Worried about melamine in the food we eat?

Yesterday, I was reading the ingredients on a box of apple juice. Mothers, where do you think the apple juice comes from? USA, Argentina and CHINA!

I'm talking name brands like Mott's and Apple & Eve. I'm talking apple juice here. Don't we grow apples in the USA?

Why do these companies import juice from China. It was an eye-opener to me. I'll be reading labels on all my food purchases from now on.

Asked by MusicLoverMe 59 months ago Similar Questions: Worried melamine food eat Recent Questions About: Worried melamine food eat Food & Drink > Food.

Similar Questions: Worried melamine food eat Recent Questions About: Worried melamine food eat.

Companies import juice, like anything else, from China because it is much cheaper. It works similarly to outsourcing. It is cheaper to produce apple juice in China because there are less labor/minimum wage laws.

With this cost reduced, the final cost of the juice is less, and companies buy this cheaper juice to increase their profit margins. As it turns out, China is the world's largest producer of apple juice. In 2004 it had a 56% share of the US market.(ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/April06/DataFeat...)Some people have claimed that China's juice is actually being sold below cost.

As early as 2001, Australian growers have lobbied to limit their country's imports of the juice, worried about the effect on local farmers. (abc.net" rel="nofollow">abc.net. Au/pm/stories/s346311.

Htm) Sources: abc.net" rel="nofollow">abc.net. Au/pm/stories/s346311. Htm .

This is a troubling prospect I had to switch my cat's food and I wasn't at all happy about it and neither were they. But I certainly wouldn't want them to get sick because of what's in the food. So the idea of this entering the human food supply is very scary, too.

There have been reports in recent weeks about animals such as chickens and pigs being fed grain that may have been contaminated. The experts immediately came out and said that the danger to humans from this was minimal, but it's still troubling. I'm not sure that reading all those labels is going to help.

How are you going to tell where the manufacturers got their supplies from? I always thought my cat's food was made by one company but it turns out that they contract out many of their supplies and there's nothing on the labels which tells you where they got it from. So we just have to trust that the government will regulate things well enough to keep us healthy.

Trusting the government not to screw up is scarier still. Sources: My Opinion .

Melamine is not a concern in apple juice. I'm wary of food products from China and just what I may ingest when I go there on business, because their industry standards leave a lot to be desired and cutting corners is endemic, but I'm not worried about melamine in my food for many reasons, and you especially don't need to worry about melamine in your apple juice. First, you have to understand this was not an accidental contamination.

The melamine was added to wheat flour (which was then labeled wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, but it was really plain old wheat flour) because it has a very high nitrogen content. When companies test for protein levels in feed ingredients, they do not actually test the protein itself. Instead, the standard is to test the nitrogen level, and determine the protein from a calculation based on that result.

By adding nitrogen to the flour, the tests would show high levels of protein, even though the protein hasn't really been increased. This is not a new trick, and even in the US companies have been caught dosing feed products with urea to boost the protein results. Urea is often tested for nowadays.

Melamine is not, which is probably why it became a popular cheat in China. High protein is desirable in wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate, but it's not something that's particularly important in apple juice, though, so there would be absolutely no reason to add melamine to apple juice. Second, humans are not at the same risk that our cats and dogs were from this contaminant, for several reasons.

The standard news blurb that's been going around says it pretty succinctly, so I'll just post one: There are many reasons mitigating consumers' risk, experts say. They include: Melamine's low toxicity. "As recently as 2000, experts almost took melamine off the list of products to be tested (in foods), because its toxicity is so low," Kellogg said.

In fact, one standard measure of a compound's ability to cause harm found that people would have to ingest three times their body weight of melamine to run any serious health risk. Lower dosages. "Remember, dogs and cats are primarily eating just one product, so they were eating (melamine) at high concentrations every day," noted Dr. Stephen Hooser, assistant director at Purdue University's Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory.

Hooser also suspects that Chinese workers who added the melamine to wheat gluten and rice proteins may have added much more to some lots than to others. "So, there might have been some spots where there was a lot of it, and that got passed on to certain pets," Hooser said. Humans, on the other hand, didn't eat the pet food directly.

Instead, it was fed to hogs or chickens that naturally excrete much of the melamine away. In fact, very little of the compound could be expected to settle in the animals' muscle tissue - the prime source of meat eaten in the United States. And, unlike pets eating a single food, consumers "are not exclusively eating chicken or pork," Hooser said.

Different physiologies. "There are lots of differences between species on how they respond to chemicals," Hooser noted. Cats can develop kidney failure from chewing on Easter lilies, and dogs can die after eating grapes — neither of which harm humans.

Cats, especially, have very acidic urine, and it could be that melamine and its metabolite, cyanuric acid (also detected in the recalled pet food), "might form crystals in the kidneys of cats. So, the acidity of their urine may help in the formation of these damaging crystals," Hooser said. The bottom line: The current melamine scare offers little or no threat to the health of the typical U.S. consumer, the experts said.

Sources: http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070508/LIFE11/705080339/1006/LIFE .

1 This is really troubling. I never thought we would have to worry about our food coming from China. I knew that most clothing, home articles and in fact, almost anything I bought had a "made in China" label on it.

That's scary enough, but our food? Have we gone crazy allowing this to happen and jeopardizing our well-being. Maybe the pet food scare will wake some of us up.

I hope so.

This is really troubling. I never thought we would have to worry about our food coming from China. I knew that most clothing, home articles and in fact, almost anything I bought had a "made in China" label on it.

That's scary enough, but our food? Have we gone crazy allowing this to happen and jeopardizing our well-being. Maybe the pet food scare will wake some of us up.

I hope so.

2 Bah. I don't normally get upset over poor ratings, but what the crap? I answered this question because I work in the industry and have very good reason to know about the melamine situation in detail.

If I was just supposed to complain about outsourcing, I wouldn't have bothered.

Bah. I don't normally get upset over poor ratings, but what the crap? I answered this question because I work in the industry and have very good reason to know about the melamine situation in detail.

If I was just supposed to complain about outsourcing, I wouldn't have bothered.

" "Name one food that you just dislike. And cannot bring yourself to eat it. " (16 answers) "If you had to eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

Name one food that you just dislike. And cannot bring yourself to eat it. " (16 answers).

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.