Yes, but there’s not much consensus on the why and some researchers believe most of this is due to prenatal exposure: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/07/25/sperm-concentration-has-declined-50-percent-in-40-years/?utm_term=.efb08aed467e.
@musicprnt , you are correct: Gelato Fiasco is the best! 
Was your S at the Bowdoin International Music Festival? If so, I may well have seen him play, and if not, my son’s godfather undoubtedly did, because he goes to ALL the student concerts.
I’m not meaning to dismiss the OP’s concerns. This thread served to remind me of how much anxiety and worry I wrestled with while raising my children.
It was much worse when they were very young, when I was, naturally, much more responsible for their well-being (versus now, when they are 21 & 19).
I’m not sure the circle of moms I hung around with helped. There always seemed something to fret about, or some buying choice that needed to be amended immediately, sizing up the good products and the bad products, and urgings to call your senator about something.
Just speaking for myself, it was hard to handle and keep balance + perspective.
Double post by mistake. Editing.
Although I think it is changing rapidly, American consumers are far less demanding when it comes to food quality than our European counterparts. EU regulations also make it harder for companies to include certain ingredients and are more vigilant when finding “traces” of anything out of the ordinary.
The products that American companies sell abroad often have better ingredients than what they sell here. For instance Kraft does not use dyes in many of the products they sell abroad but instead utilizes natural colorants like annatto, carmine and elderberry juice. McDonalds in France fry their french fries in a non-hydrogenated oil but uses a blend here at home that includes a hydrogenated canola oil – a very cheap oil. High fructose corn syrup is what we get at home in many products but real sugar is contained in what they produce abroad. Hence the popularity of Mexican coca-cola here in the states. If we want cleaner food we have to direct our consumer dollars in a way that makes that statement heard.
If you have ever been to a McDonalds in France it is a real eye opener – nothing like the experience here. They even started a branch called McSalad that only does salads–unsure if it took off or not.
Here is a pic of their dessert offerings at a McDonald’s in France:
http://ruttledg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/i-went-to-mcdonalds-in-france-and-discovered-how-the-us-is-doing-it-all-wrong-1.jpg
And of course the American people have always wanted better food choices and labelling but our corporate interests have stymied that at every level. In the EU, things are labeled as containing GMO ingredients and that includes every American product that has high fructose corn syrup or soy lecithin. We get to read labels and make assumptions…
I remember when Monsanto quashed congressional legislation about labelling bovine growth hormone and instead, made sure there was a law making products that claimed “no BGH” had to print something saying that there was no scientific evidence that BGH was bad. That involved Ben and Jerry’s too and it was a long time ago.
To me, there is no good reason to suppress truth in labelling. It’s a lot like net neutrality - the only benefits to suppressing these things are corporate profits.
@HarvestMoon1 , that’s a McCafe. They have different offerings that the regular McDonald’s in this country too. Although definitely not including some of the items I see there!
I was in a McDonalds in France that had the McCafe attached to it. Never been to a McCafe here.
It is impossible to keep up with the claims that certain foods are tainted. Last February a lawsuit was filed claiming that certain inexpensive brands of wine were tainted with arsenic. Brands like Fetzer, Cupcake, Beringer…
At other times we’ve been warned about Alar on apples, tainted buffalo mozzarella from Italy, tainted olive oil, the dangers of boxed mac and cheese, tainted seafood, growth hormones in meat, e coli on fresh produce, noro virus at Chipotle, and the dangers of cured meats. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot since a new danger seems to come out daily.
I know people who fret about every little new alarm over chemicals or hidden dangers. They won’t touch certain reciepts because they contain bisphenol. They won’t eat beef, bacon, tuna, mushrooms. They won’t drink out of plastic or drink coffee that has run through the plastic tubing in a coffeemaker. They read every single label on every sngle thing they buy at the grocery store.
At some point, the anxiety and stress over all this must be worse for one’s health than the dangers in the food.
