How Safe is Organic Produce?

Last post, I talked about the “Gender-Bender” toxins in our environment. This week I want to comment on a couple of other areas dealing with toxins to which we are exposed. These topics concern food that we eat.

The first topic comes from a friend of mine, Ellen Dorshow-Gordon, an Epidemiologist nurse for the Jackson County, Missouri, Health Department. She sent me an email about a University of Minnesota study that has burst the bubble on organic produce. If you remember, I have
written in the past that organic produce gives you about 40% more nutrition than regular produce. And if it comes from local growers, the
ripened produce actually has more of the essential nutrients our bodies
need. I also wrote that there are no artificial chemicals added to the soil or pesticides or chemical fertilizers used in this produce we consume. But what do these farmers add to the soil for fertilizers?

Read on…

It seems that produce can absorb antibiotics from the soil. This makes sense since that is where the nutrients also come from that we eat in the produce. Small doses of antibiotics over time can help bacteria adapt and become resistant to common antibiotics. In the long run, this may cause human disease from the food we consume.

We have long been concerned about our exposure to antibiotics in meat and milk and a number of us who do not eat organic meat or drink organic milk have been exposed to antibiotics fed to our animals to keep them disease-free. Now, new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, even ones grown on organic farms.

For the last 50 years, meat producers in this country have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places. According to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota, vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure where the animals were fed antibiotics.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, close to 70 percent of the total antibiotics and related drugs produced in the United States are fed to cattle, pigs and poultry. Although this practice sustains a growing demand for meat, it also generates public health fears associated with the expanding presence of antibiotics in the food chain. Now people also may be ingesting antibiotics from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms.

What Does the Research Show?

The Minnesota researchers planted corn, green onion and cabbage in manure-treated soil in 2005 to evaluate the environmental impacts of feeding antibiotics to livestock. Six weeks later, the crops were analyzed and found to absorb chlortetracycline, a drug widely used to treat diseases in livestock. In another study in 2007, corn, lettuce and potato were planted in soil treated with liquid hog manure. They, too, accumulated concentrations of an antibiotic, named Sulfamethazine, also commonly used in livestock. They also found that as the amount of antibiotics in the soil increased, so too did the levels taken up by the corn, potatoes and other plants.

“Around 90 percent of these drugs that are administered to animals end up being excreted either as urine or manure,” said Holly Dolliver, a member of the Minnesota research team and now a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. “A vast majority of that manure is then used as an important input for 9.2 million hectares of (U.S.) agricultural land.”

Manure, widely used as a substitute for chemical fertilizer, adds nutrients that help plants grow. It is often used in organic farming. The scientists found that although their crops were only propagated in greenhouses for 6 weeks — far less than a normal growing season — antibiotics were absorbed readily into their leaves. If grown for a full season, drugs most likely would find their way into parts of plants that humans eat, said Dolliver.

So What Does This Mean to Us?

For highly processed plants such as corn, the drugs would most likely be removed, added Dolliver. But many food crops such as spinach and lettuce are not processed, only washed, allowing antibiotics to remain. “Nobody particularly eats corn or soybean directly,” said Satish Gupta, a University of Minnesota professor of soil science and study leader. “But there are crops I am much more worried about, like cabbage and lettuce, because these are leaves we eat directly and consume raw.”

One finding that particularly worries food scientists is the accumulation of antibiotics within potato tubers. Tubers are an enlarged, underground stem that uptake and store nutrients from the soil. In crops like potatoes, carrots and radishes, it is the part humans eat. “Since these tubers and root crops are in direct contact with the soil, they may show a greater propensity for (antibiotic) uptake,” said Gupta.

The bottom line is that health officials fear that eating vegetables and meat laced with drugs meant to treat infections can promote resistant strains of bacteria in food and the environment. Such health concerns led the European Union in 2006 to ban antibiotic use as feed additives for promoting livestock growth. But in the United States, nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics per year, up from 16 million in the mid 1980s, are given to healthy animals for agriculture purposes, according to a 2000 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Tainted manure can impact more than just the soil. Once applied to the land, antibiotics can infiltrate water supplies as water seeps through the soil into aquifers or spills into surface water due to runoff, explained Dolliver. “The other thing to remember is that the field is not a sterile environment. Mice, rabbits and foxes traverse farmland while other animals graze, all with the potential to become vectors for the resistant bacteria organisms and spread them throughout different animal populations,” said Pat Millner, a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist based in Maryland.

