Irradiation in Food
Food borne illnesses increase dramatically every year, causing death and financial waste in their wake (Shea N.P). Irradiation is the solution but skeptic criticism is implanting fear in the minds of uninformed consumers, consequently preventing the mountains of advantage this new technology has to offer. Skeptics would wait for thousands of so-called "new" studies to tell us the same thing the old studies told us rather than save lives now. In this paper I will show you that, despite these quarrels over little imperfections, irradiation is a highly regulated, safe way to destroy harmful microorganisms in food and that all proven advantages of food irradiation tower over the few baseless fears of ignorant critics. Each year nearly 80,000,000 people become ill, over 320,000 are hospitalized, and over 5,000 die, all due to food borne illnesses (Robertson N.P). According to Dr. Katherine Shea, a Professor at the University of North Carolina, the Nicholas School of the Environment, and the Medical School at Duke University, these numbers are increasing dramatically each year and the irradiation of food is by far the best solution (Shea N.P). Food irradiation can prevent millions of these food borne illnesses. Irr
congress put food irradiation under FDA regulation by including it as a "food preservative" (Shea N. It is their responsibility to ensure the safety of using irradiation for parasite and insect prevention. For instance, according to Shea a group of expert committees including the joint Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, WHO, the International Consultative Group on Food Irradiation, and the FDA have all concluded that irradiation under specified conditions is completely safe (Shea N. All but two of the hundreds of organizations that conducted studies on irradiation have deemed irradiation safe for food. " So basically, for a nutrient loss equal to any other form of heat treating, irradiation can give us much higher levels of food safety than any other form of food processing. They say that irradiation should not even be at the level of evaluation and inspection yet, it should instead still be in the testing phase. These amazing numbers should be enough to persuade everyone to purchase irradiated products but critics say that along with destroying harmful microorganisms, irradiation destroys much of the nutrients in food. Evidently these critics do not realize that over 50 years of research has been conducted worldwide on the subject of irradiation. While the irradiation of food does cause some loss of nutrients, Shea writes that this nutrient loss is comparable to cooking, canning, pasteurizing, blanching, and any other form of heat processing (Shea N. They should instead realize it's our greatest weapon against food borne illnesses. Like all new scientific advancements, skeptics fear it even though no proof exists for those fears.
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