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Author Archives: Jessy

!بتعرف كيف عم يتحضّر أكلك؟؟ هلأ صار فيك تعرف

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Food safety awareness in Lebanon is being raised lately, and now, people demand higher standards of safety when visiting a restaurant.

Syndicate of Restaurant Owners says “most eateries apply safety standards”

Paul Ariss calls for closing down unlicensed restaurants

This is our right, not a privilege.

Boecker Q Platinum Award

In a bid to improve food quality and raise the bar in the public health and safety sector, Boecker Public Health, the region’s largest Pest Control, Biosecurity, and Food Safety provider, announced the launch of the Q-Platinum Award (QPA), an internationally recognized new food safety standard, in partnership with DQS-UL, the global leader in assessment and management system certification with the support of the Syndicate of owners of Restaurants, Cafes, Night-Clubs and Pastries in Lebanon.

And now, with this mandatory certificate being launched in Lebanon, we can judge the quality of the food in a restaurant, a café, or any food business.

You should not accept being served molded bread, a week old Hummus plate, unwached vegetables in your Tabbouleh, or suspicious kibbe!

Demand to see a certificate!

The Q-Platinum Award has been designed for restaurants and food establishments’ owners to provide them with a simple Food Safety System.The program designs and implements food safety standards for restaurants and catering firms that have smaller kitchens and thus could find it hard to obtain the ISO or HACCP certificates – due to specifications related to spaces.Interested institutions should contact Boecker and submit an application. Three months after that, Boecker will perform an audit to check the restaurant’s compliance with the applicable standards. If it obtained the required score, the restaurant would be granted the food safety certificate.

Contact person:

Martin Chakhtoura, Food Safety Sales Consultant, tel: 76755564

To All Lebanese citizens: Very Important News! – L.A.F.S site

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I am very glad to announce the launch of a new website, by the Lebanese Association for Food Safety.

In fact, after being in news headlines this summer, people are more concerned about the safety of the food they are eating in Lebanon, they are demanding more hygiene requirements from the restaurants, factories, farmers, and any source for their food. And if I may say, it is about time the food industry and government both change the way they deal with this issue.

This website is very interesting, and I promise it will add substantially to your knowledge.

Check out this article about the Tabbouli Paradox. This is the main reason I chose the name of this site! Plus take a look at this poster :)

I especially like the “Complaints” option, where you can fill a form, for when you have food poisoning (hopefully never), the “Education” part also gives you crucial details about eating out, home cooking advice, or food safety for eating outdoors…

Enjoy :D

National Tabbouleh Day

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I just I would like to point out that National Tabbouleh Day will be celebrated Saturday 2 July…

I knew about that from a post in Blog Baladi:

For the past 10 years, the first saturday of July has been celebrated as the National Tabbouleh day.

National Tabbouleh Day is being held at Souk el Tayeb in Beirut Souks on Saturday July 2 from 9:00 am till 2:00 pm.

A competition will be held to determine who makes the best tabbouleh in 3 different categories:
1- Traditional Tabbouleh
2- Winter Tabbouleh
3- Creation

To read more about past event, check out National Tabbouleh’s website. [Link]

 

Interesting event :)

E-coli outbreak in Europe, what is it? & should we be scared in Lebanon?

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The world is in chock now because of an outbreak in Germany…

According to the Food Politics website by Marion Nestle:

German authorities now say that  sprouts grown on an organic farm in Lower Saxony are the source of their E. coli O104:H4 outbreak, now responsible for more than 30 deaths and 3,000 illnesses, 750 of them severe kidney disease.

The epidemiological studies point to sprouts after all.

Sprouts, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are a prime suspect in microbial outbreaks.   They have been implicated in many outbreaks in the United States.  This is because sprouts are sprouted from minute seeds that are hard to clean, as shown in this microscopic view:

As Food Safety News explains in a long discussion of this problem, the seeds need to be dumped in bleach to kill bacteria.  It’s also a really good idea to test the wash water to make sure it is free of pathogens.

