Nutty Danes BAN Marmite and Vegemite ... because they have too many vitamins

Australia's Vegemite and Britain's Marmite are very similar products and both are hugely popular in their respective markets. Vegemite or Marmite on toast is one of life's great pleasures for their respective populations. Both are normally regarded as inedible by Americans, however.

Vegemite has long been Australia's national sandwich spread. It is sometimes described as an Australian national icon. Most Australian homes have some in the fridge. I have a big bottle of it myself and enjoy it greatly. And Australians have unusually long lifespans. Which is entirely due to Vegemite, of course!

And Princess Mary of Denmark is an Australian. How will she cope? Will the future Queen of Denmark be deprived of her hereditary food?

They say you either love it or hate it. But it seems that people in Denmark definitely hate Marmite as the country has banned it from its shelves. The sticky brown yeast extract, commonly spread on toast and sandwiches, has built up millions of admirers around the world - and just as many who grimace at the merest thought of the dark paste.

The divisive vegetable spread has been banned in Denmark because it breaks food laws passed in 2004 governing the sale of products fortified with added vitamins. And until now, Marmite had escaped the attention of food chiefs.

It is unclear exactly why the Danish authorities have launched a crackdown on foods with too many vitamins. But Marmite now joins the ranks of Australian alternative Vegemite, Horlicks, Ovaltine and Farley’s Rusks - all products the Danes have an apparent aversion to.

The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration is responsible for the ban which has ex-pat Britons living in the country fearful for their culinary future.

'What am I supposed to put on my toast now?' said British advertising executive Colin Smith, who has lived there for six years. 'I still have a bit left in the cupboard, but it's not going to last long.' He and others fear they will have to subscribe to a black-market trade in the sticky brown stuff, smuggled in from nearby Sweden or Germany where it is still legal.

British foodstuff shops in Copenhagen are worried about the economic impact on their businesses as Marmite has been a staple of their turnover for years.

The ban highlights the absurdity of the EU which states that it is a legal product, but which has no authority over nation states about what can and cannot be sold.

'They don't like it because it's foreign,' Lyndsay Jensen, a Yorkshire-born graphic designer in Copenhagen, told the Guardian. 'But if they want to take my Marmite off me, they'll have to wrench it from my cold dead hands.'

Abigails, a shop in the centre of Copenhagen that specialises in English foodstuffs, has begun a 'Bring Back Marmite' campaign.

'Marmite was one of our best-selling products. Not a day goes by without someone coming in and asking for it,' said Marianne Ørum, who together with her Scottish partner owns the food store. 'It’s becoming impossible to run a business in this country,' continued Ørum, herself a Dane. 'The government keeps making things illegal!'

The Danish government had no immediate comment on its decision.

SOURCE




Sex Scares Used to Ban BPA

Alan Caruba

We have documented a massive, global campaign to ban bisphenol-A, BPA, a chemical that has been safely used for more than a half century to protect metal and plastic containers for food and liquid against spoilage and the resulting hazard to health.

Every day, somewhere in the nation and the world, there is a constant repetition of lies regarding BPA They frequently target the fears of mothers of newborn infants, but also alleging a wide variety of other health threats including a healthy sex life for men and women.

In the same fashion that the global warming hoax was spread and maintained by a campaign that asserted that everything from frizzy hair to blizzards was the result of a dramatic warning cycle that was either happening or predicted to happen, the effort to ban BPA uses the same technique.

The campaign is pursued by a coalition of environmental and consumer activist groups that depend on such scare campaigns to maintain funding and secure members who can be relied upon to ignore or reject the science that disputes such campaigns.

In May 2011, the Miami Herald published what read like a news release by the Natural Resources Defense Council that asserted “Bisphenol-A associated with obesity, lower sperm counts, and pre-cancerous changes in the body is found in the bodies of 90 percent of Americans. Now a study shows that you can halve your levels of BPA and other chemicals within three days through a change in diet.”

Three distinct “scares” are captured in this news release, all aimed a fears regarding health, but none of them reflect the fact that trace amounts of BPA is routinely excreted and thus poses no threat. It also fails to reveal that the “studies” always involve administering large amounts of BPA to laboratory mice in a fashion that does not reflect actual exposure.

The ultimate target of the anti-BPA campaign is the widespread use of plastic containers of food and liquids, along with its use to line the insides of metal cans for that purpose.

From its earliest origins, environmentalists have sought to ban chemicals in general even though plastic has transformed and enhanced life around the world. In the U.S., the average life expectancy in the last century rose from thirty-seven in 1900 to the current seventy-eight years!

Earlier this year, the German Society of Toxicology released a review of more than five thousand previous studies of BPA exposure that concluded that BPA “exposure represents no noteworthy risk to the health of the human population, including newborns and babies.” Researchers concluded that BPA is neither mutagenic nor likely to be a carcinogen.

This, however, has not deterred the constant repetition of lies asserting that BPA is a health threat, nor a variety of efforts, including proposed State bans on the use of BPA. In April 2011, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a 14-page report that included three pages of intensely documented notes, that refuted efforts by the Maryland legislature to ban infant formula and baby food packaging that contains more than 0.5 parts per billion (ppb) of BPA.

“In public policy, bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to spread,” said Dr. Angela Logomasini, PhD. Efforts in Maine, Maryland, and even in Congress to ban BPA portend a host of food-born diseases and even death if such bans continue to be enacted.

The source of these bans is the environmental movement that first came to public notice when they succeeded in getting DDT banned. The result has been a rise in malarial deaths in nations that followed suit and in the swift explosion of the bed bug plague in the U.S.

So vast have been the campaigns against the beneficial chemicals that protect human health that a word was coined to identify the phenomenon—chemophobia. It is an irrational fear of chemicals when, in fact, the human body is a chemical factory, producing chemicals for digestion, hormones, and others, all the while cleaning the body of chemicals it rejects.

Simple common sense suggests that parts-per-billion of any substance cannot possibly pose a risk or threat.

In his book, “The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment”, published by the Cato Institute, author Indur M. Goklany, wrote “In keeping with its origins of technological skepticism, the precautionary principle has also been increasingly invoked as justification, among other things, for international controls, if not outright bans, on various technologies, which—despite substantial benefits to humanity and, in some cases to certain aspects of the environmental—could worsen other aspects of the environment or public health.”

At the heart of environmentalism is the core belief that humans are endangering the Earth by the use of the remarkable technologies that have been developed in the past century.

At the core of the efforts to ban BPA is an agenda to endanger the food supply by banning a chemical that protects it. That is why, by spreading lies about sperm counts, endocrine disruption, and non-existent threats via liquid containers, the ultimate agenda to reduce the worldwide human population is central to the campaign against the use of BPA.

There are no feasible substitutes for BPA. Banning it will guarantee the people will die.

SOURCE