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Our Home-Grown Melamine Problem

For all the outrage about Chinese melamine, what American consumers and government agencies have studiously failed to scrutinize is how much melamine has pervaded our own food system. In casting stones, we’ve forgotten that our own house has more than its share of exposed glass. To be sure, in China some food manufacturers deliberately added melamine to products to increase profits. Makers of baby formula, for example, watered down their product, lowering the amount of protein and nutrients, then added melamine, which is cheap and fools tests measuring protein levels.

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 It’s Time To Think About Alternatives To Melamine (Which May Be In The Plate You’re Using Right Now)

I’d never heard of melamine, so I didn’t know anything about its heat-related properties. Melamine, it turns out, is definitely not microwave-friendly. I found this out in dramatic fashion, when I forgot what I was dealing with and popped it into the microwave. It caused sparks and alarming zapping noises. So the slightly singed polka-dot plate was relegated to the very bottom of my stack of tableware, to be used only when I’d run out of other options.

 Weighing the Health Risks of Melamine Tableware

While Corelle is still highly desired today because of its thin design and delicate porcelain look and feel, Melamine has once again regained its earlier popularity and has taken the general mercantile by storm. Under most conditions, the amount of melamine that migrates from the dish into the food is so low that it poses no health risks. The exception is when serving highly acidic foods, especially when heated, or when serving food or drink to infants. Infants are more susceptible to melamine poisoning, and using melamine cups to serve formula and milk should be avoided. While melamine poisoning is extremely rare, it can lead to kidney stones and kidney failure.

 Why You Might Want to Steer Clear of Melamine Dishes

And what outdoor dishes you should get instead for your backyard bbqs, dinner parties, and picnics.

Articles of Interest

The FDA says Melamine is Safe With One Big Caveat

You work hard to fill your plates and bowls with healthy organic food. Too bad that tableware you’re munching your tasty meals on could be disrupting your efforts to keep chemicals out of the kitchen. If you use melamine dishes, anyway.

Are your melamine plates poisoning you?

The Wu et al study suggests that even with a melamine ware that has a very high level of melamine leaching, under conditions that favour melamine leaching, the level of melamine exposure that results are extremely unlikely to have any health impacts. However, the fact that even small amounts of melamine can leach from these ubiquitous food containers at high temperatures should make us cautious.

Back to The Jungle

"The food-tainting scandals, as much as the economic crisis, are the result of predictably unreliable 'voluntary' industry self-regulation that leaves the foxes guarding the henhouse."

Eating Hot Foods in Plastic Bowls May Pose Health Hazard

Melamine is toxic crap that makes plastics hard. It is also used for the manufacture of laminates, coatings, commercial filters, glues and adhesives. In addition, it is the stuff that the Chinese doctored pet foods with in 2007 to make the food test higher for protein, resulting in organ failure and the deaths of thousands of U.S. pets.

Melamine - Where's Your Food From?

The Chinese melamine scandal of 2008 pointed out the vulnerability of the global food supply. Be vigilant about where your food is coming from. Or better yet, become a locavore!

Melamine in Tableware Questions and Answers

Products with melamine contamination above the levels noted in FDA’s risk assessment may put people at risk of conditions such as kidney stones and kidney failure, and of death. Signs of melamine poisoning may include irritability, blood in urine, little or no urine, signs of kidney infection, and / or high blood pressure.

Melamine is Mean Stuff

Following the formula fiasco, melamine was also discovered in eggs and candy. Although outraged people wonder how this could have happened, it was only a little over a year ago that information was released about pet food being tainted with melamine, which was apparently routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein. Now that humans are the animal being tricked, I hope more of us respond proactively to this wake-up call.

Melamine toxicity

Melamine contamination of infant formula in China and its health effects highlight the safety of the global food supply especially as it relates to formula-fed infants. Melamine is a widely used industrial chemical not considered acutely toxic with a high LD(50) in animals.

Melamine: Toxicity in Dog Food

We can’t say whether earlier suspicion of melamine would have hastened the recall or improved veterinary care of the sick dogs and cats.But we can say that the old experiments on animal feeding are well worth reading, that it’s best to read entire papers and not just their abstracts, and that libraries still have much to offer that the Internet cannot.

The A-Team That Tracks the Poisonous Additives in Our Food

Some groceries are not what they seem. Just ask Mitchell Weinberg. As head of a firm called Inscatech, he specializes in the dirty details of adulterating edibles—shortcuts and substitutions that can lead to disaster. Business is booming: Reports of tainted food climbed 60 percent between 2010 and 2013, according to the nonprofit US Pharmacopeial Convention.

Why China Keeps Poisoning the Milk

China's quality challenge has at times been compared to Japan's efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to transcend a bad reputation for manufacturing low-quality goods.

Resources

WHO

Melamine is a chemical compound that has a number of industrial uses, including the production of laminates, glues, dinnerware, adhesives, molding compounds, coatings and flame retardants.