RantWorld

7-Up Natural

At first I planned to rant about the way that Cadbury-Schweppes has tried to turn the benzene in soda controversy to their favor by releasing 7-Up Natural. (I wrote more about Benzene and Soda yesterday). Yet removing the offending chemicals from your formula is a very appropriate reponse. It obviously has marketing benefits for the company, and it removes another source of benzene from the supermarket shelves.

Cadbury-Schweppes removed (most) of the artificial ingredients from 7-Up, including sodium benzoate. So now they have no additional lawsuit potential from cancer-stricken customers who might one day try to sue.

There is some controversy about the claim that 7-Up is now "100% Natural" since they still use high-fructose corn syrup as a major ingredient.

Whether they took this step primarily to remove the benzene or primarily as a marketing ploy, the net effect is still quite positive. Let's hope the rest of the soft drink makers follow suit.

Forrest Hill for California Secretary of State

The electoral process is severly broken in the United States at the national, state, and county levels. I've talked a lot about voting machine problems.

The other big problem, in my opinion, is that third party voices are actively prevented from speaking in the same forums as their major party counterparts.

Ever since the success of Ross Perot in the 1992 Presidential Election, the two ruling parties have done everything in their power to prevent third party candidates from getting on state ballots and from participating in televised debates.

In most states, the Secretary of State determines how elections are governed and implemented. Few people paid much attention to the Secretary of State position until two then-unknown politicians, Kathleen Harris of Florida in 2000 and Ken Blackwell of Ohio in 2004, abused their positions to influence election results in favor of their own Republican party candidates.

Now it is clear that an unscrupulous Secretary of State can  subvert the elections process and deny many legitimate citizens the right to vote. A strong and impartial Secretary, on the other hand, could go a long way toward making a state's elections far more democratic.

The best candidate for Secreatary of State would be neither a Democrat nor a Republican. A candidate from a third party has much more motivation to make elections fair, to make every vote count, and to let every qualified candidate have a voice.

Forrest Hill is a Green Party candidate for Secretary of State in California in 2006. He is committed to voting reform, as evidenced by this quote from his blog:

The accuracy of our elections will take a giant step backwards if either Bruce McPherson (R) or Debra Bowen (D) are elected Secretary of State. While the two candidates differ on various technical issues surrounding the certification of voting machines, both continue to support an open market for our votes controlled by private voting machine manufactures.

Since there are 58 counties in California, the potential number of voting systems in our state is large. No matter what safeguards Bowen or McPherson dream up, putting the integrity of our votes into the hands of a 'network' of private corporations is really a recipe for disaster.

If we are serious about assuring the accuracy of our vote we need a Secretary of State that will work with the local county registrars to create a 'single uniform system of voting' throughout the state, administered by a non-partisan elections commission.

As expected Forrest Hill has been locked out from debates with the Republican and Democratic candidates.

The deck is usually stacked against third party candidates. These days, the deck is even stacked against fair voting.  The only cure for that kind of deck-stacking is to elect a third party candidate for Secretary of State.

Whatever your party affiliation, if you are a California voter I urge you to vote for Forrest Hill for Secretary of State on November 7th.

Benzene and Soda

Taking a break from this blog's voting theme, I wanted to raise awareness of a big sleeper of a health issue.

A carcinogenic compound known as benzene can form in drinks that contain ascorbic acid and either sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate.

Guess what: a lot of soft drinks contain both of those ingredients.

Benzene is one of the most carcinogenic compounds around. If benzene levels in public drinking water exceed 5 parts per billion (ppb) the press must be notified and public warnings must be broadcast.

Most soft drinks have levels below 5 ppb, but a few of them test much higher than that. And when they do test higher, their consumers don't get notified at all.

The FDA and various soft drink companies have known about this for about 16 years. The FDA chose to let the drink manufacturers police themselves. A few manufacturers reformulated their drinks to prevent benzene from forming, but most of them did little or nothing.

As a recent Canadian study showed, testing by the drink manufacturers in controlled factory conditions seems to produce much different results than testing on randomly selected drinks from store shelves.

It seems that the amount of benzene formed depends a lot on whether that batch of soda was affected by heat or light during transportation or storage. So even though they say that standard Coca Cola has less than 2 ppm of benzene in it, if you take a plastic liter bottle of Coke and put it in the sun for a while, all bets are off.

So basically, the only safe bet is to "avoid or limit the consumption of products that contain both ascorbic acid and sodium/potassium benzoate."

A recent FDA report said that there's "not enough data" to understand whether benzene in soda is really a threat. Of course that lets them and the food corporations delay taking any action for a while longer.

Nice of the FDA to sit on this for so long, giving us 16 extra years of drinking refreshing benzene, eh?

For more information about the perils of benzene in your soda, the Accidental Hedonist blog did a great article on the topic earlier this year.

That article cited an editorial by Dr. Ruth Kava of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) that claims that fears of benzene in soft drinks are overblown. However a quick look at the other articles on the ACSH site reveal Dr. Kava's unspoken agenda. Other headlines on the site today included "DDT Use is Long Overdue" and "Threat of Low-Level Radiation Often Exaggerated." Every article brands some health concern as overblown, or some environmental progam as a waste of taxpayers' money. Dr. Kava and her organization seem to be trying to sow confusion and to prevent a consensus from forming on this issue.

The plain fact is, if benzene is bad for us, and if it doesn't need to be in our food and drink, it should be removed. Now.