March 1, 2008
National Peanut Butter Lovers’ Day is March 1st
Today is a sticky day. National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day salutes America’s favorite sandwich spread.
Peanut Butter is not limited to a sandwich. It’s popular on crackers, celery. It is also used in recipes for cookies and snacks.
Did you Know? Peanut Butter is 90% or more peanuts. While it has no artificial preservatives, an opened jar is stored on a shelf at room temperature.
Celebrate today with a little (or a lot) of Peanut Butter.
October 28, 2007
U.S. consumers are now looking for the country label
After contending with tainted toothpaste, suspect seafood, and poisoned pet food traced to China, many U.S. consumers are now looking for labels that indicate a product’s country of origin.
Some foods - like shrimp and other types of seafood - already must be labeled with a country name, thanks to legislation the U.S. Congress passed in 2002.
Other suppliers added labels voluntarily long before a series of recalls made consumers skittish about Chinese products.
After years of delays, labels for a wider variety of foods - including beef, lamb, pork, perishable agricultural products, and peanuts - are on course to become mandatory by September of next year.
A bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this month is expected to be taken up by the Senate and signed by President George W. Bush with few revisions. But despite the long-awaited regulations, plenty of food still will not carry country labels.
Consider poultry. Because opponents of the legislation were so strongly against requiring country labels and so little imported poultry is sold in the United States, legislators exempted it to avoid jeopardizing the bill, said a staffer at the U.S. House Agriculture Committee.
Then there are the labeling law’s quirks. For example, jalapeño peppers sold fresh will have to be labeled. But if they are sold frozen as “poppers” - wrapped in a jacket of breading with cream-cheese filling - they will be exempt.
And a laundry list of countries are likely to grace various hamburger labels, owing to the multitude of countries that send beef here for processing. But if that same beef is used as an ingredient in a frozen dinner, for instance, the dinner’s maker will not be required to note the country of origin.
Opponents have seized upon what they call the arbitrary nature of the legislation. Why pigs and not poultry? Why green peanuts but not peanut butter? The answers lie in politics, and the definition of processing.
Processed foods do not have to carry country labels. For peanuts, that exempts nuts that are pulverized and sold as peanut butter, roasted nuts coated in chocolate, and peanuts roasted in their shells.
“We’ve made our case to USDA and Capitol Hill that snack nuts go through a roasting process,” said Jim McCarthy, president of the Snack Food Association, referring to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Congress.
Bob Sutter, chief executive of the North Carolina Peanut Growers Association, suspects that snack makers want to purchase ingredients from all over the world, “without having to say they came from Argentina or Mexico or Honduras.”
When it comes to gourmet peanuts, however, Sutter hears from buyers seeking as much information as possible. Callers say, “We want to tell our customers where these peanuts came from. Not just North Carolina. We want to tell them they came from a farm in Northampton, N.C.,” he said.
Those against the labeling law also say it provides few benefits for consumers but plenty of additional costs for suppliers and retailers.
The three-year-old practice of adding “U.S.” labels to seafood did not boost sales, according to the Food Marketing Institute, which represents food retailers and wholesalers with annual sales volume of $340 billion. First-year costs for adding the labels soared up to $16,000 per store, 10 times what the Department of Agriculture estimated.
And the new labeling will be complicated. For instance, new meat labels will mark beef, lamb, and pork born, raised, and slaughtered domestically as well as meat that came from animals raised in other countries before being sold here. Mixed labels will highlight animals born and raised in one place, but slaughtered elsewhere.
Scraps from hundreds of carcasses can wind up in massive hamburger grinders, meaning a hamburger package could potentially list scores of countries.
A long list will inform consumers that a tub of hamburger may contain animals from a range of countries whose meat is processed by U.S. slaughterhouses. The largest exporters of fresh and frozen beef to the United States last year were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Mexico, according to the Department of Agriculture.
In the dozen or so years it has taken for country-of-origin labels to move from concept to congressional action, consumers have come to see them as shorthand for which food is safer.
American shoppers are reassured by food imported from such countries as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, said Christine Burhn, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California at Davis. They are wary of imports from lesser-developed countries, including China, India, and Mexico.
Source: International Herald Tribune, August 24, 2007 and the American Peanut Council Newsletter.
September 28, 2007
Cashews cause stronger reactions than peanuts – study
The allergic reaction to cashew nuts is more severe than peanuts, says a new study that deepens our understanding of food allergies and highlights the need for clear labeling.
“Cashew nuts present a considerable hazard, being hidden in a wide variety of commonly ingested foods, such as Asian meals, sweets, ice cream, cakes, chocolates and they are increasingly used in commercially prepared pesto sauce instead of pine nuts,” wrote lead author Andrew Clark in the journal Allergy.
“Specific information on how to achieve nut avoidance should always be provided,” he added.
