Last year, after the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission told the four biggest manufacturers of alcoholic energy drinks the caffeine in their beverages was an unsafe additive, and that their marketing might be unfair and deceptive, the companies agreed to reformulate. 

Of course, that did nothing to stop people — especially young people — from adding alcohol to energy drinks as they’ve always done, but did call into question whether the practice should be encouraged in advertising and promotions.

“If marketing a product that combines caffeine and alcohol is illegally deceptive, then promoting a drink as a mixer is equally deceptive,” said Michele Simon, research and policy director at the Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog.

In Simon’s view, “A company that is promoting a highly caffeinated drink to be mixed with alcohol is certainly engaged in unethical business practices and deceptive illegal business practices,” Simon added, because the potential risks aren’t being disclosed.

“You aren’t telling someone you could get seriously injured, injure someone else, or die,” Simon said. “You’re withholding relevant information.”

While it is not within the FDA’s jurisdiction to regulate whether alcohol should be mixed with energy drinks, Simon thinks the FTC could pursue the issue because of the way energy drink companies advertise and promote their drinks as mixers.

“Monster and Red Bull are promoting [the mixing of alcohol and energy drinks] and the FTC could absolutely go after this,” she said, adding that she’s not trying to dictate what issues should be a priority for the FTC.

Other countries have, however, taken steps to alert consumers about potential risks. Canada and Sweden have issued warnings about the dangers of mixing alcohol with energy drinks and, in light of evidence that caffeinated beverages may negatively affect the health of children and young adults, some countries prohibit the sale of energy drinks outright.

Earlier this year, in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association, two researchers called the FDA/FTC pressure on the makers of caffeinated alcoholic beverages “a welcome response to an increasing public health risk.”

But they warned that regular nonalcoholic energy drinks may be just as dangerous as the premixed alcohol brands, and said mixing alcohol with energy drinks is both widespread and dangerous.

“The practice of mixing energy drinks with alcohol […] has been linked consistently to drinking high volumes of alcohol per drinking session and subsequent serious alcohol-related consequences such as sexual assault and driving while intoxicated,” the researchers wrote.

Energy drink companies regularly encourage students on college campuses to mix their products with alcohol, said Patricia Maarhuis, coordinator at Washington State University’s Alcohol and Drug Counseling and Prevention Services program.

For example, she said, energy drink companies employ students at WSU to promote their products on campus, which includes throwing parties where energy drinks are handed out to students who are encouraged to bring their own alcohol. 

In marketing energy drinks to young people, manufacturers often suggest the beverages can enhance attention and endurance.  And some people think they can consume more alcohol if it’s mixed into energy drinks, because they think the caffeine will offset the effects of the alcohol. 

However, a recent study by the Boston University School of Public Health and Brown University’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, published in the journal Addiction, found that energy drinks made no difference in stopping the depressant effects of alcohol, including impaired driving performance, shortened attention span, and slowed reaction times.

Regulators should scrutinize advertising practices regarding the safety of mixing alcohol with energy drinks, the study recommended.

In a second study, researchers at Northern Kentucky University found that students who drank Red Bull with vodka said they felt more alert than students who drank straight vodka, but they were just as inebriated.  That study, published online in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, emphasized the concern that drinkers stimulated by caffeine when energy drinks are mixed with alcohol sometimes don’t know when to stop.

Asked for a response, Red Bull emailed a statement about mixing its energy drink with alcohol.

“Some consumers do like to mix [Red Bull] with different types of alcohol,” the statement said. “Red Bull Energy Drink …  may be mixed with alcohol as long as people drink responsibly and understand that alcohol consumption might impair their mental and physical activities.”

And Red Bull is not designed to counter the depressant effects of alcohol, the company said.

“Everyone knows that the excessive and irresponsible consumption of alcohol can have adverse effects on human health and behavior. But it should be clear that this is due to the alcoholic drink, not the mixer.” 

The Berkeley Student Food Collective has in turn spawned the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, or CoFed, which now is working to train student leaders nationwide to set up similar cooperatively run markets at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, City College San Francisco, Humboldt State University, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Washington.

