No More Mystery Meat For School Lunches

Berkeley, California, longtime hippie haven and world capital of political correctness, is expected to approve a plan Wednesday which would make its school cafeterias among the first in the nation to offer all organic meals.

``We have kids who are coming to school who don't understand the process,'' said Karen Sarlo, a spokeswoman for the Berkeley Unified School District. ``This is part of a whole effort to improve nutrition and educate our kids and our families about good nutrition.''

So long mystery meat, farewell corn dogs. The organic plan, which supporters say should sail through a second reading by the school board Wednesday, will pack Berkeley school lunches with such delicacies as pesticide-free baby carrots and sandwiches made with organic bread.

Students will grow some of their own food in school gardens, and the rest will come from local organic farmers. The policy requires milk to be free of bovine growth hormones, and dumps all irradiated and genetically altered foods from the cafeteria menu.

``The whole philosophy is to have food become part of the education,'' Jered Lawson, who is helping train teachers how to incorporate garden lessons into math, science, and literature classes, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Rick Deburgh of the California School Food Services Association said Berkeley's organic lunch plan was the first he'd ever encountered.

``That's pretty rare -- and pretty expensive -- but Berkeley is an unusual place,'' Deburgh told the Chronicle.

Calcium helps children with rickets

Rickets is rarely seen in Europe or North America because children who live in these countries eat foods fortified with vitamin D, note Dr. Philip Fischer of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and his international team of researchers.

But in developing countries, rickets is among the five most common diseases in children. Because vitamin D is manufactured in the skin on exposure to sunlight, the cause of rickets in regions of the world with ample sunlight ``remains an enigma.'' Some studies have suggested that a lack of calcium in a child's diet may also cause rickets.

In the new study, Fischer and his colleagues compared three treatments -- calcium alone, vitamin D alone, or calcium and vitamin D together -- in 123 Nigerian children with rickets, average age 46 months.

At 24 weeks, x-rays of the children's wrists and knees showed that those who took both calcium and vitamin D had healed more than those who took vitamin D alone. In addition, blood levels of the enzyme alkaline phosphatase, which are raised in patients with rickets, had decreased more in children who took calcium, either alone or in combination with vitamin D.

Overall, 61% of the calcium group and 58% of the calcium/vitamin D group showed a combination of lower alkaline phosphatase levels and radiological improvement, compared with only 19% of the vitamin D group.

The researchers conclude that the children with rickets in the study had a low calcium intake, and that ``dietary supplementation with calcium or a combination of calcium and vitamin D healed the rickets.''

Fischer and colleagues note that their findings ``do not prove that calcium deficiency by itself causes rickets,'' but they suggest that ensuring adequate calcium intake ``with inexpensive, locally acceptable food sources of calcium'' may help to prevent rickets.

In a letter in the same issue of the Journal, Dr. Nicholas Bishop of the University of Sheffield, UK, emphasized that rickets can lead to serious health problems, including delayed motor development and deformed bones. African children with rickets are 13 times more likely to get pneumonia and almost twice as likely to die of it.

Bishop advises that mothers in developing countries be encouraged to breastfeed for at least 18 months, and that inexpensive sources of calcium be incorporated into the diet.

``Children in developed countries need calcium, too,'' Bishop writes, noting that higher calcium intake in childhood results in better calcium retention and increased bone mass -- in other words, stronger bones.

SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine 1999;341:563-568, 602-604

Use Cinnamon to Bite the Bug

Kansas State University researchers say that after cooking and pasteurization, the most effective way to kill the E.coli bug in food is to sprinkle it with cinnamon. In tests, a single teaspoonful of the spice added to contaminated apple juice killed 99.5 per cent of the E.coli bacteria within three days.

The researchers say they believe cinnamon also may be useful in fighting other food bugs such as salmonella (eggs are particularly susceptible) and campylobacter (present on two out of every five chickens). Food poisoning infects millions of people every year, some of them fatally.

Cinnamon has a reputation of long standing as a natural healing substance, particularly for easing digestive disorders. Experts believe mankind accidentally discovered this centuries ago when it started using the pleasantly scented spice to disguise the taste of spoiled foodstuffs.

Water and exercise cut men's cancer risk

``These findings add to the evidence that leisure-time activity may reduce colon-cancer risk, not only in high-risk but also in low-risk populations, and support the potential beneficial effect of increased water intake in reducing colorectal cancer risk,'' report researchers from Chang Gung University in Tao-Yuan, Taiwan. The report is published in the International Journal of Cancer.

Those men who consumed the most water had a 92% lower risk of rectal cancer than those who drank the least water, according to the study of 163 Taiwanese cancer patients aged 33 to 80 who were compared with 163 healthy people in the same age group.

What's more, those men with the most active lifestyles had 83% lower risk of colon cancer compared to men with sedentary lifestyles.

The investigators found no link between water intake or exercise and colorectal cancer in women.

However, past studies have found that people who exercise -- regardless of gender -- have a lower risk of colorectal cancer. The researchers note that it is possible that the number of women in the study, 71, was too small to detect an association. Or that the women who were sedentary in their leisure time actually engaged in heavy physical activity, such as washing clothes by hand, house-cleaning, or farming -- which would mask the association.

The study could not determine why water intake or physical activity decreased the cancer risk. However, one hypothesis is that exercise stimulates the colon and decreases the period of time that potential carcinogens in partially digested food are in contact with the intestinal lining.

Similarly, ``increased water intake may be an important factor in reducing colon cancer risk by decreasing bowel transit time or by decreasing the concentration of carcinogenic compounds in the water phase,'' the authors write.

SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer 1999;82:484-489.

Many US adults low in vitamin E

Researchers found African-Americans to be at especially high risk for low intake of the nutrient.

Vitamin E deficiency raises risks ``for chronic diseases in which low dietary intake or blood concentration of (vitamin E) have been implicated,'' explain Drs. Earl Ford and Anne Sowell of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. They report their findings in the August issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The authors examined data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a periodic federal government poll focusing on the health of thousands of Americans.

Ford and Sowell report that among a group of about 16,300 US adults 18 years of age or older, 27% had low blood concentrations of vitamin E, defined as (20 micromoles per liter. After adjusting for age, the researchers found that ``29% of the men, 28% of the women, 26% of the whites... 41% of the African-Americans... 28% of the Mexican-Americans... and 32% of the other participants... had this low concentration.''

The finding that African-Americans had the lowest vitamin E concentrations of all racial and ethnic groups represented is ''most significant,'' Ford and Sowell write, because of ``the relatively high mortality from cardiovascular disease and cancer they experience.''

Many experts believe the antioxidant properties of vitamin E can help fight cancer, as well as the buildup of cholesterol on artery walls. In fact, the study authors report that subjects' blood cholesterol levels tended to rise alongside falling levels of vitamin E.

Ford and Sowell are hopeful that ongoing studies will ''definitively demonstrate the utility of vitamin E in reducing chronic disease.'' Such confirmation might prompt experts to revise the current RDA ('recommended daily allowance') for the nutrient.

SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology 1999;150:290-300

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