ABCs of Food Safety for Children
A coalition of trade groups has created a food safety educational program for grade-school children. The effort, called “Play It Safe: Goals for Food Safety,” was developed in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The program is designed for students in grades four through six and attempts to define the role young consumers can play in ensuring a safe food supply.
“Today with more dual-income families, greater numbers of children are preparing lunches, after-school snacks and family meals. The lesson plans stress the importance of safe food handling and preparation,” the coalition announced.
The program was distributed to 15,000 elementary schools earlier this year. The four-lesson plan discusses microbiological contamination, how to reduce food-borne illnesses and various government agencies’ responsibilities in regulating the food industry.
Among the groups sponsoring “Play It Safe” are the American Meat Institute, the National Fisheries Institute and the Food Marketing Institute.
Battling ‘Junk Food’--A consumer group also has children’s interests in mind with its announcement of a new nutrition campaign last week.
The effort is being coordinated by the Center for Science and the Public Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group. Key elements of the “Children’s Nutrition Campaign” will be to prevent manufacturers from promoting “junk food” to children and to challenge federal agencies to increase regulatory efforts in this area.
“It’s shameful that major companies are knowingly marketing junk foods to children,” said Michael Jacobson, the center’s executive director. “Just turn on Saturday-morning television and you’ll see how the nation’s cleverest marketing experts are taking advantage of 5-year-old children.”
The importance of such a program, according to the Center for Science, is to improve the overall health of America’s children. The group, for instance, claims that obesity among young people increased by 54% in the past 20 years. Further, obesity in teens can increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes in adulthood.
The center also reported that high cholesterol levels are beginning to be seen in adolescents, a condition that can precipitate heart-related illness later in life.
The campaign will single out those children’s products it believes are not healthful. The group also plans on launching educational efforts on nutrition in schools.
Upgrading Corn Chips--One development that may even please the Children’s Nutrition Campaign is a recent reseach report that indicates the protein levels of fried corn snacks, such as chips, can be doubled.
The study, published by the Journal of Food Science, found that the addition of soybeans or garbanzo beans to these products “provided two times more protein than corn flour alone.”
The article, written by N.G. Almeida-Dominquez, claimed that “fried corn snacks popular among children and teens may soon be nutritious options for between-meal munching.”
Fortifying the snacks with soybean or garbanzo beans may be possible at the same manufacturing cost of current products or may even cost less, the journal reported.
Communicating Chemicals--A federal agency is co-sponsoring a toll-free telephone number that offers callers information on pesticides 24 hours a day.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with Texas Tech University, have launched the National Pesticide Telecommunications Network. According to a report in Nutrition Week, the line will be staffed by chemical specialists with backgrounds in agriculture, the environment or public health. The newsletter expressed hope that the hotline would disseminate “impartial information.”
The pesticide hotline is (800) 858-7378.
Pesticide Correction--A recent story on the United Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Assn.’s annual convention incorrectly listed the percentage of pesticide residues being found on produce by federal health officials.
The actual figure for 1988, or the last year for which data is available, indicated that the figure varied between imported and domestic produce. For instance, 49% of the domestic fruit sampled by FDA contained no residues versus 58% of the imported fruit tested. Sixty-five percent of the domestically-grown vegetables were found to be free of pesticide residues compared to 60% of the imported samples.
Illegal chemical levels were found in less than 1% of the domestic and imported produce analyzed. Less than 2% of the 14,336 items sampled were found to be technical violations, or showed evidence of a compound that was not approved for use on that particular crop. The remaining 40% to 50% of the total sample contained legal amounts of pesticide residue, according to the agency.
The figure used in the Feb. 22 story indicated that 96% of the fruit and vegetables tested did not contain residues. However, this percentage applies to all foods tested by FDA, including meats, grains and seafoods as well as produce and includes those items that contained legal chemical residues as well as no detectable amounts.
