(NaturalNews) Rather than actually take the time to address the root causes of meat and poultry contamination, which more often than not are a direct result of outrageously unsanitary factory farming practices (http://www.naturalnews.com/025716_antibiotic_animals_antibiotics.html), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has instead decided to simply up the doses of radiation that industrial food producers are allowed to blast on their filthy, contaminated meat products.

In the first new rule recently published in the Federal Register, the FDA specifies that "unrefrigerated uncooked meat" can now be irradiated right alongside refrigerated, frozen and cooked meat. And in the second new rule, the FDA increases the amount of ionizing radiation that can be applied to poultry products such as chicken by 50 percent, bumping the dosage up to 4.5 kilograys (kGy) of radiation from the previous 3.0 kGy.

You can view the two published rules here:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-11-30/pdf/2012-28967.pdf

These two rules, which were enacted quietly and without any media fanfare (big surprise), come more than a decade after the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) first petitioned the FDA for their passage back in 1999. And in the years that followed, numerous consumer advocacy and food safety groups decried the proposals, warning that irradiation is dangerous.

But the FDA ignored all the comments made by these groups, which included reputable names like Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and continued forward with its irradiation agenda. According to Food Safety News (FSN), the FDA actually went so far as to belittle the merit of the input given by these groups, referring to them as "general" comments that did "not contain any substantive information that could be used in a safety evaluation of irradiated poultry."

FDA ignores science showing dangers of irradiation, claims there are no safety issues

This careless dismissal by the FDA is completely bogus, of course, as the CFS and many other groups have repeatedly offered valid scientific evidence showing that irradiating food denatures its quality, nutritional value, and safety. The production of "unique radiolytic products," for instance, which include various mutagens, or radioactive substances, is one major negative byproduct of irradiation that is both proven and undeniable. (http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/campaign/food-irradiation/)

And yet the FDA does not seem to care much about the facts as they concern the safety (or lack thereof) of irradiation, as the rogue agency has been on a crusade for the past several years to irradiate virtually everything that Americans eat. Meat, fruit, spices, breads, you name it -- if the grocery store sells it, then the FDA wants to nuke it for your "safety." (http://www.naturalnews.com/023945.html)

And in the rare case that an irradiated food actually bears a proper irradiation label -- the FDA, after all, has established incredibly lax rules that allow most irradiated foods to be sold to consumers without labels -- the flowery emblem, known as a radura, that has been created for food irradiation is unlikely to have much of an impact anyway, as it was deliberately designed to appear pleasant and insinuate that a product is "natural." You can view the ridiculous irradiation radura here so you know what to look out for: http://www.naturalnews.com/023945.html

If you wish to truly avoid irradiated foods; however, the best way to do this is to purchase only organic or locally-grown and verified foods. You can also learn more about the history of irradiation and how to spot potentially unlabeled irradiated foods by visiting the following two links:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/Irrad/LabelingStatus.cfm and

http://www.organicconsumers.org/irradlink.cfm

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foodsafetynews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/z038255_radiation_meats_FDA.html