic food" here in the United States is more or less called "food" in other countries.  Because overseas, it's the products that contain all of the novel ingredients like, genetically engineered ones, that have to be labeled.

So what's a consumer to do?  Learn the Big 8.  These are the ingredients which, by law and according to our very own United States Department of Agriculture, are not allowed into the production of foods that are made organically:

If you eat and pay taxes, you might want to know about “The Farm Bill.”

Remember the bailout that we funded for the banks?  Well, the same thing is happening in our food system.

And today, seventy leading chefs, authors, food policy experts, nutritionists, CEOs, and environment and health organizations sent an open letter to Members of Congress urging lawmakers to modernize the Farm Bill and make nutritious and healthy foods more affordable to all Americans.

According to a July 2011 poll , 78% of Americans want healthy food to be more affordable.  Not surprising when you consider the rates of diseases like diabetes, asthma and cancer that we are seeing in the health of our loved ones.

If you are one of the countless Americans who has ever stopped to wonder why fresh fruit is so expensive and processed and packaged food is so cheap, it’s largely because of the “Farm Bill” and the way that we currently allocate our taxpayer resources in our national food budget.

How it stands right now is that as taxpayers, we are writing checks and that money is being used as taxpayer funded payments called “subsidies” to support the growing of corn and soy, crops used to make our processed foods. Few of the dollars that we send in are used to support other foods in any meaningful way.  In other words, our current system keeps the foods that use these ingredients, mainly the cheap processed foods, cheap, while making everything else seem expensive.

Can you imagine if  instead of funding the junk food, we funded other foods?  Like apples and carrots for example?  We could afford to carry them in schools, at home and in hospitals. Our food companies would use more of them in their products, as they’d be cheaper to source, and we would benefit from the nutritional differences.

Sound too good to be true?  It is, right now.

And some might argue (and they do) that we need our current subsidy system to avoid mass starvation.  How else are we going to feed the world?  But interestingly, just this week, according to the World Health Organization and Business Week, there is so much extra food floating around the globe that not only is it increasing rates of obesity, but we also waste a third of what is produced, it’s simply thrown away. As a result, obesity is a far greater threat facing the globe than starvation, and malnutrition is affecting both.

In other words, we have subsidized a food system that is making us fat, sick and undernourished.

Some food corporations and production groups, especially those who grow soy and corn believe that these handouts are necessary to guarantee stable prices, a food supply and to protect food crops from steep price declines.  Apparently, they may not be aware that the global banks and Wall Street can wreak havoc on food prices by trading what are known as “collateralized commodity obligations” in which they bundle up a whole bunch of these assets in order to profit off of the trades. But how could they be aware of these derivatives?  They are hardly regulated.

But back to the "Farm Bill," the bill would also provide an estimated $9 billion a year to continue a long-standing insurance program that benefits only farmers of commodity crops.  In other words, farmers are paid to buy and grow corn and soy.  They won’t get the same level of insurance if they grow something else, like apples, carrots or tomatoes.  In the current system, with the subsidies and insurance promises, the system only pays farmers to keep growing corn and soy crops.  There is no safety net if they choose to grow anything else.  Who can blame them?  Times are tough.

Which is why today’s letter to Congress is so important.  It calls for an end to this lopsided allocation of taxpayer resources and our lopsided funding of the food system and asks for an end to the bailout of Big Ag that allocates $140 billion to companies engineering corn and soybean seeds from which so many of the ingredients now found in our fake, fast and processed foods are derived.  Right now, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “about one-third of the subsidies awarded under (last year’s) program went to just 4% of farmers.”

According to the letter sent to Congress today, Americans "are deeply concerned that it would continue to give away subsidies worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to the largest commodity crop growers, insurance companies, and agribusinesses even as it drastically underfunds programs to promote the health and food security of all Americans”.

Mass starvation?  It seems that mass malnutrition in an increasingly obese world in which too much food is being produced, thrown away and wasted seems more likely.

It also seems that the Farm Bill, this taxpayer funded piece of legislation, “is out of step with the nation’s priorities and what the American public expects and wants from our food and farm policy.”

And while this funding of the status quo might be good for the chemical companies and for those whose products have to be purchased  by our nation’s farmers in order to grow these two crops, it doesn’t seem to be benefiting the millions of stakeholders in the food supply, nor the farmers themselves, nor the growing number of obese and overweight Americans who rely on cheap, processed foods to feed their families in quite the same way.

A better "Farm Bill" would fund a diverse and healthy food system, especially in light of the fact that a growing number of us and our national economy are being impacted by obesity, diabetes, cancer, allergies and autism, diseases and conditions that are increasingly being shown to have a link to diet and nutrition.

So while you may not have heard of the “Farm Bill” until recently, this Senate bill is arguably one of the most important pieces of legislation Congress will consider this year, and it is set to go to the floor in the coming week.

And if you haven’t heard about it, you’re not alone.  But “unless we – meaning all of us who eat and pay taxes – demand Congress fundamentally change the way it writes the next farm bill, I can guarantee the interests of agribusiness will once again come out on top,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of EWG. “We have a real opportunity to compel members of Congress to work on behalf of our health and the environment if they hear from all of us now.  Eaters - it's time to get in the game."

Let’s go, America.  Game on.

CALL TO ACTION: The Farm Bill—the most important legislation when it comes to your food- is about to be voted on in the US Senate. Now is the time to stand up and fix our broken food system. Together, we can create a food system and a Farm Bill that is fairer, healthier and more sustainable for all Americans http://tiny.cc/ff26ew

 

 

 

In the last week, extraordinary things have happened to our food supply.  

Coca Cola and PepsiCo agreed to alter their formulas in order to reduce the risk of a potentially cancer-causing caramel color in their product, Campbell's Soup announced they are kicking a hormone-disrupting chemical out of their soup cans, the USDA agreed to school lunch programs a choice around "pink slime" and 55 members of Congress sent a letter to the FDA calling for the labeling of biotech's genetically engineered ingredients - ingredients, not unlike "pink slime," that industry claims is safe. 

And what is remarkable about all of these things is that these changes were driven by consumer demand - consumers flat out wanted the right to know what was going into their foods and beverages.  

So here's a thought: thank them. All of them for stepping up and making these changes.  Sure, it might have taken some time, but hop on their websites and send in an email.  It won't take long.  And an attitude of gratitude goes such a long way.  For every voice that they hear, they recognize that there are dozens if not hundreds behind it.  

Send a quick thank you to your local Congressman for being one of the 55 who sent a letter to the FDA calling for the labeling of genetically engineered foods.  

Or if yours wasn't on the list, and you want to give them a heads up, you can find a link to who your state senator is right here. 

Plug in your zip code (you probably already know this) and it will bring up the list of the entire delegation, from federal to local. 

All you're doing is sending a little "thank you" note, or maybe a simple: "Hello.  Like you, I am concerned about the health of my loved ones, our community and our food supply..."

Remember: Together, we can do this.  Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.  A little gratitude can go a long way.  And you may just begin an unlikely conversation (and find out that, like you, your local Congressmen has loved ones that might have allergies, diabetes, ADHD or cancer...).

Together, we can create a much-needed dialogue around restoring the health of our country.