Don't Eat That!

Hey, eat popcorn, lots of it.  It's great for nibbling.  And calorie-wise.  As snacks go, it's one of the nutritiously-innocent ones, relatively speaking.  And hey, it's corn, after all.  Exploded corn.  Not the rice crispy cereal kind, but oven-popped and delicious.  Here, have a bowl of it. 

There's some guy in Colorado so devoted to his daily bowl of popcorn he never saw it coming.  Saw what coming?  That his daily dose was liberally laced with !yum! butter, of course.  Oh, not butter-butter, instead chemical-butter.  And therein lay the problem.

We're trying to avoid saturated fat, after all, found in animal-based products - like butter.  So, avoiding the expense and the cholesterol found in real butter brings us to the usefulness of chemical alternatives.  In this instance that alternative was named diacetyl, butter flavouring.  And, it is dangerous.

This man, Wayne Watson, 59 years of age, would still like to live to a ripe old age.  Riper than 60, for example.  But he has been afflicted with a dangerous chronic condition - known.as.pop.corn.lung.  Yess!  This is a form of obstructive lung disease which makes it difficult for air to flow from the lungs.

And it is an irreversible condition.  Mr. Watson is rather aggrieved that neither the popcorn's manufacturer nor the supermarket where it is marketed informed the public by clear labelling that the butter flavouring is, in fact, dangerous.  

He was so persuasive in his annoyance that a U.S. federal court jury awarded him $7.2-million in damages.

Gilster-Mary Lee Corp. located in Chester, Illinois manufactures the popcorn; the jurors found them 80% liable for the damages awarded, with the King Soopers supermarket chain, and its parent company Kroger Co., liable for 20%. 

That won't, of course, return Mr. Watson's lung capacity to him.

He had been diagnosed at Denver's National Jewish Health, a respiratory health centre, following years of consuming the artificial popcorn he ate on a !daily! basis.  The examining doctor asked him if he had been around large quantities of microwave popcorn.

Dr. Cecile Rose had been a consultant to the flavourings industry, had observed the same disease that Watson presented with among workers exposed to the chemical.  Microwave popcorn and flavouring workers across the U.S. have been suing since 2004, awarded large damages.

Ditch those microwave popcorn packages.