Rather Be Healthy

By Dr. Mercola

A full two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese and childhood obesity has tripled over the past 30 years.

While the American agricultural system may be the envy of many less affluent nations, it also has many unintended consequences. One of them is a food system that promotes cheap food largely devoid of nutrients and chockfull of unhealthy ingredients that has caused obesity rates to skyrocket.

If you’re like most people, you probably do not know that there is NO link between agricultural subsidies and nutrition. This is a major part of the problem.

Directly related to this issue is the fact that the government’s nutritional guidelines are in large part mirrored by these same agricultural subsidies, rather than being built upon sound nutritional science.

The original food pyramid created and promoted by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), told you that the “base” of your diet should consist of grains, pasta and breads, despite the evidence showing that grains, which break down into sugar in your body, promotes fat accumulation and drives insulin resistance and related diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

In short, the reason you’re told to make grains the cornerstone of your diet is because that’s what farmers are paid to grow in the US. There’s a lot of it, and it’s inexpensive compared to healthier foods like vegetables, for which few subsidies are offered.

Conventional Farming Promotes Consumption of Unhealthy Foods

There’s no denying the fact that modern agricultural practices promote the consumption of an unhealthy diet. Today’s sky-high rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease can be tied directly to changes in how our food has been grown and produced over the past 40 years.

According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), between 1995 and 2010, a mere 10 percent of American farmers collected 74 percent of all subsidies, amounting to nearly $166 billion over 16 years.

These farm subsidies bring you high-fructose corn syrup, fast food, animal factories, monoculture, and a host of other contributors to our unhealthful contemporary diet.

A report comparing federal subsidies of fresh produce and junk food, prepared by US PIRG, a non-profit organization that takes on special interests on behalf of the public, revealed where your tax dollars are really going and it’s quite shocking: If you were to receive an annual federal subsidy directly, you would receive $7.36 to spend on junk food and just 11 cents to buy apples.

Equally astounding is the following statistic gleaned from a recent interview with Michael Pollan, in which he points out that according to USDA data, 92 cents of each food dollar now goes to someone other than the farmer—it’s actually spent on the various manufacturing and packaging processes associated with processed foods.

“We’re not going to undo that unless we buy more directly from farmers and buy unprocessed food,” he says.

And I think that’s a crucial point, really. Imagine if food growers could get most or all of each food dollar instead of it being spent on plastic wrappers and food processing! Then they might actually be able to afford growing something other than corn, soy and wheat, which are three of the unhealthiest staples of the processed food industry…

Following USDA Diet Recommendations Is a Recipe for Obesity

Some of you may be old enough to recall the 1992 Food Pyramid, which had grains as the largest bottom block of the pyramid, encouraging you to eat 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta each day.

This excess of carbohydrates, most of them refined, is precisely the opposite of what most people need to stay healthy. At the very top of the pyramid was fats and sugar, and while sugar clearly belongs there, healthy fats do not. In fact, most people would benefit from getting anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of their total calories from healthy fats!

The food pyramid was replaced with “MyPlate” in 2011, which slightly downplayed grains as the most important dietary ingredient, making vegetables the largest “slice,” but it still has a long way to go before it will offer a meal plan that will truly support your optimal health.

One of its most glaring faults is that MyPlate virtually removed all fats from the equation! In fact, except for a small portion of dairy, which is advised to be fat-free or low-fat, fats are missing entirely… There is no mention of the importance of dietary fats, even the “politically correct” ones like the monounsaturated fats in olive oil and nuts, such as pecans (canola oil is also in this category, but I advise avoiding it and using coconut oil instead).

Of course, one of the most important of the healthy fats is animal-based omega-3, which is also absent from the plate. Deficiency in this essential fat can cause or contribute to very serious health problems, both mental and physical, and may be a significant underlying factor of up to 96,000 premature deaths each year.

Not surprisingly, the US government still has not acknowledged the ever mounting data showing that saturated fat is actually an incredibly healthy, nourishing, and all-natural fat that humans have been thriving on for generations. It provides the necessary building blocks for your cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone-like substances that are critical to your health. Saturated fats from animal and vegetable sources, such as coconut oil, avocado, non-CAFO meat and dairy, also provide a concentrated source of energy in your diet.
When you eat fats as part of your meal, they also slow down absorption so that you can feel satisfied longer, which helps curb overeating. In addition, they act as carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, and are needed for mineral absorption and a host of other biological processes. To get these healthy saturated fats in your diet, you need to eat animal foods like butter and other full-fat raw dairy products and eggs, yet these foods are still demonized by the establishment.

What a Food Pyramid Based on Nutritional Science Really Looks Like

In an effort to remedy the situation, I’ve created my own food pyramid for optimal health. My pyramid, which is based on nutritional science opposed to agricultural subsidies and industry lobbying efforts, is almost the inverse of the original USDA food pyramid, featuring healthful fats and vegetables on the bottom.

Again, most people would benefit from getting at least 50 percent of your daily calories from healthful fats, such as avocados, coconut oil, nuts, and raw butter. In terms of bulk or quantity, vegetables should be the most prominent feature on your plate. Veggies provide countless critical nutrients, while being sparse on calories.

