Judging the 2012 FreeFrom Food Awards – fascinating and rewarding

February 12, 2012 By 3 Comments

Kate  Hawkings (food writer) and Louise Marchionne (allergy therapist) ‘working on’ category 12 – scones, sweet tarts, sweet biscuits, cookies etc. 

Like last year’s, this year’s judging for the FreeFrom Food Awards was a thoroughly enjoyable, if somewhat exhausting, experience! Made so by the range and quality of the entries, the enthusiasm and interest of our splendidly eclectic collection of judges and the superb efficiency with which Cressida, and her ‘kitchen assistant’, Katherine managed us all.

And managing us all, not to mention all the samples, is no mean feat.  We run two judging rooms, alternating between them and, in each, timed to the minute, we need not only the samples (some hot, some cold, some frozen, some fried) but an endless supply of bowls, plates, spoons, rubbish bins, water – and tea/coffee to revive flagging judges.

This is all made infinitely more complicated by the fact that all entries are judged blind, judges only seeing the packs at the very end after they have made their choices – just in case their chosen winners have committed some packaging or labeling howler which would effectively, disqualify them. It has happened. But from an organisational point of view it means that every product and every tasting sheet has to be meticulously numbered – and that those numbers must tally or we are all in serious trouble!

Our judging process comes in two parts. Part one is delightfully silent. Judges look at, sniff, taste and assess each of the products laid out or presented to them, make their own notes on the relevant judging sheet and give the product a guide mark out of 10. The judging sheet will have all the information about the product (ingredients, freefrom claims, directions for storage/preparation, availability, cost etc) except the brand name and who makes it.

They are asked to bear the following criteria in mind when assessing each product:

  • Quality of product based on appearance, aroma, texture, flavour
  • Usefulness – does it fulfil a really useful purpose for someone on a freefrom diet?
  • Cleverness – is it doing something which is really difficult to do in manufacturing terms?
  • Nutritional profile
  • Labelling – is the ‘on pack’ information that it gives clear & accurate?

 

 

Debbie of the Who says coeliacs can’t eat cake? blog checking out an entry.

We are very insistent that they do not talk to each other while doing this bit and that they at least try to keep their faces expressionless while they are tasting so as not to influence the fellow judges (either positively or negatively) who may not yet have tried that particular entry. Once they have all done their initial assessment, I ask them to draw up a shortlist and I note all their shortlist choices which will be used as a basis for a discussion of the potential winners.

At that point I ‘open the floor’ to discussion and, maybe because they have had to keep silent for so long – in virtually every category a very lively discussion ensued. This is mainly thanks to the diverse make up of the judging panels all of which include at least one nutritionist/dietitian, one foodwriter/chef/cook/’foodie’, one coeliac, one allergy sufferer (nuts, dairy, egg, celery, tomatoes etc) and one ‘normal’  non-foodie, non’freefrom’ person to benchmark the foods against non-freefrom food.

John Burke of GFLifeIreland, Hulya Erdal of Made by the Chef and chef Frank Bordoni working on their shortlists before the final discussion.

Coming from such very diverse backgrounds, the judges have very different ‘takes’ on what a constitutes good ‘freefrom’ product and the battle of nutritional content versus taste/quality, versus ‘Ohmigod -  you mean this really is a dairy and gluten free quiche that I could eat’ can rage quite fiercely!

We were very lucky this year also to have a lot of ‘dual’ experts, nutritionists/dietitians such as  Christine Bailey or Tanya Wright who not only have professional expertise in their area but are allergy sufferers themselves (Christine, dairy and gluten free, Tanya anaphylactically allergic to milk and eggs), chefs and food professionals such as Jane Milton, Hulya Erdal or chef Frank Bordoni who have also either had food problems themselves or been closely involved with some who had – and of course our new crop of ‘blogging judges’ all of whom have had very personal experience of living freefrom – and are delightfully vocal on the subject!

And what of the entries? Well, for obvious reasons, I cannot say much about them – except that there were some really exciting new products this year. Exciting not only in terms of flavour and texture (although some certainly were in those terms too) but in terms of going where no freefrom product has gone before!

Although you will have to wait till April to get the full story of who has won what, the shortlist will be out very soon so at least you will now what is in the running! Watch this space.