The group’s five-year goal is 35 co-ops and 1,000 trained student leaders serving 700,000 students.

In Berkeley, the Student Food Collective operates out of a storefront owned by UC.  Open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, it’s a grocery market and coffee shop where students can get freshly brewed fair-trade coffee along with sandwiches, eggs, produce, and other grocery items. Students who volunteer a few hours of work each week get discounts and help keep prices affordable.

Berkeley graduate Yoni Landau, CoFed’s director and cofounder, is training students to start co-op cafes on their own campuses that more or less follow the UC Berkeley model. 

The campus co-ops will not only serve local, healthy and sustainably grown food but can create a sense of community, said Landau, who believes communities are strengthened when people know where their food comes from and come together to be involved in the food chain from farm to plate.

“In a way it’s a little bigger than food,” Landau said. “It’s not just changing the content of the food system, it’s actually restructuring the food system so we can have community-driven institutions.” 

CoFed gives student leaders autonomy in deciding what food standards their co-ops will adopt, leaving it up to them to debate and define concepts like sustainability. The Berkeley collective follows the standards of www.realfoodchallenge.org, evaluations based on who produces the food and how it is produced, whether it is local, fair, ecologically sound and humane.

Anna Banchik is studying economics and international studies at the University of Washington and also is the director of the UW Student Food Cooperative. Banchik thinks most college campuses aren’t meeting students’ dietary needs.

“Food access for vegetarians, vegans, the gluten-free, and other individuals limited by food allergies or restrictions, is usually minimal and non-diverse, entailing that same, disappointing, cabbage wrap or pricey salad every day,” Banchik said.

In planning the UW’s co-op, which is scheduled to open this fall, her group holds biweekly meetings where student members discuss food issues and help make decisions about what the market will offer. Banchik shares Landau’s belief that food can bring a community together. 

“Everyone from foodies to people interested in social justice issues come to the meetings,” Banchik said. “Food is an issue a lot of people can see eye to eye on.”

The UW students have agreed to label food to show how many miles it has been transported, Banchik said. They’ve also debated the moral and ethical implications of serving meat and non-local coffee, she said. Once the founding leaders graduate, the co-op members will vote to determine who the new leaders will be.

The UW has already agreed to provide space, rent free, in the health sciences building, and will pick up the cost of utilities. Prices will also be kept affordble because the co-op will be run entirely by volunteers, use produce from UW’s own farm, and collaborate with other nearby co-ops to buy local food in bulk, Banchik said. 

Banchik sees the co-op as a way for students to learn valuable life skills, ranging from eating responsibly to bookkeeping and accounting. 

“It’s a great opportunity to learn on your own instead of just going to a class,” Banchik said. “It’s valuable to start a grassroots movement on campus.” 

It’s Landau’s hope that students will live out the values co-ops teach for their rest of their lives. “If we can show them an example of a community,” he said, “then after they graduate they can create the world they want to see.”

Dr. Conrad Woolsey, an assistant professor of applied health and educational psychology at Oklahoma State University, has written several scholarly articles and lectured extensively on energy drinks.  He says the problem isn’t just that the drinks are packed with sugar and caffeine, but also with additives and herbal ingredients.

“Energy drinks are like a pharmacological Molotov cocktail,” Woolsey said.

He explains that because the human brain does not fully develop until the age of 25, it is more susceptible to being affected by the ingredients in energy drinks that influence the brain’s neurotransmitters–the chemicals that send information across a small gap, or synapse, from one nerve cell, or neuron, to another.

Circumstances both inside and outside of the brain determine which neurotransmitters get released. So pleasure-reward neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, are released during pleasurable experiences and stress neurotransmitters and hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, are released during intense experiences.

Caffeine’s ability to induce alertness, rapid heart beat and even jitteriness is well-documented, and energy drinks contain a lot of it. 

According to Woolsey, some of the ingredients commonly found in energy drinks, like taurine and inositol, have been used as anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications.  Along with the caffeine and ingredients such as ginseng, epinephrine, and guarana, they can simultaneously cause the release of pleasure-reward neurotransmitters and stress neurotransmitters.

