Never mind Big Brother; your beer’s isotopes knows where you are.

By Andrew Schneider

That mug of microbrew you hoisted after work today tasted good, didn’t it? Would it have gone down as easy if you knew that it left a chemical marker showing what city you were in when you drank it? So do bottled and tap water as well as soft drinks.

It’s true. Your cellphone isn’t the only thing that can tell others your location. Scientists who can precisely measure hydrogen and oxygen isotopes can also tell where a crime victim spent the past year or whether that milk came from the farm down the road or across the country.

Biologists, geologists and analytical chemists at the University of Utah and a Salt Lake City laboratory called IsoForensics, Inc. are using this technology to help test food quality and solve cold cases for detectives around the country.

At the heart of the process is the water that is used in all beverages, from booze to baby formula. The body removes hydrogen and oxygen atoms from water and beverages that contain it and leaves a natural chemical imprint or fingerprint, explained Lesley Chesson and her colleagues in the current issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. “What we found is that human hair records the isotopic composition of the water that you drink,” she explained.

Chesson, an analytical chemist and the lead author of the study, explains it this way: The isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen in water vary in ways that can be predicted accurately, and they reveal the latitude, elevation and proximity to coastline.

Lesley Chesson

“A distinct chemical fingerprint in your hair could be used to track your travels,” Chesson says.

There are implications for this beyond tracking human whereabouts. It’s also a way to find fraudulent food.

The Utah team is collecting honeycomb from beekeepers across the country in hopes of tracking where honey originates. If this works, federal criminal investigators from Customs, the Food and Drug Administration and the Border Patrol will finally have a way to stop the smuggling of mislabeled, often unsafe Chinese honey.

It might also be a way to determine if that pricey bottle of wine is really worth it.

Three scientists from the University of Utah and IsoForensics – Jason West, James Ehleringer, and Thure Cerling have used the technique of measuring hydrogen and oxygen stable isotopes to detect and confirm the origin of wine.  They found that the water in the wine does indeed provide a record of where the water came from—meaning the wines were clearly distinguishable by growing region.

The criminal-case uses for this technology is right out of CSI. The first case it was used on was that of a woman whose body was found in 2000 in an old bathhouse on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. It had been converted into a concert hall called Saltair.

Seven years after the woman was found, a few strands of her hair yielded a staggering number of details.

“We were able to get a snapshot of the victim’s life back through time…week by week, determine what she drank and thus her location during the period,” Chesson says.

For example, they found that the victim had made periodic moves in the two years leading up to her death, back and forth between two regions in Idaho and Utah every six or eight months.

Chesson began collecting water and hair samples from across the United States in 2007. Next she collected samples of beverages found in almost every community – Dasani brand bottled water, Coca-Cola Classic soda, and Budweiser beer.

The Utah team collected a database of the chemical characteristics of drinking water in 450 U.S. communities.

Chesson and her colleagues found that the soda, bottled and tap water offer a consistent and accurate database. (They found that Budweiser might not be a good way to track someone—the brewer, Anheuser-Busch Inc., operates 12 breweries in the U.S. A consumer could be tipping a Bud that traveled hundreds of miles to their local market.)

The team also collected milk and cow drinking-water samples from eight locations in six states and Puerility Rico then bought milk from supermarkets in 30 cities within 18 states. Yes, they can track the origin of that milk mustache.

Chesson and the other scientists from IsoForensics have put out the word to beekeepers across the U.S. to send in samples of well-identified honeycomb. so the group can refine a method to accurate identify where the honey originated. I’ve was writing about honey laundering before my former newspaper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, closed 14 months ago and since I began covering public health for AOL News.

Believe me the bogus honey continues to flow though U.S. and onto store shelves. Honest honey importers and packers, and there are many, are trapped between shady importers who actually bounce Chinese honey from country-to-country, or just falsify the shipping papers, and the inability to actually have the golden nectar tested for country-of-origin by any laboratory outside of Germany.

If the analytical wizards in Salt Lake City can develop and confirm the accuracy of this technique, federal criminal investigators from Customs, the Food and Drug Administration and the Border Patrol will have a long-sought-after tool in U.S. efforts to halt the smuggling of mislabeled and adulterated Chinese honey.

In May, I reported that Texas A&M University palynologist and an anthropology professor Vaughn Bryant said he is doing melissopalynology – the study of pollen in honey that allows identification of its country of origin. From what Chesson told me it sounds like IsoForensics approach could wind up being more accessible and perhaps less costly than the German process.

Once you get beyond the gee-whiz factor, the Utah team’s tracking technology has  big-time implications for making sure any number of food products are safe, and accurately labeled.

Here is a link to a longer version of what I wrote today for AOL News .

(Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett contributed to this report.)

The ratio of isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen differ by geographic region.