And meanwhile, thank you very much, again, both to all of those wonderful judges (for a full list of who they were see here on the FreeFrom Food Awards site) and to our amazing ‘in house team’ – seen below: Cressida, Katherine – and Daisy, who  behaved immaculately throughout, merely waking every now and then for a quick look around and a little nosh!

Filed Under: Allergies, Blogging, Dairy-free, Food, FreeFrom Food, Gluten-free, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mobile phones a vital lifeline – but can they be safer?

December 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Despite the reams of research and comment that I have read, written and posted on our website about the possible health hazards of mobile telephony, along with most of those who worry about what man-made magnetic radiation is doing to human health, I recognise that mobile phones have brought huge benefits to every sector of society.

From a farmer in rural Africa or India who can now access weather and crop information that enables him to farm hugely more efficiently, to a child walking safely home from school, to an Arab spring revolutionary accessing the internet and thereby both fellow rebels and the outside world, to homeless teenagers who value their phones (according to a fascinating article on forbes.com) more than eating or a drug habit – every aspect of everyone’s life has been significantly impacted by mobile phones. There is no way back – nor should there be. But…

If you accept the ever-growing body of research (see the FM site and many others) linking mobile telephony not only to brain tumours but to autoimmune conditions, autism, other cancers and hundreds of less devastating but still debilitating conditions, then – if we are to continue to use mobile phones – we must make them safer.

I do not doubt that there are ways (see Dr Andrew Goldsworthy’s suggestions below) – they just need to be found. But until the financial imperative is strong enough (eg mobile telephony is seen to pose a great enough threat to human health for mobile phone companies to face class actions that would make tobacco and asbestos payouts look like small change) the scientific effort and investment will not be applied. In fact, I am moderately optimistic that some of this work is already being undertaken (mobile phone companies may not be concerned about human health but they are not stupid) but that it will continue to be cloaked in the greatest secrecy until it is ready to be launched – and when that may be is another matter.

Meanwhile, for those of you who are technically minded, here are Dr Goldsworthy’s suggestions:

There are two ways that we could modify a mobile phone signal to make it less damaging. Most, but not all, of the damage is due to the way in which the signal is pulsed and modulated to carry the digital information.

One way that I thought of is to use what I have called Balanced Signal Technology. That is to transmit two mirror image signals from the handset on different carrier frequencies so that where one had a pulse, the other had a gap.

As far as the base station is concerned, they are two separate phone calls and there would be no problem in decoding them. However, a living cell would probably not be able to distinguish between the two so that the opposing signals would cancel each other out and the signal would appear to be unmodulated and relatively harmless.

Another way was discovered, and patented, by the late Theodore (Ted) Litovitz in the 1990s. This is to superimpose a low frequency random magnetic field (random noise) on the handset signal. He found that many of the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation could be reversed by this procedure; furthermore, it seems to work even with unmodulated signals, so a combination of the two procedures may be better than either alone.

Unfortunately, the mobile phone industry does not seem to be interested in either of these. I do not know why. Possibly they do not want to pay for a licence to use Litovitz’s patents (now held by the Catholic University of America) but I have offered them Balanced Signal Technology free of charge. All they have to do is test it using volunteers with EHS.
Perhaps they do not want to recognise that EHS exists; perhaps they do not want to admit that their own technology is unsafe, which could open the floodgates to a whole raft of litigation, who knows?

Dr Goldsworthy set this out in a correspondence with our webmaster so, for those who might have similar queries, here is the rest of the exchange:

Dear Dr Goldsworthy,

I did have a couple of questions about the methods of modifying mobile phone signals. 

  • I presume balanced signal technology would apply equally to mobile phones and base stations? In your email you refer to ‘phones, but ES sufferers like Michelle don’t use a mobile ‘phone but are sensitive to the radiation from base stations.
  • If I understand it correctly, for the technology to work there would need to be two ‘mirrored’ data streams. Would this doubling of the data stream effect base station call handling capacity, and have an adverse effect on cell phone battery usage? This might – in part – explain the lack of enthusiasm of the network operators?
  • Presumably the Litovitz technology might also negatively effect handset battery usage. Apparently battery usage is a hot topic at the moment! 

 

Dear Webmaster,

In theory, Balanced Signal Technology could apply to base stations too.

I take the point that there is an issue with reduced handset battery life with both systems. Although battery capacity is improving all the time, it may  still be necessary to have a slightly larger handset to accommodate a larger battery.