As Woolsey explains it, energy drinks essentially simulate both a pleasurable and high-stress experience, at the same time.  The problem with that is the brain can become desensitized to otherwise normally pleasurable experiences due to these ingredients, so it takes ever-more artificial and natural stimulants for a person to feel satisfied or the same level of pleasure and reward–which Woolsey says can lead to addictive behavior.

He points to one study in which college students who drank three or four energy drinks a week were found to be more likely to illicitly use amphetamine-based attention deficit disorder medication.

Similarly, overstimulating the stress neurotransmitters at a young age can cause the brain to be overactive to them later–which can lead to anxiety and depression, Woolsey said.

Children are also more affected by caffeine than adults because they weigh less; a 100 pound person is going to be twice as affected by caffeine than a 200 pound person, Woolsey said.  “A kid (over-)using an energy drink(s) at [age] 12 would have a strong drive for addictive behavior later,” Woolsey predicts.

A survey conducted by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland found that college students who regularly consume energy drinks are at a greater risk for alcohol dependency.

The study, published in the journal “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research,” involved interviews with 1,097 fourth-year students at a large public university.

Researchers found that “low-frequency” students, those who drank energy drinks 51 or less days out of the year, were significantly less likely to have alcohol-related problems than “high-frequency” students, those who drank energy drinks 52 or more days a year. The high-frequency students drank alcohol an average of 141.6 days a year compared with 103.1 days a year average for the low-frequency students. 

The high-frequency students also consumed a greater amount of alcohol. The high-frequency group consumed an average of 6.15 alcoholic drinks per drinking session, compared with the average of 4.64 alcoholic drinks consumed by the low-frequency group.

According to the researchers, while there is a strong correlation between daily or weekly energy drink consumption and alcohol dependence, further research is needed to understand the connection.

In response to the Johns Hopkins-University of Maryland article, the American Beverage Association, which represents several energy drink companies, said that an association between alcohol and energy drink consumption does not mean increased energy drink consumption leads to increased alcohol use.

The ABA declined a request for an interview for this article, but sent a written statement defending the safety of energy drinks.

The caffeine in energy drinks is no different from the caffeine in coffee, and some coffee may even contain more caffeine than energy drinks do, the ABA’s statement noted.

“Caffeine is one of the most thoroughly tested ingredients in the food supply today and has been deemed safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as more than 140 countries around the world,” the ABA said.

However, the ABA did not comment on the safety of the other ingredients in energy drinks.  Although caffeine at normal levels is considered relatively safe, the sale of caffeine pills to adolescents is regulated at dosages as low as 100 milligrams.  Also, as Woolsey has pointed out, it is the interaction between the multiple ingredients that increase the strength and risks to using energy drinks.

Although the farm is primarily used for research, its crops are sold or donated to a local food bank.  So when Bary decided to identify areas in which he and his staff could improve or update their food handling operations, he put his farm through an audit and Good Agricultural Practices–commonly called GAP–workshop this past summer.

Based on the recommendations from the WSU experts, the Puyallup farm workers changed the way they wash their hands and sanitize the crates used to store the produce, Bary said.

Washington State University is one of many institutions helping farmers to understand the science behind food safety recommendations by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulators and how they can improve food safety on their farms, said Karen Killinger, an assistant professor at WSU’s school of food science.

As offered by WSU, Killinger explains, the workshop is divided into two separate sessions designed to help farmers meet the third-party food safety certification requirements that an increasing number of produce buyers are demanding.  WSU does not provide certification but will perform mock certification audits to help farmers prepare for a real one. 

In that way, “we help farmers sell their product to a larger number of buyers,” Killinger said.

The workshops focus on some of the most common challenges farmers face in making food production safe, Killinger said, including:

— Water irrigation safety, because some farmers, especially those who must use open-source water, do not have control over the irrigation water they use.

—  Amending soil to improve plant growth and manure management, learning how long to wait between applying manure and harvesting crops, Killinger said. 

— Worker health and hygiene issues, making sure farm workers thoroughly wash their hands and do not handle food if they have symptoms of a foodborne illness.

— Storage and distribution sanitation, helping farmers to be aware of the sanitary manner in which harvested food crops must be stored before sale or distribution.

