Naturalpath

What's in a name, if the name is "natural"?

Plenty, to the rushed consumer grabbing a box off the grocery shelf. For that person, the words "natural" and "all natural" probably mean they are eating something healthy. Well, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sees things differently. The FDA, which regulates the labeling of all foods and beverages except meat and poultry, has no formal definition for natural or all-natural. Last week, the FDA confirmed, it has no plans to create one any time soon.

For Florida's sugar industry, which uses both terms, that's not good...

The Food and Drug Administration issued its first regulations for sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug intended to reduce sunburn risk more than 30 years ago.  Critics of the F.D.A have asserted not only that its standards have fallen behind research on skin care and cancer, but that the agency has allowed manufacturers to make vague and misleading marketing claims.  Recently, Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, sent a scathing letter to the agency claiming that unclear sunscreen labels and inflated marketing were placing people at risk.

Healthnotes Newswire (July 5, 2007)—The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that, rather than being regulated by the standards used in the food industry, manufacturers of vitamins, minerals, and herbs will now be held to standards more in step with the pharmaceutical industry. Many supplement manufacturers have created and kept high standards for their products and welcome the new FDA regulations, since they ensure that other companies that have been slow to adopt such practices will be held to equal standards.

Despite connections between the sweetener aspartame and cancers (leukemia, lymphoma, and breast cancer specifically) the FDA is rejecting calls to take a closer look at the carcinogenic little chemcial. DemocracyNow (www.democracynow.org) reports:

Healthnotes Newswire (April 12, 2007)—Everyone knows that eating fresh fruit and vegetables is essential to good health. Every year, vast amounts of published research demonstrate these benefits, such as preventing cardiovascular disease and a variety of cancers. Ironically, these same health-promoting foods can quickly turn deadly if they are handled in an unsanitary manner. From 1996 to 2006, 72 food-borne illness outbreaks in the United States were associated with eating fresh produce, and 25% of these outbreaks implicated produce that was bought “fresh cut” in a store.

Healthnotes Newswire (March 15, 2007)—Adverse reactions to over-the-counter drugs are a significant problem in the United States. A once-common danger on the drug store shelf, phenylpropanolamine (PPA) was banned in the US by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a few years ago, though it is still available in many other countries. A new study supports its ban by confirming that it increases women’s risk of stroke.

Stroke occurs when normal blood flow through one or more small vessels in the brain is altered, causing the area of the brain served by that vessel to be damaged. Hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a small vessel bleeds into the brain, usually because of increased pressure in the vessel.