Bottled water in America is big business. Two years ago a quarter of the world’s bottled water was sold in the US for over $12 billion. Some might say that two years is all water can last, judging by the expiration date printed on the bottle.

Sadly, the expiration date was printed on water bottles for reasons unknown. Several sites say the date was to comply with a poorly written law in New Jersey that has since changed. That seems hard to believe and I have found no evidence that it existed. In any case (pun not intended) an expiration date certainly does not relate to safety or health of the water.

Here is the FDA statement on the subject:

Bottled water is considered to have an indefinite safety shelf life if it is produced in accordance with CGMP and quality standard regulations and is stored in an unopened, properly sealed container. Therefore, FDA does not require an expiration date for bottled water.

Those paying 1000 times the price of water from the tap perhaps would be first in line to want an indefinite life. The DHS and American Red Cross have a different recommendation:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross both encourage the public to change their bottled water every six months.

I suspect the DHS and Red Cross really want to ensure people actually have water, or to help them remember where their water is stored. They say the six months is targeted at people who bottle their own water, to ensure that bacterium does not form. This makes bottled water seem like the less-risky option again because of the process, but the bottles themselves are another matter.

The PET (#1 or polyethylene terephthalate) used for hand-held containers and HDPE (#2 or high-density polyethylene) for big containers is said to break down from chemicals, heat and UV as well as absorb materials around it. Coca-Cola has found their Dasani bottles introduce flavor to the water over time:

Susan McDermott, says the company has done research on its own Dasani brand showing that the taste of its bottled water changes after its one-year expiration date. But, she adds: “It is probably not something the average person will notice.”

Perhaps Coca-Cola could start to market Dasani water as better with age? Instead of an expiration date, they should print the date it is bottled like a fine wine. Imagine a Dasani bottle of water from 2006 that has been stored in an oak barrel…

I can not wait to hear comedians comment on the news from Italy about suspicious cheese.

A batch of about 70,000 mozzarella balls which turned blue upon opening has been confiscated by food authorities in Italy, officials say.

Blue cheese? Apparently the Police are called in Italy when cheese goes blue. I would wager the cheese would get a completely difference reaction in England or France. Maybe the cheese was just shipped to the wrong market.

Some interesting facts in this incident:

• 60% of Italians regularly eat mozzarella
• The cheese in question was produced in Germany for “discount supermarkets”
• The blue was by bacterium, not toxicity

Bacterium is essential to making cheese flavorful. The blue thus could be a good thing, or it could be bad. Control of bacterium is an interesting and ancient security issue, as an article from 1897 explains.

The food value of cheese is dependent upon the casein which is present. The market price, however, is controlled entirely by the flavour, and this flavour is a product of bacterial growth. Upon the action of bacteria, then, the cheese maker is absolutely dependent; and when our bacteriologists are able in the future to investigate this matter further, it seems to be at least possible that they may obtain some means of enabling the cheese maker to control the ripening accurately.

Italians outsource mozzarella to Germany? Engines and suspension, I can believe, but food? What were they thinking? Also notable that the police responded without any illness reported, just suspicion based on color.

The BBC says the risk of a young girl being put to death at birth is high in parts of India.

In Bihar, payment of dowry by the bride’s family is a common practice. The price tag of the bridegroom often depends on his caste, social status and job profile.

The state is also infamous for the maximum number of dowry deaths in the country.

The risk to a girls’ life is therefore a financial issue. The model has been changed in one town by a simple financial management plan. The parents invest in a set of fruit trees for every girl born. The fruit generates income as the girl is raised and the set of trees help offset the cost of marriage.

“This is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female foeticide. There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or dowry death in our village,” [villager Shyam Sunder Singh] says.

His cousin, Shankar Singh, planted 30 trees at the time of his daughter Sneha Surabhi’s birth.

The practice is not new. The article says the village now has nearly 100,000 mango and lychee trees for just 7,000 residents and has become far more lush with shade and hospitable compared to other villages in the area.

Now if only the Basel II accords, which require a capital investment/offset for financial and operational risk, could make banks less shady…

I am amazed by the low-fat marketing movement. People all around me in America seem obsessed with the idea that removing fat from your diet somehow makes you healthy. From a risk management perspective this makes no sense to me.

It should be common sense just from observing nature. Take the bear, for example. A bear that catches a fish will tear just the fat of the salmon off (with the skin) and then discard the rest. Birds of prey then take the meat from the bones left behind.

Would a bear target fat and skin if it was so unhealthy? We do not live like bears, of course, and there is no accounting for taste but observing them can give us a clue about how to live.

