It's a Jungle Out There

The beleaguered Chicago Tribune turned out a classic consumer-interest story this week, testing food products to see if their ingredients were labeled properly. The paper found over a hundred products that contained well-known allergens not listed on the label or listed in ways that would make them hard to recognize.

This was the most outrageous fact in the story:

The newspaper...conducted 50 laboratory tests -- more than the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration combined over the past several years -- to determine the precise ingredients.

Which means a bankrupt newspaper is doing more to protect the public than the government.

Imported foods (said to be primarily from China, although there wasn't a lot of detail on origins in the story to support this) were particularly called into question because they were more likely to be completely unchecked and mislabeled.

This reminds me of today's AP story in the Star Tribune about imported diet treatments that are being sold to hapless people.

Available mostly online, with names like 5x Imelda Perfect Slimming, 999 Fitness Essence, and (my personal favorite) Venom Hyperdrive 3.0, these "herbal" treatments promise major weight loss in very short periods of time. Unfortunately, they contain dangerous amounts of the active ingredient in the legal diet drug Meridia (amounts that can cause heart attacks and strokes), as well as a banned laxative that is known to cause cancer.

In this case, the FDA has put out a warning with a complete list of the products, and is considering legal action against the companies.

All of which brings us back to two basic tenets of picking the items you ingest:

1. Buy local, and if possible from someone you can talk to.
   
2. If something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.

But at the same time, I look forward to a day when we have a government that takes a strongly proactive role in ensuring a safe food and drug supply.