An estimated 4 per cent of adults and 8 per cent of children in the 380 million EU population suffer from food allergies, according to the European Federation of Allergy and Airways Diseases Patients’ Associations.
There is no current cure for a food allergy, and vigilance by an allergic individual is the only way to prevent a reaction.
But a peanut allergy can be so severe that only very tiny amounts can be enough to trigger a response. While cashews are used less extensively as ingredient than peanuts, the new study suggests that the allergic reaction to the former may be more severe than even that of peanuts.
The researchers, from Addenbrookes Hospital (Cambridge University Hospitals) and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kings Lynn, matched children whose worst ever reaction was to cashew nut (cashew group, 47 children) with children whose worst ever reaction was to peanut (peanut group, 94 children). The comparison matched the children according to sex, age of reaction and presentation, amount ingested, and asthma.
“This is the first study to employ case-matching to compare severity of peanut and cashew nut allergy and demonstrates increased severity of reactions to cashew nut,” said Clark.
The researchers note that wheezing and cardiovascular symptoms were reported more often during reactions in the cashew than compared to the peanut group, while those allergic to cashews also received intramuscular adrenaline more frequently.
“A recent study showed that 10/37 (27 per cent) of nut-allergic children were unable to correctly identify the type of nut to which they were allergic,” wrote the researchers.
“Previous studies show cashew nut can cause severe reactions. The nut type which caused the worst reaction to date should be considered when providing emergency medication,” they concluded.
Source: FoodNavigator.com, July 20, 2007 and the American Peanut Council Newsletter.
May 4, 2007
Peanut Allergy
Early exposure to food allergens may increase tolerance
4/30/2007 - Exposing premature and low birth weight babies to food allergens early in life may boost tolerance later in life, suggests a new study from Canada.
The study, looking at the risk of developing food allergy in premature or low-birth-weight children, found no difference between the normal and premature babies, challenging the hypothesis that immature gastrointestinal tracts may boost food allergy development.
“To the best of our knowledge, this population-based study is the first to examine prematurity or low birth weight and the risk of developing food allergy,” wrote lead author Joel Liem from the University of Manitoba.
“Our data suggest that no association exists between gestational age and birth weight with the development of IgE-mediated food allergies. As a result, the theory that an immature gut mucosa results in increased permeability to large-molecular-weight proteins and predisposes the baby to early sensitization needs to be questioned,” he added.
According to the European Federation of Allergy and Airways Diseases Patients’ Associations, an estimated four per cent of adults and eight per cent of children in the 380m EU population suffer from food allergies.
As a result, the “free-from” food market has been enjoying sales growth, with of over 300 per cent reported in the UK since 2000, according to market analyst Mintel.
The most common food allergen ingredients and their derivatives are cereals containing gluten, fish, crustaceans, egg, peanut, soybeans, milk and dairy products including lactose, nuts, celery, mustard, sesame seed, and sulphites.
Previous studies had indicated that immature gastrointestinal tracts as found in premature babies result in an increased uptake of food antigens, but limited studies have investigated the immunologic response of preterm or low-birth-weight infants to dietary antigens, said the researchers in the current issue of Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
The researchers analysed 13,980 children were born in 1995 and living in the province of Manitoba, and of these, 592 children were found to have food allergy. When the data was analysed with respect to birth weight and maturity, no association with food allergy was observed.
“Prematurity and low birth weight are not associated with a change in risk for development of food allergy in childhood,” said the researchers.
The researchers did find that food allergy was associated with a maternal history of asthma and food allergy, however.
“The theory is that at a young age (ie. less than 3 years), an immature and permeable gastrointestinal tract will result in increased antigen uptake. Thus, highly allergenic foods may be absorbed more easily, increasing the risk for sensitization,” said Liem.
“However, our large, population-based epidemiologic study does not support [this]. A possible mechanism preventing sensitization might be the development of immunologic tolerance to orally ingested allergens in premature infants.
“Such tolerance might result from interaction of high antigen concentration with the immature immune system of the preterm infant,” he said.
“These data prompt us to ask whether it may be possible that introducing highly allergenic proteins (such as peanut) early in life would tolerise (as opposed to sensitise) a child to that particular antigen?” said the researchers.
They called for carefully designed and monitored studies to identify the best approach to the introduction of foods for infants and young children.
An extensive review, published towards the end of 2006 by the Global Allergy and Asthma European Network (GA2LEN) reported that the growing number of people suffering from allergies is due to changes in European diets over the past 30 years.
But by targeting several key areas, particularly how children are fed early in life, including breastfeeding, their early diet and increasing the use of pre- and probiotics could have a direct positive effect on the subsequent development of asthma and allergies.
Source: Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
May 2007, Volume 119, Issue 5, Pages 1203-1209
“The risk of developing food allergy in premature or low-birth-weight children”
Authors: J.J. Liem, A.L. Kozyrskyj, S.I. Huq and A.B. Becker
Source: foodnavigator.org
