Eat at your own risk

Just the other day I savored beef with broccoli in oyster sauce at home. Yesterday I rummaged through my pantry, tossing out the bottles of oyster sauce and soy sauce whose brand names were among those listed by the Department of Trade and Industry as likely sources of carcinogenic substances.

The sauces, according to Trade Secretary Mar Roxas, were among 21 brands listed by the British Food Standards Agency as having high levels of 3-MCPD or 3-monochloropropane-1, 2-diol, a substance produced during food processing.

Now I may have to forgo food flavored with oyster sauce for a long time. The brand I have at home I had selected after a careful inspection of the other brands, local and imported. I had chosen it because it was the only one without monosodium glutamate (MSG or vetsin) which, as you also probably know, supposedly causes cancer (or at least allergic reactions and stomach upset). 

I grew up on food flavor-enhanced with MSG without any health problems, and teachers of Chinese cuisine still swear that there’s nothing wrong with MSG as long as it’s used in moderation. But I started harboring some doubts after a reporter who had stomach cancer told us the only reason she could think of for her illness at her young age (she died before she was 40) was that she used to eat MSG by the teaspoonful.

I don’t know anyone else who consumes so much MSG so my cooking teachers are probably right – eat everything in moderation and you’ll have no problem. But just to be on the safe side, I cut down on MSG consumption years ago and experimented with herbs and spices instead.

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I was just getting over the mad cow scare when I ate that beef with broccoli. To this day I still don’t buy meat from Monterey, which imported slabs of beef from Ireland last year.

Some people worry too much; others simply don’t care. One of our colleagues is happy that many brands of corned beef have been on sale since the mad cow scare. If he ever develops mad cow disease, he says, he’d be too old by that time to worry about dying. He says this while chewing corned beef in pan de sal, and he isn’t worried either about bromate in flour. I tell him the gestation period for mad cow disease can be as short as a year but he’s not about to forgo his corned beef or beef mami (flavored with MSG and chili sauce with 3-MCPD).

If I’m going to worry about mad cow disease, I can go back nearly two decades, when the Philippines reportedly imported tons of animal feed believed to have caused the disease in European cattle.

Worrying is probably a waste of time since government warnings usually come too late. I had savored many "pearl shakes" (I even made them at home) before we were warned about that toxic ingredient in the chewy sago. So now I’m back to sago sold by ambulant vendors, sa malamig, which is a potential source of hepatitis.

What can you eat that won’t make you ill later in life? Most processed foods have high sodium, sugar and artery-clogging fat content. Imported potato chips reportedly come from genetically modified potatoes. On the other hand, fat-free, low-cholesterol, low-sodium and low-sugar food all seem to taste like uncooked oatmeal. Chicken? Bird flu. Pork? Foot-and-mouth disease.

I told a doctor that I’d stick to sushi and sashimi, and she said that according to medical books, the Japanese are highly prone to parasites because of their penchant for raw seafood.

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Yesterday the Department of Health contradicted Mar Roxas and advised the public not to panic about the 21 brands of soy sauce and oyster sauce. So why are the brands blacklisted in the UK and Malaysia?

If consumers easily panic about these things, it’s because we aren’t sure if the government has the expertise to warn us about potentially hazardous substances in food and drugs. We eat at our own risk. We’re not sure if artificial sweetener is safe for the health. We don’t know if certain brands of beauty products won’t cause skin cancer or at least permanent blemishes.

Food supplements and herbal preparations, which aren’t regulated even abroad, pose the biggest risks. I know someone who developed liver problems after taking fish oil capsules for several months.

These days there’s a product from Canada that’s touted not only to reduce wrinkles and make you look younger but also to have effects similar to Viagra. We’ll have to wait for someone to keel over from the drug before we can say for sure if it’s hazardous to health.

In the absence of reliable warnings, I don’t think you should deprive yourself of the right to panic.

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ONLY IN RP: Never mind who "rescued" that Korean woman in Quezon. The initial report was that the P500,000 ransom was recovered intact. Later, it was reported that only P250,000 was recovered. Don’t tell me the kidnappers got the rest of the money.