The seeds are sprouted in water at room temperature, “a warm, moist climate — just perfect for a bacteria’s social life and subsequent reproduction.”

Now, about the disease:

The O157:H7 E-coli strain causes “renal damage and its consequences, which at the extreme of failure requires either kidney transplantation or lifelong dialysis; when advanced medical treatment is available.

O104:H4 has a more virulent course than O157:H7 and the prior non-O157:H7 STEC E. coli that have caused outbreaks. This is shown by: an unknown number sickened, 4,000 with some form of hospital admission, presumably with bloody diarrhea, approximately 400 with HUS, 100 with kidney failure, nearly 40 deaths. Hospital staff have also been troubled by a higher level of neurological symptoms, starting with patients presenting with a listless affect and proceeding to severe symptoms, that may be subsequent to kidney stress and damage, or involve a neurotoxin, or both.”

As stated in Food Safety News.

 

In Lebanon, should we be scared of this outbreak? 

As stated by the Lebanese Association of Food Science:

“People of Lebanon, no need to panic, our vegetables are supposedly fit for consumption at this time and not directly linked to those in Europe. However, to be on the safe side please:

1- Wash your vegetables well by soaking in vinegar, salt and potable water.
2- Make sure to eat only very well cooked meats and when eating out, avoid raw vegetables.”

Recent facts about Europe’s E. coli O104:H4 outbreak:
- Organic sprouts are now the suspect.
- Death toll: 22 Sunday — 21 in Germany and 1 in Sweden.
- Total number of sickened people is 2,243
. Total 627 people have developed Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (Kidney failure).
- The Spanish are going to sue the Germans over the cucumber error.

 

 

 

One of the scariest movies… and it’s about food.

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A must see!!!!! Check out this movie.

Ingredients in food that are added by design

- Aspartame, a fecal matter of E.coli,  that causes brain cancer, threat to inborn and so many health effects, it’s just unspeakable.

- Plastic in nuggets, and many kinds of TV meals

- Fluoride in water, a form of forced medication

- Corn that grows its own pesticide in it, linked to organ failure and sterility.

- Genetically modified meat like salmon…

And many many more.

Enjoy

Tempting foods can trigger urge to indulge

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Tempting foods can trigger urge to indulge – Yahoo! News.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Seeing a milkshake can activate the same areas of the brain that light up when an addict sees cocaine, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study helps explain why it can be so hard for some people to maintain a healthy weight, and why it has been so difficult for drugmakers and health experts to find obesity treatments that work.

“If certain foods are addictive, this may partially explain the difficulty people experience in achieving sustainable weight loss,” Ashley Gearhardt of Yale University in Connecticut and colleagues wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Gearhardt’s team wanted to see what happens in the brain when young women are tempted by a tasty treat.

They used a type of brain imaging known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study brain activity in 48 young women who were offered a chocolate milkshake or a tasteless solution. Women in the study ranged from lean to obese.

The team found that seeing the milkshake triggered brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the medial orbitofrontal cortex — brain areas that have been implicated in an addict’s urge to use drugs.

And this activity was higher among women in the study who had high scores on a scale that assessed their eating habits for signs of addictive behavior.

“These findings support the theory that compulsive food consumption may be driven in part by an enhanced anticipation of the rewarding properties of food,” Gearhardt and colleagues wrote.

People who are addicted to a substance are more likely to react with physical, psychological and behavioral changes when exposed to that substance. Altering visual “cues” — billboards of tempting treats, for example — might help curb the urge to indulge, they said.

“Ubiquitous food advertising and the availability of inexpensive palatable foods may make it extremely difficult to adhere to healthier food choices because the omnipresent food cues trigger the reward system,” they wrote.

The study suggests that advertising might also play a role in the nation’s obesity problem, and future studies should look at whether food ads trigger this same kind of brain activity.

Obesity is one of the biggest health challenges facing the United States, and health officials already added a requirement to President Barack Obama’s new healthcare law requiring that restaurants add calorie counts to their menus.

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