Eat Your Spinach; Irradiated Food is Better for You Than You Think

Why Zapping Foods is Better Than the Alternative

Great news for your health -- beginning today, the US Food and Drug Administration says your spinach and iceberg lettuce can be irradiated to kill certain bacteria. Why should you care? Because irradiating food is better than the alternative, which is food contaminated with E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, Toxoplasma or other multisyllabic biological agents making the headlines regularly lately.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), these organisms currently cause millions of infections and thousands of hospitalizations in the United States every year from people getting violently sick. Yes, people actually die from eating everyday foods like hamburger, unpasteurized fruit juice, and spinach unknowingly contaminated with bacteria, viruses, insects, and microorganisms. And all destroyed in with irradiation in about two seconds.

Activist groups such as Public Citizen say irradiating foods just masks filthy conditions in slaughterhouses which cause meat to be contaminated with bacteria that cause illness. I can't control what goes on in slaughterhouses, but if I can keep undetected contamination out of my kids' food by buying safely irradiated products, I will. The alarmists say irradiation forms new chemicals in food that are known or suspected to cause cancer and birth defects; well, so does grilling a steak on the barbecue. They say irradiating food destroys vitamins and other essential nutrients, and corrupts the flavor, odor and texture of food. Sadly, so does my cooking, and the experts still think we are better off with irradiated food. As reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, "irradiation kills or markedly reduces counts of food pathogens without impairing the nutritional value of the food or making it toxic, carcinogenic, or radioactive."