The presence of antibiotics within the food chain is likely to increase as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has permitted greater use of controversial drugs on farm animals. For example, this past October 2008, the FDA dropped plans to halt use of cefquinome, a potent antibiotic, after it said in July 2008 it would push against its use in animals.

While there are restrictions on use of raw manure in U.S. organic farming because of concern over bacteria, no such rules are in place regarding antibiotics or hormones. Not all organic growers use manure with antibiotics, but many do, said Gupta. Even if a product has the USDA organic label, it still might harbor traces of antibiotics.

What About Toxins in Other Foods We Eat?

Mercury is back in the headlines! Chicago actor Jeremy Piven has unexpectedly left the cast of the Broadway revival of “Speed-the-Plow”
because of a mercury count that his doctor said was the highest level he’d ever seen. Dr. Carlon Colker, who had been treating Piven, said Piven was suffering from “extreme mercury toxicity” and that “a test revealed that Jeremy had … six times a healthy amount of mercury in his system.” Piven has long been a sushi eater, often twice a day, which may be the ultimate cause of the problem.

A major symptom of mercury poisoning is extreme fatigue. Piven was also experiencing neuro-muscular dysfunction, which resulted in his having trouble lifting his arms and legs. This announcement comes just weeks after the U.S. FDA began arguing that pregnant women should eat more fish, even if it contains mercury! Although no definitive link has proven that Jeremy Piven’s twice-a-day sushi habit is what caused his excessively high mercury levels, common sense would indicate that there is likely a connection. Recent testing of sushi bars show that sushi does often appear to be contaminated with mercury, and in some cases worse so than other fish. Laboratory tests in New York released last year found so much mercury in tuna sushi that two or three pieces a week at some restaurants could be a health hazard. Last year, the Chicago Board of Health began requiring that all sushi restaurants post the amount of mercury in the fish they served. The New York Time purchased sushi from some of the restaurants in NYC and found that eight out of 44 pieces they purchased for testing had mercury levels so high that the FDA could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. And the problem is certainly not isolated to New York.

Sushi samples from 10 high-rated sushi restaurants in Chicago showed:

* 70 percent exceeded the Illinois Environmental Protection agency’s
(IEPA) special advisory threshold for methylmercury. At that level,
women of childbearing age and children are advised to eat no more than
one serving per month

* 14 percent had a concentration higher than 0.730 ppm — a level that no women or children should ever consume

* 10 percent of the tuna samples were unsafe for all consumers, because
they contained mercury levels above 1.0 ppm, which is the legal action limit for fish sold in the U.S.

The dangers of consuming too much mercury are often focused on children and pregnant women because of the known damage it can pose to a baby’s developing central nervous system.

What are the Risks of Mercury Poisoning?

Thousands of tons of mercury are released into the air each year through pollution and waste. In the environment the mercury can transform into organic mercury, which is known as methylmercury, and accumulate in streams, oceans, water and soil. Methylmercury accumulates in the food chain, so each fish absorbs the mercury from other fish and organisms it eats. For this reason, larger and older fish such as shark, tuna and swordfish contain the highest levels of methylmercury. In fetuses and developing infants it can also have negative effects on attention span, language, visual-spatial skills, memory and coordination. It is estimated that nearly 60,000 children are exposed to methylmercury exposure in the womb.

Mercury is especially damaging to your central nervous system (CNS), and studies show that mercury in the CNS causes psychological, neurological, and immunological problems including:

* Arrhythmias and cardiomyopathies

* Insomnia

* Tremors

* Weakness

* Personality changes and irritability

* Headaches

* Blurred vision

* Unsteady gait

* Slowed mental response

But there is another problem with mercury; it bonds very firmly to structures in your CNS. Unless actively chelated, mercury has an extremely long half-life of somewhere between 15 and 30 years in the CNS!