Even Bary, a pro when it comes to compost and other aspects of agriculture, said he benefitted from the audit.  Not only did it identify places where the farm needed to make a few changes, but it reassured him that things are being correctly.  After all,  “I don’t want to make anyone sick who eats my produce,” he said.

For more information visit http://foodsafety.wsu.edu/.

“Food Pantries on college campuses are unique because they seek an underserved population of students that many people may not be aware is struggling,” said Laura Pick, a graduate student and coordinator of Oregon State University’s emergency food pantry.

“[In] grade school through high school, students can receive free or reduced [priced] lunch, but when you get to college you don’t have those options,” Pick noted.

In 2009, more than 31 million children, ages 18 and under, received free or reduced price lunches every school day under the federally assisted National School Lunch Program, according to United States Department of Agriculture figures.

Similarly in 2009, 11.1 million children participated in the federally assisted School Breakfast Program and 9.1 million of those children received their meals for free or at a reduced price, the USDA said.

As more of those students pursue higher education, many are now finding it difficult to meet the rising cost of tuition, books and housing, and still have enough money left for meals.

“We’re here to help students who have to decide between buying textbooks or buying food,” Pick said.

The food pantry at OSU, which has recently been serving upwards of 200 students a month, was started to address the growing food needs on campus, Pick said.  The pantry assists mainly college students but is open to the general public as well.

It opens its doors toward the end of every month because that’s when people generally tend to run out of food stamps, Pick said.

The USDA recently released statistics showing that the need for food assistance has increased significantly in the past couple years: 42.9 million people used food stamps in September 2010, six million more than the 36.9 million people who relied on them a year ago.

The September 2010 numbers are also a roughly 50 percent increase from the numbers in the beginning of 2008, the USDA said.

Today, there are 22,000 new applications every day for food stamps, up from 20,000 applications a day last year, the USDA said.

Every university should have a food bank, according to Pick, adding that Oregon State University is trying to partner with other universities to start food banks on their campuses and encourages other schools to come up with creative solutions to help students who need a hand.  Some are doing just that.  For example, Abdallah Jadallah, a student at UCLA, started a food bank at his school in an abandoned storage closet on campus, according to UCLA’s website.

“I think more colleges are recognizing that hunger is an issue for students and trying to combat it,” Pick said.

One of the most important issues involving hunger on the college campus is simply convincing people that it’s OK to receive help, Pick said.  “It takes a great deal of courage for an individual to admit that they are food insecure and then seek aid.”

“I crack one open every morning like clockwork,” said Hassan, a 21-year old political science major at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

At a time when national attention is being focused on energy drinks that contain alcohol, which have been banned in several states, the non-booze brands like Hassan favors are not getting much publicity.  But that hasn’t made them less widespread–or less controversial.

According to the Mintel International Group, non-alcoholic energy drinks are enormously popular.  The marketing analysts say 31 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds and 34 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds report they regularly consume energy drinks.

Hassan said she started downing them when she was 14 years old to keep her going through a busy schedule of school and athletics. 

She’s been hooked ever since and even started a Facebook page, “Admitting You Have a Problem: The Energy Drink Addicts Support Group.”  Started as a joke, Hassan says she was surprised when the group grew to its current 118 members. The page is filled with comments from people unapologetically professing their energy drink addictions.

Some researchers, however, worry that people are uninformed or misinformed about the ingredients in energy drinks and their possible effects.

“We talk with students a lot and they don’t really know what’s in (energy drinks),” explained Patricia L. Maarhuis, a coordinator at Washington State University’s Alcohol and Drug Counseling, Assessment, and Prevention Services (ADCAPS).

Energy drinks are marketed as nutritional supplements and are therefore not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration–which worries Maarhuis.

Many of the beverages are advertised as containing “natural” or “herbal” additives such as taurine, an amino acid that may or may not be a mood enhancer (the research is mixed) and stimulants such as guarana or ginseng.  But “they’re not required to tell the consumer what’s really in there so we really don’t know,” Maarhuis said.

What is known, according to a report by ADCAPS , is that the “energy” in energy drinks is really “sugared water with a lot of caffeine,” that delivers a buzz along with a can of empty calories.

