Shedding light on fluorescent light bulbs

While everyone is absorbed in the melamine issue, there’s one threat that could be lurking right in your own home: mercury exposure from broken compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).

A concerned consumer, a faculty member of the University of Santo Tomas who simply signed his name as Edgar in his e-mail to Consumerline, called our attention to the mercury in CFLs, which is especially hazardous to small children and pregnant women, as pointed out by home educator Jo Hartley, mother of eight and grandmother of two. Fact is, according to Edgar, “CFLs contain a significant amount of mercury enough to cause concern of leakage especially when a micro crack develops.”

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency warned against the use of CFLs because they’re “not a safe product in many cases.”

CFLs can contain as much as 30 milligrams of mercury. As you probably learned in school, mercury is a heavy silver-white poisonous metallic element that is liquid at ordinary temperatures and is used especially in scientific instruments. It can accumulate in the body and cause serious damage to the central nervous system.

Mercury is necessary in light bulbs and today, there’s no other alternative.

Hartley writes that you can accidentally break a bulb when it is screwed into a socket incorrectly. This is certainly a major screwup. Small amounts of mercury are vaporized when a fluorescent light bulb breaks.

In an experiment, 65 CFLs were broken. When the air quality was tested, immediately after the breakage and even after the cleanup, it was found that the levels of mercury were as much as 100 times higher than federal guidelines for chronic exposure. A study estimates that every year, two to four tons of mercury are released into the air from CFLs.

Now that we’re enlightened on the health risks posed by CFLs, Hartley also cautions us against using them over carpeted surfaces. The reason is, in the event of a breakage, the mercury could contaminate the carpet. When that happens, children and pets should be immediately removed from the room and the room should be ventilated.

How to clean up? Never use vacuums to clean up a broken fluorescent light bulb, warns Hartley. Instead, use stiff paper and tape to clean up small pieces.

But the future does look bright. According to Hartley, there’s a Congress mandate banning the sale of CFLs by the year 2012.

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Spilling more dirty secrets

Dear Consumerline,

I’m Michael, 43 years old. I stand 5’9” and weigh 170 lbs. Basically, I’m a health buff. I go to the gym regularly (three times a week). I don’t smoke, and I don’t drink. Since I’m into weight training, I try to balance the ratio of my protein and carbohydrate intake. I watch what I eat. I seldom eat at fast-food outlets. Junk foods are a definite no-no for me. Veggies and fresh fruits form a large percentage of my diet and as much as possible, I eat food with high-fiber content and consume an adequate amount of water daily in order to keep myself “regular.” Which brings us to my query. In your story about food myths and facts that came out on Aug. 26, you mentioned that all breakfast cereals are produced by a process called extrusion, and that this process takes away all nutrients in the grain. What about bran flakes? Are these produced by extrusion, too? Are they safe to eat? I’ve been consuming this type of breakfast cereal for more than two years now (I usually mix it with almonds, pine nuts or sunflower seeds, and fresh fruits in season with a cup of non-fat milk).

My mid-morning snack is an apple or a banana, sometimes an individual pack of SkyFlakes if I run out of fruits.

I eat a full meal at lunch time, rice, meat, veggies, the works.

My afternoon snack is either a peanut butter or tuna sandwich or fruit again.

For dinner, I eat a bowl of oats with a cup of non-fat milk. 

Unlike before (two to three years ago), ever since I started eating like this, I became “regular.”

— MICHAEL

Hawaii-based Filipino nutritionist Dr. Angel Respicio shares these grains of wisdom on packaged cereals from Sally Fallon, nutrition researcher, activist, and author of the cookbook that challenges politically correct nutrition and diet dictocrats:

 “Dry breakfast cereals are produced by a process called extrusion. Cereal makers first create a slurry of the grains and then put them in a machine called an extruder. The grains are forced out of a little hole at high temperature and pressure. Depending on the shape of the hole, the grains are made into little o’s, flakes, animal shapes, or shreds (as in shredded wheat or triscuits), or they are puffed (as in puffed rice). A blade slices off each little flake or shape, which is then carried past a nozzle and sprayed with a coating of oil and sugar to seal off the cereal from the ravages of milk and to give it crunch. In his book Fighting the Food Giants, Paul Stitt tells us that the extrusion process used for these cereals destroys most of the nutrients in the grains. It destroys the fatty acids; it even destroys the chemical vitamins that are added at the end. The amino acids are rendered very toxic by this process. The amino acid lysine, a crucial nutrient, is especially denatured by extrusion. This is how all the boxed cereals are made, even the ones sold in the health food stores. They are all made in the same way and mostly in the same factories. All dry cereals that come in boxes are extruded cereals.The only advances made in the extrusion process are those that will cut cost regardless of how these will alter the nutrient content of the product. Cereals are a multi-billion dollar business, one that has created huge fortunes. With so many people eating breakfast cereals, you might expect to find some studies on the effect of extruded cereals on animals or humans. Yet, there are no published studies at all in the scientific literature.”

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