A drink to your health? Well, maybe.

By Kathy Egan, RD

Wonder how to make a million in tough economic times? Simple: Sell a consumable repeat-purchase product that implies it will create a sense of well being.

Nutraceuticals and functional food products fit this bill amazingly well.  Consumers will pay $3, $4 or even $5 or more for a 16-ounce (or less) bottle of flavored water or juice mix spiked with dietary supplements –and the actual manufacturing cost is pennies per bottle.

These things go in cycles. First we had energy boosters. Now, drinks that promise to calm us down.

A recent New York Times piece, “Skip the Scotch, Just Have a Swig of Mellowberry” by Stephanie Rosenbloom reported on this latest trend in supplement spiked beverages: relaxation drinks.

Rosenbloom writes:

There are already more than 350 kinds of relaxation drinks on the market, according to Agata Kaczanowska, an analyst with the research company IBISWorld. Instead of slogans like Jolt’s “All the sugar and twice the caffeine,” these new drinks proffer serenity with maxims like Unwind’s “Tired of being wired?” and Drank’s “Slow your roll.”

Yes, many of us could use a slower roll, but can it be proffered in a bottle?

Some of the more than 1, 200 supplement containing beverage on sale in North America

Marketers know just how to launch these products. They know that the initial consumer reaction must be good, but not too good. These products do best flying under the radar long enough to get a group following before the experts have a chance to weigh in on them.  Then, after lots of people are using a product, consumers fall prey to false logic, i.e. it must be okay if so many people are using it.

Yet, as Rosenbloom points out, these drinks are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

What’s a wanna-be slow-roller to do? For starters, eyeball the marketing materials. Careful reading of labels reveals that these product claims are subtly worded to allude to the desired result.  Most companies are savvy enough to avoid legally defined health/ nutrition claims. (For more information on health-claim regulation, go to the FDA website.)

Ultimately, any discussion of functional foods comes back to the two main issues around dietary supplements:

Are they what they say they are? And does the ingredient really perform the desired function?

Consumers are often lulled into a false sense of security when the product is a food or drink.  We’re not suspicious of fortified foods because Americans have been buying them since white flour became “enriched” in the 1940s. Today, an average consumer will swallow a variety of dietary supplements in the form of breakfast cereal, energy bars, juice  and milk.

There are two main resources for those interested in verifying the safety of their supplements: U.S. Pharmacopia. U.S. Pharmacopia will verify supplements and allow them to display the USP mark.  (For a list of approved brands, click here.)

NSF International has a more extensive and searchable listing of dietary supplements deemed safe  .  While USP focuses on the veracity of the ingredients, NSF emphasizes safety.

My advice: if you are interested in taking supplements–make a deliberate, educated choice based on dietary needs, weighing benefits against risks or unknowns.  Talking to a physician or nurse practitioner is wise, of course. But don’t stop there: If you don’t know how to decide what supplements might be beneficial for you, see a Registered Dietitian.

(Kathy Egan is The Food Watchdog’s resident “renaissance dietitian” and senior writer. Click here for more of her bio.)

Who says Gulf seafood is safe?

I watched a shopper and fishmonger at a high-end Seattle grocery debate the safety of a pile of succulent-looking, fresh, jumbo shrimp in the seafood case.

The shrimp weren’t from Thailand, Vietnam or even Mexico.  They were from the Gulf, from the waters off Louisiana or Mississippi. They weren’t frozen, packed months ago before BP’s oil rig blew up, sank, and began spewing millions of gallons of hazardous hydrocarbons over almost everything.

Fish suppliers across the country have sold off much of the frozen Gulf products they were hoarding. But now new, freshly caught, Gulf goodies are again showing up in restaurant kitchens and on the chipped ice of good fishmongers.

Good chefs and persnickety consumers have long coveted the taste of shrimp, crab, oysters and fish from the Gulf.

On Monday, a gaggle of top chefs from around the country went to Grand Isle, La., to confirm for themselves the safety of the Louisiana seafood. Many promised the shrimpers, crabbers and fishers that they would eagerly use what they catch as long as it’s safe.

There is fresh seafood in the pipeline and according to Louisiana State officials the supplies are gradually increasing as more harvesting grounds are declared safe from oil and dispersants.

Everyone knows the threat is real and that availability could change. Things such as the weakening Hurricane Alex, or those storms that will surely follow, can force the still-surging oil back over previously safe breeding ground.

Consumers should be confident in the quality of what’s being offered.  I think that buying seafood from the Gulf is a much safer gamble than consuming the virtually untested imported seafood when inundates our food supply.

While food-safety activists say barely 2 percent of the imports are inspected by understaffed FDA port inspections, there is an elaborate and intricate system for ensuring the safety of food from the Gulf.  If you want more information, here is a link to a story I wrote this week for AOLNews.