According to the report, some energy drinks contain up to 200 milligrams of caffeine.  By comparison, a 1 oz. shot of espresso contains about 30 – 50 milligrams of caffeine. And energy drinks average about 200 to 260 calories, which the report notes is the equivalent of eating a large candy bar or two hot dogs.

All of this is big business; two years ago the energy drink industry’s total U.S. sales reached $4.8 billion, according to the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois, and sales have likely grown since then, with big companies like Coca Cola, PepsiCo, and Starbucks Coffee getting in on the action and releasing their own brands. The Institute of Food Technologists predicts the energy drink market will be as much as $19.7 billion by 2013.

The ADCAPS report notes that one marketing technique has been for companies to sponsor parties on college campuses, offering to supply drinks as mixers.  And the trend of mixing non-alcohol energy drinks with beer and hard liquor inspired companies to offer the pre-mixed malt-based beverages that are now being targeted by local regulators as potentially dangerous.

Health problems associated with too much caffeine — increased heart rate and blood pressure, insomnia, and anxiety –are also linked to energy drinks, Maarhuis said.  She added that some people with sleep problems may not realize that energy drinks are contributing to the problem because they are unaware of how much caffeine they’re getting.

None of this fazes Hassan, who proudly continues to consume energy drinks daily.

“Everyone tells me energy drinks aren’t good for you,” Hassan said. “But I’ve been drinking them since I was 14 and I’m in great shape.”

She admits that she is mostly unfamiliar with what’s in energy drinks and what effects they can have but doesn’t really care so long as they work.  “I get a really bad headache if I don’t have one,” she said. “I’m not functional unless I have an energy drink.”

“It’s not a single mystery thing that’s causing problems,” said Marion Ellis, professor of  entomology at the University of Nebraska. “There are probably lots of little components.”

For those who see bees as a bellwether, the stresses they face seem to echo the environmental consequences of contemporary, large-scale agriculture.

According to Ellis, the three biggest factors hurting hives are likely nutrition, pesticides, and parasites.  Poor nutrition is significant. Ellis said, because without enough nutrients, bees are less able to fend off the harmful effects of pesticides and parasites.

Modern farming practices, including the conversion of pasture land to row crops and the use of herbicides to clear field margins and ditches of blooming plants, have led to poorer nutrition for honey bees, Ellis said. 

“Bees are only getting one source of pollen,” Ellis said. “It would be as if we didn’t get a balanced diet.”  Weaker bees may be more vulnerable to pests and chemicals.

And the pesticide load on bees may be significant.  Researchers at Washington State University found five dozen different pesticides in hives they studied.  A majority of the pesticides were insecticides, any one of which might be toxic to bees; WSU is looking at the combined effects of these chemicals. 

But Kim Kaplan, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s in-house research agency — Agricultural Research Service — said pesticides have not been scientifically confirmed as a cause of colony decline and no specific pesticides have been named as potential culprits.

The best way beekeepers can prevent colony decline is by watching their colonies closely and giving them extra feedings to keep them healthy, Kaplan said.

Many of the bee losses are being blamed on Colony Collapse Disorder, which the USDA defines a bee hive that still contains a a live queen bee, but little or no male honey bees. There are no dead bees in the hive.  Apiary Inspectors of America says the disorder hasn’t gone away; that beekeepers throughout the U.S. have lost one quarter to one third of their bee colonies in each of the last three years.

A research study led by University of Montana researchers and U.S. Army scientists, peer-reviewed and published recently by the online science journal PLoS One, was hailed as a breakthrough in solving the mystery of colony collapse.  It suggested that a particular virus and a microsporidia may be a cause; the study found the pair in many of the honey bee colonies they tested.

The study said that either factor on its own was not lethal, but when combined they become increasingly deadly.  The  combination was not found in colonies that had no history of the collapse disorder, the study said.

At WSU, which two years ago launched its Honey Bee Colony Health Diagnostic Laboratory, researchers have also found that a mite particularly harmful to bees proliferated after pesticide contamination delayed one hive’s larval development.  The mite has become resistant to safe control measures, so the long-term answer to warding off many of the problems plaguing bees may lie in making bees stronger through genetic improvement.

