(NaturalNews) Three batches of American powdered milk registered nitrite levels of between 2.7 milligrams per kilogram and 4.4 milligrams per kilogram -- that's above the Chinese national safety limit of 2 milligrams per kilogram. Over 100 metric tons of the product was subsequently sent back to U.S. manufacturer West Farm (Darigold).
According to the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), the shipment of powdered milk was worth $200,000. The AQSIQ then appealed to local quality-inspection bodies to intensify inspections of milk powder imports in order to protect consumers.
Rising demand for dairy products and processed foods in China has prompted the food industry there to import large quantities of powdered milk, but fatal contamination cases have left the government questioning the product's safety. Thirteen babies died of malnutrition and nearly 200 were sick after consuming substitute milk powder made in the country's Eastern Anhui Province in 2004.
The nutritional disasters in China don’t stop there -- Beijing hospitals are currently treating 87 patients who have contracted meningitis over the past few weeks. Raw or partially cooked snails consumed at a restaurant brought on the disease.
A recent British Medical Journal editorial reported that Chinese people are rapidly becoming overweight and obese, a trend experts blame on the country's "urbanization," which has led them to eat more meats and processed foods and increasingly use cars for transportation rather than walking or mass transit.
"The health of the Chinese people is plummeting precisely because they are increasingly following Western diets and lifestyles," explains Mike Adams, a consumer health advocate who speaks Chinese and once lived in Asia. "The more meat, milk, processed foods and sugary sodas they consume, they more they will look like sick Americans -- obese, diseased, lethargic, angry and mentally impaired. And if they follow the same route that America has by drugging their population with prescription drugs, they will join America in a march down the path of economic ruin due to out-of-control health care costs," he adds.
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