No melamine for me!

In my opinion, there is no such thing as a “safe level” of melamine in the food supply.   I don’t want to see our food contaminated by even a scrap of a fragment of a percent, by anything, but of course when you are looking at a massive industrialized food industry that has profits as it’s bottom line you will find melamine and God only knows what else in the system.

We need and deserve a food supply that is pure and safe, wholesome and life building, not cheapened and toxic-  does this even need to be said??- and the only way for that to happen to to take control back from the corporations, now, and to do so on an individual basis.  In this particular case that would mean that mothers return to breast feeding their babies, and that mothers consume high quality natural foods.  Stop thinking to yourselves that “they” must do something because “they” don’t care about you.  Indeed, it would appear as though “they” (the FDA) have as their primary concern Nestle and Bristol-Myers Squibb and the impact that this news might have on corporate profits.

Remember the pet food recalls of 2007?  It was announced then by the FDA that they had identified melamine as the culprit in tested samples of recalled pet food.  Melamine was identified in urine and tissue samples taken from sickened cats and from the kidney of one cat that had eaten the recalled food.

Great.  Now the same chemical has been identified in the food supply of our smallest ones.  Should we really be surprised by this?  I think not.

Some Melamine Factoids:

• Melamine is sometimes illegally added to food products in order to increase the apparent protein content.
• Melamine at ppm level (1 part per million) in food and beverage has been reported due to migration from melamine-containing resins. Small amounts of melamine have also been reported in foodstuff as a metabolite product of cyromazine, an insecticide used on animals and crops.

• Melamine by itself is nontoxic in low doses, but when combined with cyanuric acid it can cause fatal kidney stones due to the formation of an insoluble melamine cyanurate.
• FDA permits a certain amount of cyanuric acid to be present in some non-protein nitrogen (NPN) additives used in animal feed and drinking water. For example, Archer Daniels Midland manufactures an NPN supplement for cattle, which contains biuret, triuret, cyanuric acid and urea

• Chronic exposure may cause cancer or reproductive damage.

Do you start to see how this works?  Think about it, especially that last bit.  “Chronic exposure may cause cancer or reproductive damage.”

Source: Yahoo! News

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defended the safety of infant formula sold in the United States on Friday despite tests that found the chemical melamine in one brand and a related compound in another.

The amounts found are far less than levels found in infant formula in China earlier this year and “do not raise public health concerns,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “The domestic supply of infant formula is safe.”

FDA tests found “very low levels” of the industrial chemical melamine in Nestle’s Good Start Supreme with Iron formula, Sundlof said during a conference call. Low levels of cyanuric acid were found in Bristol-Myers Squibb unit Mead Johnson’s Enfamil Lipil with Iron.

The agency said it had determined that levels of melamine or one of its related compounds, alone, below 1 part per million in infant formula were not a concern.

The FDA has so far tested 74 samples of U.S. infant formula, a process that began in September when melamine was discovered in infant formula in China. It has 13 more to test.

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