Honey bee health, while not yet causing a food-production crisis according to the USDA, is nonetheless vital to the food supply.  Honey bees pollinate approximately 95 different crops, including almonds, raspberries, blueberries, and cranberries; one-third of our food is directly or indirectly influenced by honey bees. 

California almond growers use approximately half of all the managed, commercial honey bees in the U.S. to pollinate their crops, and that number could soon be as high as 75 percent, Ellis said. 

Mohnish Sets, owner of Farmers International, grows, processes, and exports almonds out of Chico, CA.  He agreed that colony collapse could pose problems for the almond industry, but said it hasn’t yet.  He sees some evidence that the bee population could be improving.

“We had a good supply of bees (last year)” Sets said. “I think the bee supply is getting better.”

Haggen Food & Pharmacy said Tuesday it was halting the sale of two brands of alcoholic energy drinks–Joose and Four Loko–from its 32 stores in Washington and Oregon.

Four Loko is the brand that Central Washington University officials said sickened nine of its students, who had been drinking at a party before being hospitalized earlier this month.

 The campus has since banned the drink. 

“The right thing to do for our communities is to immediately stop sales of Four Loko and Joose, regardless of if or when a government agency bans them,” said Becky Skaggs, a spokeswoman for the Bellingham-based Haggen.

The grocery chain’s move came after Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna questioned the safety of alcoholic energy drinks at a news conference Monday, citing the Central Washington University incident.

McKenna called the drinks a serious health risk and said he is asking the FDA to examine their safety.  Previously, McKenna endorsed proposed state legislation that would have ban the sale of alcoholic energy drinks in Washington. The bill died in the Senate Rules Committee.

McKenna had also asked the FDA to review the safety of alcoholic energy drinks. The agency has now given the manufacturers of the drinks 30 days to explain their reasoning for mixing alcohol with stimulants.

If the FDA does not act quickly, McKenna said he will attempt again to ban the sale of alcoholic energy drinks in the state of Washington.

Several of the Central Washington students had blood-alcohol levels that were nearly lethal, according to Brian Smith, a spokesman for the Washington State Liquor Control Board.

Up to nine people passed out at the party, according to the Cle Elum police department report on the incident.

The report said that, “(one girl) was very limp and…did not respond when people touched her and talked to her.”

She, along with others, were taken by ambulance to a local hospital.

Police officers who arrived at the scene initially thought someone had slipped a date rape drug into people’s drinks because a majority of those sickened were female, but investigators later found the alcoholic energy drink “Four Loko” was to blame.

“Putting the two combinations (alcohol and caffeine) together in a (23.5 ounce) can is the equivalent of drinking five to six cans of beer and two cups of coffee,” Smith said.

These drinks are especially dangerous because the stimulants in them make the drinker more alert, therefore giving them the illusion that they are not as drunk as they really are, Smith said.

Nestle, author and public health and sociology professor at New York University, discussed the corporate and political influences on American agriculture industry during a recent appearance at the University of Washington in Seattle, part of the school’s “Food: Eating your Environment” lecture series.

“You can’t understand anything about how people eat until you understand how the agricultural industry works,” Nestle said.

Summarizing the dramatic changes within the food industry in the last 20 years, Nestle said that after the end of government subsidies farmers received to not farm, food production increased and the industry became more competitive.

That drove food prices down, she said, which encouraged consumers to buy more food and go out to eat more frequently, usually being served or sold larger portions.  Nestle thinks that is one of the biggest factors contributing to the national obesity problem. 

“Larger portions have more calories,” Nestle said. “If there’s one thing I could teach, it would be that.”

Meanwhile, laws regarding the types of claims food companies can make about their products changed. 

For example, Nestle pointed to federal laws that prohibited food companies from making health claims about food products until Congress relaxed those rules.  Suits brought by the Food and Drug Administration against food companies making questionable claims were tossed out on First Amendment, free speech law grounds.

Nestle applauded the Federal Trade Commission for recently stepping in and trying to do what she said the FDA no longer will do.  She cited the FTC’s recent move against the beverage maker POM Wonderful for exaggerated claims about  the health benefits of pomegranate juice.