The biggest polluting chemical… drumroll… is caffeine. Naturally occurring in the coffee we drink. Look it up. We pee it out and it gets into the bodies of water. Also, the hormones women take to combat the effects of menopause and as birh control mostly end up flushed out…
Living itself is toxic. This article is a hit job. Take a deep breath. You just inhaled more carcinogens than in a lifetime of B&G. Hysteria.
Two articles that look at the science behind these claims, as well as the group responsible for them.
https://medium.com/the-method/anti-vaccine-group-organic-consumers-association-may-be-extorting-ben-and-jerry-s-17f89690517d
https://medium.com/@kevinfolta/ben-and-scarys-or-bogus-news-scoop-8f27979082b5
I don’t see any hysteria – that’s the whole problem, we are too complacent. Why should we settle for the cheapest ingredients here when consumers abroad demand and get a superior product from American companies?
As far as the article is concerned who knows what the truth is, but it’s better to keep consumer awareness focused on ingredients. Traces of something can very easily become unacceptable levels if we don’t keep our eye on the ball.
I ate a hot dog for lunch today and B&J ice cream for dessert. No apologies, no anxiety and no guilt.
Agent Orange caused severe birth defects. So if anything was as dangerous as that, we would have heard about it by now. On the organic issue, more generally, there are no rigorous peer reviewed studies, testing whether an organic diet causes a person to have a longer life expectancy. In the absence of research, such arguments usually devolve into shifting the burden of proof.
@roethlisburger:
Are you serious? Agent Orange caused outbreaks of cancer in Vietnam vets who were exposed to it (I won’t even go into what it did to the Vietnamese), after years of claiming it wasn’t true, the VA admitted it and I believe the company that produced it settled court suits and set up a trust fund for the veterans exposed to it (just look up the story of Elmo Zumwalt, Jr).
It isn’t just about organic produce, it is about the quality of the whole food supply and how we eat. For example, there are certain types of food grown where they use a ton of insecticides on them and they absorb it, root vegetables and berries use a lot of chemicals, and because of the way they are it is taken into the plant (the way Glysophate is), whereas for example with apples and other hard skin fruit you can wash away the contaminants with water and or/peroxides, so it also varies. The other problem with commercial produce, especially things like tomatoes, is that they often are not allowed to grow to maturity, they pick them green, then gas them to ripen them, and nutritionally they don’t have the same value as ones grown organically, but in the end it is likely that nutritionally the organic produce will be the same (though I will tell you that commercially grown products to me have a lot less flavor, especially with fruit, but that is opinion).
In terms of life expectancy, there is one proof of what I am talking about, cancer is a billion dollar cost each year in the US, and the rates of people getting cancer since we had the ‘war on cancer’ haven’t changed and life expectancy would also need to chart things like the cancer rates of people who eat organic versus non organic.You won’t see those studies anytime soon, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have laws
The real overall problem goes beyond that, it is what we are eating, the ‘industrialized food’ has done a number on the US and is now hitting the rest of the world as well, Obesity is getting to be a global epidemic and it is tied to industrialized food, like fast food, and is part and parcel with the heavy use of insecticides and herbicides and the like, producing food on an industrialized basis that is cheap.
And going back to the original post, I did some research of glyphosate and the FDA. When people mention that the level of glyphosate found in B and J’s ice cream were “lower than the FDA safe level”, what they don’t tell you is the safe level they are talking about was about indirect exposure (ie like blowback in the air or the amount that might evaporate and be breathed in), the FDA has never done a study about a safe level for Glyphosate being ingested, and indirect exposure is not the same thing as ingesting it, they are two different pathways.The problem is glyphosate has gone from being something that is sprayed to kill weeds for aesthetic reasons (up until maybe 5 years ago, it couldn’t be used on feed crops because it would kill the crop) to something being used…what makes it worse is how pervasive and how fast this is being propagated, the heaviest use of glyphosate on the GMO crops that can handle it, is corn and soybeans, and guess what, both are incredibly widespread in our food chain, from beef and chicken that are feed chicken and soy meal, to things like corn used as sweetener and filler, and soy oil routinely used in a lot of food, and all of them have the potential to increase the amount of the stuff being ingested and most people won’t even know it They started using glyphosate without any kind of testing on its safety in food crops, from what I read the FDA allowed them to do this based on the standards for indirect exposure, there never were tests, which is scary as heck.
