FDA Warns Food Manufacturers Over Misleading Labels
March 4, 2010
ABC News
By Lee Ferran
The countdown is on for 17 food manufacturers to correct labels on popular food products that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says misrepresents the products’ health benefits — or else.
The FDA said Wednesday that its commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, had sent letters to each company in question Feb. 22, along with an open letter to the food manufacturing industry demanding they take action against “false or misleading” labels.
Among the complaints is that “misleading ‘healthy’ claims continue to appear on foods that do not meet the long- and well-established definition for use of that term,” Hamburg said in the letter.
If companies such as Nestle and Beech-Nut do not comply, the FDA warned, the products could be removed from the shelves.
“FDA is notifying a number of manufacturers that their labels are in violation of the law and subject to legal proceedings to remove misbranded products from the marketplace,” Hamburg said in the letter, which is posted on the FDA Web site.
Bruce Silverglade of the Center for Science in the Public Interest told “Good Morning America, “We hope this is the start of a battle that will lead to a war that will end deceptive food labeling.”
Hamburg, citing the desire of industry leaders to provide safe, healthy products, said in the letter that the FDA’s measure is an attempt to clarify “what is expected of them.”
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Why We Use Natural and Alternative Remedies
November 18, 2009
EurekAlert.org
Alternative health remedies are increasingly important in the health care marketplace. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research explores how consumers choose among the many available remedies.
“Examples of the wide array of health remedy options available to consumers include drugs, supplements, acupuncture, massage therapy, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (to name a few). Such medical pluralism is common in both developed and developing countries and raises the questions: How do consumers choose among health remedies, and what are the consequences for a healthy lifestyle?” write authors Wenbo Wang (New York University), Hean Tat Keh (Beijing University), and Lisa E. Bolton (Pennsylvania State University).
The authors use “lay theories of medicine” to explain how consumers choose between Western medicine and its Eastern counterparts, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic medicine.
“Western Medicine is primarily concerned with the material aspect of the body and views all medical phenomena as cause-effect sequences, relying on rigorous scientific studies and research that seeks empirical proof to all phenomena,” write the authors. “On the other hand, TCM and Ayurvedic Medicine favor a holistic approach, view the mind and body as a whole system, and rely upon inductive tools and methods for treatment.”
Based on a series of experiments and surveys in the United States, China, and India, the authors found that consumers prefer TCM (over Western medicine) when uncertain about the cause of an illness (i.e., diagnosis uncertainty)—because a holistic medicine tolerates uncertainty better than Western Medicine. Similarly, consumers prefer TCM (over Western medicine) because of lay beliefs that TCM offers an underlying cure (versus symptom alleviation by Western Medicine).
“These findings add to the growing debate over the regulation of health marketing and the delivery of health care, the role of direct-to-consumer advertising, and marketing efforts to promote a healthy lifestyle,” the authors conclude.
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Goldman Sachs Oil Scam Passes $2.5 Trillion
November 13, 2009
Phil Stock World
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate “dark pool” trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.
A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate “round-trip” trades. Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.
“Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate.” – Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE.
How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector and this is what they reported: This pattern of trading suggests a market environment in which a significant volume of fictitious trading could have taken place. Yet since most of the trading is unregulated by the Government, we have only a slim idea of the illusion being perpetrated in the energy sector.
DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades. That means 80 percent of all of their trades that year were bogus trades where no commodity changed hands, and yet the balance sheets reflect added revenue. Remember, these trades are sham deals where nothing was exchanged. Duke Energy disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999. Roughly two-thirds of these were done on the InterContinental Exchange; that is, the online, nonregulated, nonaudited, nonoversight for manipulation and fraud entity run by banks in this country. That means thousands of subscribers would see false pricing. Under investigation, a lawyer for J.P. Morgan Chase admitted the bank engineered a series of “round-trip” trades with Enron.
Goldman Sachs Exec Says Pay Inequality Is Good
October 21, 2009
Bloomberg
By Caroline Binham
A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.
“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. The amount set aside this year is just shy of the all-time high $16.9 billion allocated in the first three quarters of 2007. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally in New York declined to comment.
Banks in the U.K. and U.S. have been pressured by lawmakers to contain compensation after bailouts of financial firms by national governments. Goldman Sachs repaid $10 billion plus dividends to the U.S. government this year, and resumed allocating billions of dollars for year-end bonuses after slashing compensation last year when the firm reported its first quarterly loss.
Griffiths, 67, called on bankers to boost their charitable giving to help improve the financial industry’s reputation following a worldwide crisis.
‘Much Is Expected’
“To whom much is given much is expected,” he said. “There is a sense that if you make money you are expected to give.”
Griffiths said that banks should hire and promote people based on criteria beyond how much money they could or did make.
“It was the failed moral compass of bankers which was primarily responsible for why we had this crisis,” he said. “The question is: what can we do in the culture of institutions to make them behave in a more socially responsible way?”
Financial Services Authority Chairman Adair Turner, speaking at the same event, repeated his call for a global tax on financial transactions, a so-called Tobin Tax. He said in August a tax could redistribute bank profits to the world’s poor and to causes like fighting climate change.
