Our World, a blog by Diane MacEachern, The World Women Want, environment, women and the environment, green, ecology, ecofeminist

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Diane MacEachern

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March 16, 2006

Popping the Soda Pop Bubble…

My son loves root beer. But it sounds like I’m going to have to stop buying it, at least until the ingredients change. Right now, at least two of the brands he drinks contain sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, these chemicals can react together to form cancer-causing benzene.

I wouldn’t even be aware of this if not for the recent announcement that U.S. food safety authorities have re-opened an investigation they closed 15 years ago into soft drinks that may be contaminated with this carcinogen, which has specifically been linked to higher rates of leukemia.

The FDA has been quiet on the issue since 1990, when it originally started tracking it. Rather than make the findings public then, the agency asked U.S. soft drink companies to voluntarily change their formulas to eliminate the problem.

Instead, more than 1,500 soft drink products containing sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate and ascorbic acid or citric acid – otherwise marketed as Vitamin C – have been launched across Europe, Latin America and North America. In addition to soda pop, the list includes drinks like Country Time Lemonade, Crystal Light Sunrise Classic Orange, and Tropicana Twister.

Meanwhile, according to Sally Squires of the Washington Post, the amount of soft drinks being consumed in the U.S. has reached stunning proportions. Quoting U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, Squires reports that fifty-six percent of 8-year-olds drink at least one soft drink every day, while a third of teenage boys drink at least three cans of soda pop per day. Do we want our kids drinking all that benzene, too?

Not in my house. Fortunately, with the exception of my son’s root beer, we’ve never been big soft drink consumers anyway. If he wants to continue to drink something that tastes like root beer, we’re going to start buying organic brands. There are plenty available.

For additional thirst quenchers, we’ll continue buying organic fruit juices, and drink tap water. We’ll also be reading the labels of any other drinks we do buy to make sure that they don’t contain both the acid and the benzoate. It’s that specific combination, which manufacturers evidently add to their products to extend shelf life, that creates the specific problem.

I’m also going to write a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urging the agency to ask all soft drink manufacturers to remove benzoate from their products. After all, by law the government wouldn’t allow benzene in our drinking water. Why should it be in something as popularly consumed as soda pop?

If you want to write your own letter, here’s the address:

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D.
Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
5600 Fishers Lane
Rockville, MD 20857

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My Book Club

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv

If you only have time to read one book about why it’s so important for your child to stay connected to the natural world, this is it.

In fact, Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder should be required reading for anyone who is concerned about humanity’s growing alienation from nature and the consequent diminished use of the senses, spiraling attention difficulties, and increased rates of physical and emotional illnesses.

“NDD”, Louv says, can be detected in individuals, families, even whole communities. In part, Louv blames the incredible time pressures to which we submit ourselves and our kids. Given everything else we’re trying to cram into our lives – work, school, sports teams, music lessons – Nature is getting the very short end of the stick. But the author also attributes a large part of the problem to the increasingly dominant role that computers, television, and other technologies play in our lives. “Children prefer to connect to electrical outlets” rather than to the world around them, Louv observes, and the health impacts are substantial. Two-thirds of American children can’t pass a basic physical: 40 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls ages six to seventeen can’t manage more than one pull-up; and 40 percent show early signs of heart and circulation problems, according to a new report by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

For parents worried their kids might get hurt playing outside, Louv asks, “So where is the greatest danger? Outdoors, in the woods and fields? Or on the couch in front of the TV?”

One inspiring solution, suggests Louv, is to re-imagine your city or suburb as a “zoopolis,” a word that rhymes with “metropolis.” Louv believes cities can be transformed into much more natural habitats through intentional land planning, creative architectural design and targeted public education. Doing so will “re-enchant the city” by bringing animals and plants back in and make it possible to reside with Nature, rather than apart from it.

Louv makes a compelling argument. Nature, he says, “offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood. It serves as a blank slate upon which a child draws and reinterprets the culture’s fantasies. Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy; a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.”

Clearly, Louv delights in observing that “nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees… Nature – the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful – offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.”

Immersion in the natural environment cuts to the chase, Louv reminds us, exposing the young directly and immediately to the very elements from which humans evolved: earth, water, air, and other living kin, large and small. Without that experience, he says, “we forget our place; we forget that larger fabric on which our lives depend.”

Last Child in the Woods convincingly argues that direct involvement with Nature is essential for healthy childhood development, as well as for the physical and emotional health of both children and adults.

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Other Books

Global Profit and Global Justice: Using Your Money to Change the World, by Deb Abbey, et.al., New Society Publishers

New and Selected Poems: Volume Two by Mary Oliver

A Field Guide to Buying Organic by Luddene Perry and Dan Schultz

The Eco-Foods Guide: What’s Good for the Earth is Good For You! by Cynthia Barstow

Divorce Your Car: Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Blood and Oil: The
Dangers and
Consequences of
America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum by Michael T. Klare

American Primitive:
Poems by Mary Oliver

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