Food Safety- Is It A Joke?

How safe is your packaged drinking water?

How safe is your packaged food?

How safe is your carbonated drink like Coke, Pepsi?

How safe are your vegetables?

Do you know the chemicals being added to your food?

We all consume food to enjoy, relish and survive. We are what we eat, goes a old saying. Today it is becoming increasingly difficult to know how safe is our food and what all goes into making it. There are some short term consequences and some long term, which our brain finds it difficult to comprehend.

On occasion of "World Health Day" theme of Food Safety, we raise these questions and try to answer them.

"Water" 

Getting safe drinking water is becoming challenging day by day. They either contain contaminants like E.Coli, high iron and nitrate content, pH not adhering to guidelines. 
Research suggests that dry regions are going to become drier and wet regions wetter. resulting in unsafe drinking water for various reasons. The ground water, so called bore well water is also not safe with the minerals and lead being taken away from it.
Extract from article, 
"As wells are drilled deeper in pursuit of the falling water table, the water which is extracted frequently displays higher levels of arsenic, fluoride, and other harmful chemicals. The attendant health effects have been well documented throughout India"

Those who want to read more 

Packaged water..here, here, here

Ground Water ..here, here

General reading ... here, here, 

"Packaged Food"

For good or bad, we all consume packaged drinking water and packaged food. The chemicals which can leech into the food because the packaging material is a concern. Some of these chemicals are toxic to us. The ambiguity is how much of it is toxic, how long one should be exposed to it. The impact on pregnant women, foetuses and new born babies is being discovered with each passing day. 

The harmful chemicals found are formaldehyde, bisphenol A, tributyltin, triclosan, and phthalates. 

Formaldehyde, a cancer causing substance is present in plastic bottles and melamine tableware. 

Read more here

"Vegetables"

If you are thinking that eating vegetables is healthy, do not think twice , think 100 times! Common food items contain banned pesticides in quantities a thousand times more than the permissible limits.

Brinjal, cabbage, cauliflower, apples, oranges, bananas, name any vegetable or fruit , you are consuming different pesticides and insecticides along with them, more than permissible.

What you can do

• The first step in the removal of pesticide residues from the food products is washing. Washing with 2% of salt water will remove most of the contact pesticide residues that normally appear on the surface of the vegetables and fruits.
• About 75-80% of pesticide reduces are removed by cold water washing. The pesticide residues that are on the surface of fruits like grapes, apples, guava, plums, mangoes, peaches and pears and fruity vegetables like tomatoes, brinjal and okra require two to three washings.

Read more here, here, 

To read about how to prepare and cook food safely... here

To read about which foods to be cooked and which food to be eaten raw, read this article

Food industry is undergoing tremendous changes. It is not easy to keep tab on what innovations are happening to keep our food fresh looking and palatable. All the chemicals being used need more research which is going to be difficult. 

We need to ensure that we eat safe food. We need to question more, test more and demand more.