–Andrew Schneider

“The Help” has the taste of the South in the 1960s

Most people who’ve read “The Help,” the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam) didn’t seek it out because of the references to Southern food. But the real nature of a place is found in its everyday meals, and Stockett has preserved a kind of South

ern life as surely as if she preserved Mississippi 1962 in amber.

In “The Help,”  three women narrate their overlapping lives. They are Skeeter, an intelligent beanpole of a white woman, just graduated from Ole Miss; dignified, tireless Aibileen, an African American cook and maid who lovingly raises the children of white employers–right up until the kids get old enough to go along with segregation; and Minny, also African American, a cook/maid and Aibileen’s best friend. Minny is young, wide, and possesses  a fast brain and smart mouth that keep her on the edge of disaster with her mean-spirited white bosses.

(more…)

Fast-food fantasies: Someday we’ll find some good news about junk food. Or die trying.

The wonderful thing about us, the overweight, inactive, sodium and high fructose corn syrup-slurping Americans, is that we put so much energy into figuring out which forbidden food is really, truly the worst.

Yet another case in point: Atlantic’s current article, “McDonald’s vs. Chipotle: Does the Big Mac Win?” by James McWilliams. As the headline indicates, it’s a two-meal comparison of the fat grams, fiber, calories and all those other mysterious measurements we now track.

Bottom line: The Mickey D’s Big Mac edges out the burrito from Chipotle slightly. (And no, McD’s doesn’t own Chipotle anymore.)

We know that just about everything we like to eat is wildly unhealthy. Why do we continue to revisit the bad news by comparing it to…different bad news? (If you’re presently going on a lot of blind dates, you have already asked yourself a version of this question.) (more…)

Gulf seafood is safe and for sale, but some fishmongers are pushing more risky foreign shrimp, crab and oysters.

Fifty-two days of oil gushing from the jagged remnants of the British Petroleum well, while devastating, has contaminated less than a third of the Gulf of Mexico fishery.

Nevertheless, there is growing fear among those catching, processing and selling the Gulf’s shell and fin fish that the nation’s fishmongers and restaurant suppliers may soon go to foreign waters for their seafood because they don’t understand that their products are both available and safe.

Gulf Blue Crabs waiting for pot. Photo (c) a. schneider

I’ve spent about three weeks talking to people who supply and ultimately cook those coveted saltwater delicacies from the docks of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

I found was that hundreds of samples of market-ready Gulf seafood have been and continue to be tested by about every government agency you can name. The testing uses both the highest-tech laboratory equipment and the carefully trained noses of human inspectors.

The conclusion so far is that the seafood being sold is free of contamination by oil and the little-understood chemical concoctions that make up the millions of gallons of dispersants dumped on the Gulf.

This rush to import from overseas, and replace what is still a steady source of safe Gulf seafood, could ravage a supply chain built over decades. But of greater public health concerns to many experts is that those who rush to foreign suppliers may not know (or may chose to ignore) the litany of FDA warnings over the years. Those warnings address harmful adulterants found in fish and crab, farmed shrimp and oysters from China and several other Asian countries.

The contaminants — some of which the FDA listed as carcinogenic – included a number of antimicrobial agents, disinfectants and drugs to combat diseases and parasites that often flourish in heavily overcrowded fish and shellfish pens.

(more…)

A critic on food stamps has a lot to tell us

If you only read one food-related story today, this would be a good one to pick. It appears in Pacific Northwest, the Sunday magazine of The Seattle Times. The writer is Ed Murrieta, a former food critic whose income vaporized, sending him to the food-stamp line with millions of other Americans.

He writes:

“When I was the restaurant critic at the Tacoma News Tribune, from 2004 to 2008, I enjoyed a $1,300 monthly expense account, on top of the middle-class salary that financed a house overlooking Puget Sound. I gave that up to start my own business, and when my entrepreneurial dream fizzled along with the economy, my food budget — my total income — plunged to $200 a month.

As I search for work without success (I’ve applied for restaurant-critic jobs at alt weeklies in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver; communications jobs with state and city agencies; and jobs as butcher, baker, line cook and carpet cleaner) I find neither shame nor deprivation in food stamps.”

Check out this excellent story, here.

–Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett

The 2010 Xtreme Eating Awards go to…

If you were at Woodstock (or could have been if your parents weren’t such Fascists), you’re old enough to remember when high school yearbooks used to routinely award the “Most Likely to Succeed” title to the biggest pothead in the senior class. Wink wink.

The Xtreme Eating Awards of 2010 are sort of like that. Folks at The Center for the Science in the Public Interest know that railing about junk food doesn’t change anything, but humor might. So they sent out their best (undoubtedly thin) investigators to discover which restaurants in this country are the worst, most “Xtreme” offenders in the calorie war. (more…)