CBS news does a nice job making this point in a much more scientific manner in their article called Friendly Fats — and Fiendish Ones:

According to the National Institutes of Health, about 35 percent of the calories you eat per day should come from fat, as long as most are from healthy, plant-based foods. That’s about 60 grams a day for most of us, or roughly 15-20 per meal.

Note the reference to “healthy” foods. The irony is that fat has become bad because of the movement by the food industry to create artificial non-fat versions of fat. Follow me? Marketing fat as bad is what created demand for non-fat substances that turn out to be far worse than the fat itself. The industry telling you to buy non-fat, in other words, is the same industry that is making fat bad for you. Trans-fats are the perfect example:

There’s no good news here! Man-made trans-fats, found in foods like crackers, cookies, baked goods and fast food, is crafted from partially hydrogenated oil, which means liquid oil that had hydrogen added to it to make it solid. It’s been shown to boost weight gain and belly fat even when the exact same number of calories are consumed and the percentage of total fat is identical. Trans-fats have also been linked to an increased risk of infertility. One study found that infertility risk jumped by a whopping 73 percent with each 2 percent increase in trans-fat.

I will never forget a security product company where I worked that kept an unlimited and free supply of trans-fat filled products available for employees.

A whole cabinet full of boxed and bagged food products would disappear in just one day. I asked them if they were aware of the risks to their employees from the trans-fats to which they replied “we can not afford to buy the fancy food”. Save money? They paid for the insurance to treat all the employees who were affected by the bad fat in the cabinets. Moreover, productivity is surely impacted by the bad-fat. A risk management view would ban the artificial fats and bring in the good fats.

Let me make a finer point here about this company. It was a security product company. They had a marketing campaign to sell security products for unknown and unquantified risks. Their campaign was sometimes even based on just fear — buy this product or you could suffer the consequences. They were very successful and very proud of making hundreds of millions of dollars on this fear-based strategy. Yet, without any awareness of irony, when it came to evaluating risks for their own employee health they found it better to save money than reduce a clear and known danger.

Clear and known to whom? The risk of trans-fat, to be fair, has been mixed into deceptive marketing practices.

Unfortunately, food products can claim to provide zero grams of trans fat if the food contains less than 0.5 grams per serving (to identify this “hidden” trans fat, check the ingredient list for the words partially hydrogenated). And, a product can also be labeled trans-free if it’s made with FULLY hydrogenated instead of partially hydrogenated oil. Technically, fully-hydrogenated oils are trans-free, but they’re not risk-free. A Brandeis University study found that eating products made with fully hydrogenated oil, a trans-free alternative to partially hydrogenated oil) may lower HDL, the good cholesterol and cause a significant rise in blood sugar (about 20 percent).

The bottom line is that unprocessed food is increasingly found to be the source of nutrition with the least risk to health. A simple risk calculation should make fat the hero and non-fat the zero and the CBS report is a great sign of things turning in the right direction.

This trend could take a while. I believe the current chemical non-fat fascination is from as far back as the 1950s when the industry focused on making food sanitized to be healthy. The marketing has been so effective I hear some people say they would rather eat pesticides than see a worm or a blemish. Obviously those people have no idea about risk.

Those within the industry who are working against the grain have found things can get ugly.

“The tomatoes you find in the supermarket taste like cardboard,” [Joe Procacci] said. “We’ve come up with something consumers want. It tastes great. But they won’t let me market it.”

He speaks of the Florida Tomato Committee, an obscure but powerful group of tomato growers who regulate the quality of tomatoes shipped out of state. To some, many UglyRipes are the Frankenstein of the breed: misshapen, wrinkled and scarred tomatoes that look as though they’ve been to war.

Not the face many Florida tomato farmers want the world to see.

Quality? Who in their right mind would want to measure the quality of food by appearance alone? Yet that is exactly what has happened.

“Let’s take the Miss America pageant,” said Dan McClure, a member of the committee from Palmetto. “How often have you seen an ugly woman in the pageant? The same thing applies here.”

The committee to sell you tomatoes apparently just wants to win your business at the most superficial and least important level possible. After that, they do not care what happens to you. If that does not scream bad risk management, I am not sure what does.

Shelf-life is important. Cost is also important. However, they are not the most important and the non-fat movement should be put back into the box. A better measure of quality is taste as a short-term goal. An even better measure is health, as a long-term benefit, and from those two measures we should see that fat is good for us, really. So the next time you hear an American holding a non-fat drink and eating a non-fat muffin rant about how much they love/hate bacon just say “I agree *fat* is great but it is even better from healthy, plant-based foods”.