(NaturalNews) One of the most overused words in the food world has become dominant on many packaging labels, and companies and corporations are making big bucks using it as a marketing tool. In recent years the word “natural” has multiplied on food products as manufacturers capitalize on the emotions its very mention conjures up.

This one word, however, may be the least trustworthy of all food labeling terms. While it evokes thoughts of being healthy and wholesome, very little is actually said about the nutritional makeup of the food products. Legally a food manufacturer cannot lie about the nutrition and ingredients of its products, but since there are very casual guidelines about the term “natural”, shoppers might easily be misled into thinking an item is healthier than it really is. Read More

Are Scanners Worth the Risk? By SUSAN STELLIN Published: September 7, 2010. THE next time you go through security at the airport, you might be told to empty your pockets, put your hands over your head and stand still while an X-ray machine looks for anything hidden under your clothing.

If this body scanning option sounds unappealing, you have another choice: an “enhanced pat down” conducted by a Transportation Security Administration employee, which some travelers have described as quite intimate. Read More

Johann Hari: And now for some good news

We’ll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours
At first, this isn’t going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is. Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year-old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile-phone batteries. Read More

Many artificial food dyes that colour everything from breakfast cereal to ice cream should be banned because they pose cancer risks, a new report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest says.

“These synthetic chemicals do absolutely nothing to improve the nutritional quality or safety of foods, but trigger behaviour problems in children and, possibly, cancer in anybody,” said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson, co-author of the report, Food Dyes: A Rainbow of Risks. Read More

After 7000 miles, and 25 hours of footage, “Sweet Misery” will reveal one of the most pervasive, insidious forms of corporate negligence in the history of the industrial revolution.

The toxic long-term effects of aspartame are often dismissed as a “hoax” by the sweetener industry and at least five other internet websites. The real footwork, however, unravels something less comforting than a mere “Hoax.”

Sweet Misery Official Website

“Sweet Misery” is the title of a documentary released by Sound and Fury in June of 2004. Our primary investigation includes interviews with doctors, lawyers, people who have had health probems which they associate with aspartame usage, advocates, and many others.

“Aspartame is inherently, markedly and uniquely unstable in aqueous media”

is a quote from the congressional record in 1985, and yet it was approved for use in soft drinks and other beverages.

So what happened?

Is there credible evidence if you look beyond the smokescreen of corporate medicine? The primary research and interviews have been quite disturbing.

Dr. Woodrow C. Monte wrote: “Methanol [one of the breakdown products of aspartame] has no therapeutic properties and is considered only as a toxicant. The ingestion of two teaspoons is considered lethal in humans” (Monte, Woodrow, “Aspartame: Methanol and the Public Health”, Journal of Applied Nutrition, Vol. 36, Number 1, 1984, p. 44).

Though it can hardly be considered good fortune to have an immediate reaction to aspartame, at least you are spared the potential long-term ticking time-bomb of a large array of neurological illnesses. These include, but are not limited to Brain Cancer, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Graves Disease, Chronic Fatigue, MS and Epilepsy.

This feature-length documentary is now available.

By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Dole Food Company Inc filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Swedish film makers it accuses of knowingly including “patent falsehoods” in a documentary about Nicaraguan banana workers who sued Dole for allegedly exposing them to pesticides on its plantations.

Dole said it repeatedly “implored” director Fredrik Gertten and producer Margarete Jangard to revise the film “Bananas!*” to show that the bananeros’ lawsuits against Dole were thrown out in April by a Los Angeles judge who found a “pervasive conspiracy” to defraud U.S. courts by plaintiffs attorneys and Nicaraguan judges.

Gertten “refused to make any meaningful changes to the film, and persisted in publicly screening it and touting its accuracy in the face of court rulings that the story was false …,” said the suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Full Article