Nestle takes offense to what she called, “self-endorsements,” when companies make up their own nutritional guidelines and then advertise that their food products meet those guidelines.

Saying that food safety regulation needs to improve, Nestle endorsed Senate Bill 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which would create a single agency to regulate the food industry.  The bill has been blocked in the Senate and Nestle doesn’t have much hope it will pass in the upcoming session.

“We have the same food safety system as in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote ‘The Jungle,'” Nestle complained. “This is a place where we need advocacy.”

She sees growing signs of such advocacy, and evidence that a “food revolution” is taking place.  In just the past year, Nestle noted, the number of farmers markets has increased by 16 percent and consumers are increasingly demanding organic foods.

The food industry needs to be more socially responsible, but consumers can force that by taking personal responsibility for what they eat.

“You need to vote with your fork,” Nestle told her audience.

It’s the people who carelessly (or unknowingly) overuse these chemicals, says Prof. John Stark, an ecotoxicologist at Washington State University who specializes in risk assessment of threatened and endangered species.

Stark, director of WSU’s Puyallup Research and Extension Center, was in Seattle, WA Thursday to deliver a lecture titled “Pesticides, Pollution, and Policy: New Strategies for Saving Pacific Northwest Salmon.”  

Stark and other WSU researchers, in collaboration with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are examining the effects of pesticides on salmon biology and behavior, as well as on the organisms salmon feed on.

They’re trying to learn why there’s been a 95 percent drop in some wild Pacific salmon species since the 1940s, and what role pesticides may play in that decline.

In his lecture, Stark, who has researched salmon for eight years and pesticides for 20 years, focused on improper pesticide use in suburban neighborhoods.

Too many homeowners, he said, overuse pesticides for lawn and garden care.  The chemicals then get flushed into storm drains and the contaminated runoff flows into streams or Puget Sound, Stark said.

“They’ll (homeowners) go out and double or quadruple the amount (of pesticides they’re supposed to use),” Stark said. “It will say on the label ‘apply once or twice a year’ and they’ll apply it six times a year.”

Warning labels on pesticide containers actually carry the force of law, so theoretically someone could get in trouble for misuse, but there’s no enforcement and few people even bother to read the product instructions, Stark said.

Stark said the WSU-NOAA research has so far found that pesticides not only can kill  salmon directly, but also may cause neurological damage that affects their sense of smell, hampering their ability to escape predators or find their way back to spawning grounds

And sometimes pesticides are even more detrimental to the aquatic invertebrates salmon feed on, Stark noted. 

One unexpected discovery in the research has been the synergistic toxicity of pesticides, the “chemical soup” that results when multiple pesticides blend together and contaminate salmon habitat. 

When synergism occurs, pesticides grow exponentially more potent and lethal, Stark said.

“It’s not one plus one equals two; it’s one plus one equals one hundred,” he said. 

Because pesticide pollution is so minute–measured in parts per billion, or one part pesticide per one billion parts of water–researchers originally questioned the importance of its impact. But the combined effect of pesticides has shaken their complacency, Stark said.

“Everyone was very surprised,” he said. “We did not expect synergism to happen.”

Stark doesn’t think pesticides should be prohibited, but does support better public education on how to use yard and farm products properly and judiciously.  “Pesticides are a big business and employ a lot of people,” Stark said. “We aren’t saying ban everything; we’re saying let’s do this right.”

He acknowledged that he has experienced some industry pushback given the controversial nature of the research, especially from those who see the issue as one of fish versus farms.

But it’s all matter of weighing risks, costs and values, he explained.  For instance, it’s known that copper dust, which flakes from automobile brakes and washes off roadways into local waters, is quite toxic to salmon and is contributing to their decline, Stark said.

Switching to ceramic brakes would solve the problem, but there has been resistance to such a requirement because of the extra cost. 

Salmon tissue does not absorb pesticides, so salmon affected by pesticides are nevertheless safe to eat, Stark said.

Perhaps to emphasize this point, salmon was served at the lecture lunch.

“I had something to do with that–it’s kind of a joke,” Stark said.