Put it this way, when it comes to food safety it shouldn’t be the party line of far too many people who protect the chemical and food industries, saying “it is safe until proven unsafe”, the burden of proof should be on it being safe, and not only that, but in the way people are being exposed. Put it this way, when lead in the air being generated by the burning of gasoline and was first questioned in the late 40’s, until the time the EPA finally banned it (in 1980!), the standard refrain was “there has never been a study proving lead wasn’t unsafe”…if you have a compound that has not been tested, the first order of business is to assume it is unsafe until it is proven safe, but that isn’t how it operates, especially in the last 35 years, more and more it is 'prove it is unsafe". BTW, with leaded gasoline the only reason it stopped being used was because it contaminated the catalytic converters car makers had to go to to reduce NOx emissions, if that never happened the EPA may likely have not banned lead, once the carmakers stopped using leaded gas entirely, there was no incentive for them or the oil companies to fight it.
I completely disagree with this. Obesity is a function of the average person not getting any more exercise than the walk from the parking lot to the cubicle, and maybe not even that if they’re unemployed, disabled, or telecommute, while consuming too many calories.
Sure, I am. The US banned Agent Orange domestically in 1969. At least by the mid 70s, absolutely no one believed Agent Orange was safe. Everyone knew it was highly toxic. The real questions were always about what level of exposure vets experienced, whether Agent Orange could be tied to specific diseases, and who knew what when.
Round-up beans have been on the market since the mid 1990’s; Round-up corn since 1998.
@roethlisburger:
That isn’t true, and the proof is in the fact that obesity is not just a first world problem. Among other things, take a look at the number of calories being ingested and the quantity of fat and sugar being eaten, and it isn’t just exercise. We were a nation of couch potatoes back in the day when I was growing up, in the 1970’s, people we watching a lot of tv and were driving all over, but the rate of obesity has skyrocketed since then, do some research on people being overweight in the 1970’s and what it is today, and industrialized food is the big culprit. One of the funny parts is the number of gyms out there has soared, yet the obesity rate and being overweight it much, much larger than it was back then.
The difference is in the food people are eating. When I was growing up, fast food was not really that cheap, what you are paying for that supersize meal today, which is much larger portions of everything, in real dollars is a lot less than it was when I was growing up. Portions in restaurants other than high end frou frou restaurants have become much, much larger because people want 'value", a portion of meat 40 years ago was likely 4-6 oz, these days it is much larger. And yes we had tv dinners back then, but take a look at the inner aisles of grocery stores, the number of packaged foods has soared and it is industrialized food at its worse. I am sure the food industry would love to blame lazy people who don’t exercise, but the reality is since at least the 1950’s most people lead relatively sedentary lives, but the obesity explosion has been in the last 25 years or so, where it really skyrocketed. And I’ll give you an indication, type II diabetes 40 years ago was seen almost entirely in adults and usually in their 40’s and 50’s, today it is hitting people much younger than that, and worse is hitting epidemic proportions and they are seeing large numbers of kids getting it. Food that is based on large quantities of dirt cheap ingredients is generally loaded with fat, sugar and salt, not to mention a ton of chemicals it takes an organic chemist to figure out. We subsidize the wrong food, especially corn and soy, and dirt cheap meat raised in factory farms which are unhealthy as hell, still allow them to use hormones in beef along with indiscriminate use of antibiotics, and create food that is full of empty calories.
On this program on Netflix called "Eating’ they profiled an operation in India, where Nestle is busy created packaged version of Indian foods, that are engineered to taste like traditional indian foods but is basically a bunch of cheap ingredients and additives to make it taste like the original, but nutritionally is junk, and that is exactly what has happened in this country already.
Even in the 70s, obesity was still common,
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity, so the baseline was higher than you seem to be assuming. According to Pew,http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/, caloric intake increased more than 20% since 1970. So caloric intake went up and obesity went up. I’m not sure how that’s related to organic vs non-organic, other than to the extent non-organic methods made food cheap enough that even poor people can afford to buy more than they need.