However, it can be argued that handsets are already too small and thin because with a modern phone the antennas are too close to the head and you have to hold it at least a half an inch from your head to keep the SAR within the legal limit.  This fact can normally be found in the instruction manual, but buried in small print where few people are likely to read it. On balance, I think I might opt for a slightly larger phone and no EHS or cancer.

Filed Under: Alternative/Complementary Health, Electrosensitivity, Environmental Issues, Food/Health Policy, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aspartame and Gulf War Syndrome….

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I have never been that keen on Aspartame (well, on any artificial sweeteners really – what wrong with natural fruit sugars if you need a sweetener?) but I had not thought of it as a cause of Gulf War Syndrome…

Natural News is, this morning, trumpeting the evils of all artificial sweeteners which, they maintain, have created a new disease, Artifical Sweetener Disease (ASD), that is sweeping across America causing headaches, migraines, depression, anxiety, muscle pain, chronic fatigue, IBS, Crohn’s disease, nervous twitches and abnormal reflexes, to name but a few.

Aspartame’s history is, certainly, decidedly murky. Early trials in the 1970s suggested that it was far from safe and ‘might induce brain tumours’. By 1977 the FDA  was taking grand jury proceedings against its makers, GD Searle for knowingly misrepresenting findings – the first time in their history that the FDA had requested a criminal investigation of a manufacturer. However, in a master stroke, in that same year, GD Searle  recruited Washington insider, Donald Rumsfeld, as CEO.  Opposition did not evaporate (National Soft Drinks Association, for example, called for extra safety testing because liquid aspartame is so unstable that when it is stored in temperatures above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, it breaks down into DKP and formaldehyde, both of which are known toxins) but, despite its critics’ best efforts, in 1983, the first carbonated drinks sweetened with Aspartame appeared on the market. (For a full ‘timeline’ on this process see  How Asparatame became legal.)

Concerns about its safety did not evaporate with its legalisation. Dr Ralph Walton, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Northeastern Ohio Universities, has not only published studies on Aspartame himself but conducted a review, in 1998, of other studies on Asparatame. He found 166 separate published studies in the peer reviewed medical literature, which had relevance for questions of human safety. ‘The 74 studies funded by industry all (100%) attested to aspartame’s safety, whereas of the 92 non-industry funded studies, 84 (91%) identified a problem. Six of the seven non-industry funded studies that were favorable to aspartame safety were from the FDA, which has a public record that shows a strong pro-industry bias.’

Since then a vocal lobby has continued to inveigh against Aspartame accusing it, as does Natural News, of being the root cause of many 21st century physical and psychological disorders, especially amongst the young. Although I have long been aware of these concerns, I had not met the Gulf War Accusation before. Nor might I have paid that much attention had I not noticed that one of the sources quoted for the article was www.militaryspot.com, a website offering ‘resources, news, and information for our soldiers in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and National Guard’ in which ‘you’ll find everything you need, whether you are considering joining the military or you already have a job or career as a soldier.’ Scarcely a natural food lobbyist!

On a page on the Gulf War Syndrome, ‘the name given to a variety of wide ranging and often ill-defined psychological and physical symptoms suffered by veterans of the Gulf War’ they suggest various causes including the normal suspects of depleted uranium poisoning, side effect of drugs given for protection against nerve agents, squalene induced autoimmune conditions, fumes from oil wells, undisclosed use of biological or chemical weapons, parasites and – Asparatame poisoning…
‘Large quantities of aspartame sweetened diet soft drinks were provided to Gulf War troops, often times sitting in high temperature conditions. This artificial sweetener breaks down at roughly 85 °F (29.5 °C) into, among other things, methanol, formaldehyde, diketopiperazine and formic acid.’ Just what the National Soft Drinks Association had warned of back in the 1970s.

If you  are still looking for a sweetening alternative to sugar, why not check out either stevia or xylitol – if you put either into the ‘search’ box at www.foodsmatter.com you will find a number of references, including a long forum post on xylitol and another on stevia. You could also look at agave nectar (delicious and very popular with diabetics because of its low GI) but be aware that it is high in fructose, which brings its own problems… See both this article on the FM site and this forum post…

 

Filed Under: Alternative/Complementary Health, Environmental Issues, Nutrition, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts