Dangerous Food Product to Have "Dangerous Ingredient" Removed; is Still a Dangerous Food Product

Here's a headline that made me chuckle:

Dunkin Donuts Removing Possibly Dangerous Material from Product

What, just one? I believe if you removed every ingredient in a Dunkin Donut that causes obesity, diabetes, gallstones, high blood pressure and heart disease you wouldn't have anything left but the hole (bah-dah BOOM!).

So what is it that's being removed?

Dunkin Donuts has announced it will be changing the recipe of its doughnuts.

The coffee chain said it will remove the titanium dioxide, a food coloring agent, from all of its powdered sugar products, including doughnuts.

Titanium dioxide is commonly used to brighten white substances, like powdered sugar or toothpaste.

Some groups said it could also lead to health problems like inflammation or even organ damage.

So, out with the product that sounds like it should go into making gulf clubs rather than something a person would actually eat because of vague warnings from the ever nebulous "some groups." And while its removal is likely a good thing, there's still the matter of the:

Enriched Unbleached Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron as Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamin Mononitrate, Enzyme, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Palm Oil, Water, Dextrose, Soybean Oil, Whey (a milk derivative), Skim Milk, Yeast, Contains less than 2% of the following: Salt, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda), Defatted Soy Flour, Wheat Starch, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Cellulose Gum, Soy Lecithin, Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Artificial Flavor, Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative), Enzyme, Colored with (Turmeric and Annatto Extracts, Beta Carotene), Eggs; Glaze: Sugar, Water, Maltodextrin, Contains 2% or less of: Mono and Diglycerides, Agar, Cellulose Gum, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative), Artificial Flavor.

Actually, I have no idea what most of that shit is, but it all adds up to 260 calories and 30% of your recommended daily allowance of saturated fat--for just one lousy glazed donut.

But hey, I'm sure this move will turn these little fat pills into virtual health food.


Bonus: "As if there has ever been a good reason to eat a donut"

Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut are Lobbying to Get a Piece of the Food Stamp Action

I’ve written before about the explosion in the number of Americans who participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, since the beginning of the Great Recession at the end of 2007. Currently, around 45 million people receive SNAP benefits at a rate of about $133 per participant, per month. That’s nearly 15% of the total population, and is a true (rather than government/media-manipulated) indicator of the state of the economy.

And now, in a story that should be as predictable as night following day, comes a report that one of America’s worst peddlers of the junk food causing our rampant obesity epidemic has been lobbying the government to get a piece of that action. Here’s USA Today with the story:

The number of businesses approved to accept food stamps grew by a third from 2005 to 2010, Department of Agriculture records show, as vendors from convenience and dollar discount stores to gas stations and pharmacies increasingly joined the growing entitlement program.

Now, restaurants, which typically have not participated in the program, are lobbying for a piece of the action.

Louisville-based Yum! Brands, whose restaurants include Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver's and Pizza Hut, is trying to get restaurants more involved, federal lobbying records show.

So why are they so hot to trot to participate? The article goes on to state:

There is big money at stake. USDA records show food stamp benefits swelled from $28.5 billion to $64.7 billion in that period.

Four states accept restaurants, with Florida the most recent to begin a program.

"It makes perfect sense to expand a program that's working well in California, Arizona and Michigan, enabling the homeless, elderly and disabled to purchase prepared meals with SNAP benefits in a restaurant environment," Yum! spokesman Jonathan Blum said.

Ummm…I don’t wish to sound like a rude contrarian there, Mr. Blum, but it does not in fact “make perfect sense” to include your company in the SNAP program. Let me be perfectly frank with you if I may, sir. Your food is shit. It is barely fit for human consumption at all, let alone by poor people who have very limited culinary options as it is. You and your ilk are merchants of death who kill countless Americans every year through diabetes, heart disease and other obesity-related illnesses. Your company is right there with the tobacco companies, difference being that they only get their government agriculture subsidies on the producer end.

Sadly, we have become a nation so unmoored from basic common sense and decency that we could actually regard enabling someone to buy a large bucket of KFC poppers as an appropriate social welfare benefit. As it is, we already have the fattest poor people in the world because of corporate America loading much of what we eat with corn syrup and other unhealthy additives to get people addicted to the type of diets that are slowly killing them.

Make a profit getting people sick eating cheap, crappy food, and then profit again when they seek medical care and drugs to treat the resulting chronic health conditions. It’s a classic win-win right out of the Harvard Business School. For nothing in this country, not even our basic health and well being, is so sacred that you can't put a price tag on it.

The answer from the Department of Agriculture (which runs SNAP) to Yum! Brands and any other fast food chain which lobbies for approval to participate in the program should of course be: Hell No. But I’m certainly not holding my breath that it will be.

Half of All Americans Could be Obese by 2030

One of the primary purposes of this blog is analyze America’s near term future by examining current trends and extrapolating them forward. The premise is that the key turning point was the financial crash of 2008, which ushered in the initial stages of what author James Kunstler calls, The Long Emergency. My personal view is that The Long Emergency is going to take about a generation to play out, in other words until sometime in the late 2020s.

So it was with interest that I read a recent article in Business & Health about obesity in America and the likelihood that if current trends continue, half of all Americans could be obese by the year 2030—in other words right around the time that The Long Emergency is winding down. Here is a quote:

America is getting fatter: Half of all men and women in the United States could be obese in 20 years, according to a study by the Journal Lancet and reported by the Los Angeles Times. This could lead to 65 million more Americans being classified as obese.

Between 2007 and 2008, 32 percent of men were obese in the United States, while 35 percent of women hit the obesity benchmark. Using 20 years of Body Mass Index data, the researchers note that approximately 50 percent of men could reach obesity and between 45 and 52 percent of women could reach that point.

So what might all of this have to do with economic collapse? The article goes on to state:

What could the rise in obesity mean? An increase in obesity could mean 8 million more cases of diabetes, 500,000-plus cases of cancer and 6.8 million cases of coronary heart disease in the U.S., the Times reports.

The ever-expanding waistlines could lead to higher healthcare costs, the study notes.

In my August 3rd blog post, “Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is Absolutely Out of Control,” I cited a recent USA Today article showing that annual Medicare and Medicaid costs have exploded by over $200 billion in just the past three years, and at their current rate of increase would top $2 trillion by 2021, or almost 100% of what the federal government took in from taxes this past year. With this article, we can clearly see that the obesity epidemic is one of the primary factors pushing up health care costs at such a rapid rate.

Putting aside for a moment the individual lifestyle choices that cause so many people to become obese, I think it is actually more illustrative to examine from a big picture standpoint WHY this is happening. Quite simply, it is because fat and sick people are more profitable to corporate America than are healthy ones.

Cheaply produced prepackaged food contains immense amounts of corn syrup and other fattening ingredients produced by agribusiness giants like Monsanto that are immensely profitable. Mega fast food chains like McDonalds, Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s whole business model revolves around selling convenience (and hence obesity) to the public. As for the health care industry (which author Charles Hugh Smith refers to as the "sick care" industry), it makes far more money by treating the people who eat the garbage produced by the food industry than it does those who try to stay healthy.

I often tell people that if you want to know why anything in American society is the way it is, particularly if it’s screwed up in some way, you need look no further than who is getting paid. Sure, the government has its silly little ineffectual campaigns encouraging people to eat healthy and to exercise. In fact, this issue seems to be of particular interest to our current First Lady.

But such messages are then completely drowned out by the 24/7 advertising barrage on teevee relentlessly pounding corporate America’s message that it is better to eat and consume all you can today and tomorrow be damned. Oh, and we’ll also sell you the medications that help deaden the unpleasant side affects of all that overconsumption. Plop, plop; fizz, fizz.

I suspect, however, that America will NOT in fact see the day when half of its citizens become obese. As the old saying goes, if a trend appears to be unsustainable, it probably is. The advent of peak oil, closely followed by peak phosphorous, means the impending end of the “Green Revolution” in modern industrial agriculture that enabled world population to double since the 1960s but conversely was a major contributor to the bloating of America’s waistlines. The likely sharp decline in agriculture production over the next two decades means that rather than obesity, by 2030 many Americans are instead going to be worried about where their next meal is coming from.