Next comes high quality proteins, followed by a moderate amount of fruits, and lastly, at the very top, you’ll find grains and sugars. This last top tier of sugars and grains can be eliminated entirely, and your health just might become the envy of everyone around you… While this may sound impossible to some, I can attest to the fact that quitting carbs is doable. In fact, once you’ve successfully switched over from burning carbs to burning fat as your body’s primary fuel, carb cravings actually disappear, as if by magic. There are two primary ways to achieve this metabolic switch, and these strategies support each other when combined:

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Intermittent fasting: I prefer daily intermittent fasting, but you could also fast a couple of days a week if you prefer, or every other day. There are many different variations. To be effective, in the case of daily intermittent fasting, the length of your fast must be at least eight hours long. This means eating only between the hours of 11am until 7pm, as an example. Essentially, this equates to simply skipping breakfast, and making lunch your first meal of the day instead

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A ketogenic diet: This type of diet, in which you replace carbs with low to moderate amounts of high quality protein and high amounts of beneficial fat, is what I recommend for everyone, and is exactly what you get if you focus on the bottom three tiers of my food pyramid

Other Atrocious Health Recommendations That Drive Obesity and Disease Rates

Make no mistake about it, obesity is the result of inappropriate lifestyle choices, and unfortunately, our government has spent decades disseminating astoundingly inaccurate information about diet and health. In many ways, the US government has become little more than a propagator of corporate-sponsored propaganda. The following is just a tiny sampling of the pervasive misleading information on weight and obesity disseminated by our government agencies:

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“All sugars are equal, and are okay in moderation:” The science is overwhelmingly clear on this point: fructose and glucose are NOT metabolized by your body in the same way. For example, while every cell in your body utilizes glucose, thereby burning up much of it, fructose is turned into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat. Furthermore, the entire burden of metabolizing fructose falls on your liver, which creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout. It also promotes visceral fat. When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. As a standard recommendation, I advise keeping your total fructose consumption below 25 grams per day, or as little as 15 grams a day if you have insulin resistance, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease or are overweight

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“To lose weight, just expend more calories than you eat:” This outdated advice has been shown to be patently false, as not all calories are created equal. In a nutshell, counting calories will not help you lose weight if you’re consuming the wrong kind of calories

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“Choosing diet foods will help you lose weight:” Substances like Splenda (sucralose) and Equal or Nutrasweet (aspartame) may have zero calories, but your body isn’t fooled. When it gets a “sweet” taste, it expects calories to follow, and when this doesn’t occur it leads to distortions in your biochemistry that actually lead to weight gain

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“Avoid saturated fat to protect your heart:” The myth that saturated fat causes heart disease began as little more than a scientifically unsupported marketing strategy for Crisco cooking oil. Most people actually need about 50 to 70 percent of their diet as healthful fats from organic, pastured eggs, avocados, coconut oil, real butter and grass-fed beef in order to optimize their health

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“When it comes to cholesterol levels, the lower the better, to avoid heart disease:” Cholesterol is actually NOT the major culprit in heart disease or any disease, and the guidelines that dictate what number your cholesterol levels should be to keep you “healthy” are fraught with conflict of interest — and have never been proven to be good for your health. Meanwhile, bringing your cholesterol levels down too low can have significant health ramifications, from mood disorders and violence to, ironically, heart disease

Yes, You Can Slim Down Without Even Trying…

Once you realize the root of the problem, which begins with agricultural subsidies that are based on economics and have nothing to do with growing nutrient dense foods for the masses; which in turn has spawned dietary recommendations that are also based on industry profitability opposed to nutritional science, then it becomes easier to understand why a full two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Even the education of registered dietitians is sponsored and taught by the junk food industry!

Sadly, these deeply flawed dietary recommendations fuel the nation’s poor health scores, and drive the now colossal health industry, which in turn is run by the pharmaceutical industry… It’s really one big vicious circle.

You CAN break free.

Perhaps one of the most powerful scientific discoveries to emerge in the past several years is that the old adage “a calorie is a calorie” is patently false. The research clearly demonstrates that even if you control the number of calories you eat, if those calories come primarily from fructose and grains, you are at increased risk of obesity and pre-diabetes, which includes both insulin and leptin resistance, fatty liver, high blood pressure and high triglycerides. Insulin and leptin resistance in turn form the foundation for virtually every chronic disease you can think of, including heart disease and cancer.

The answer, therefore, is to turn the conventional food pyramid on its proverbial head, and dramatically reduce or eliminate virtually all grains and sugars, especially fructose. This in and of itself will go a long way toward preventing accumulation of excess fat. However, to be truly effective, you want to make sure you’re replacing those refined carbs with vegetables and healthful fats.

Now you’re entering into a diet that will allow your body to shift from burning carbs to burning fat (or ketones) as its primary fuel. At this point, weight loss is not the only benefit you’ll reap. Compelling research shows that this type of diet, also referred to as a ketogenic diet, is an effective prevention and even treatment strategy for cancer.

Intermittent fasting is another powerful key that will help you transition your body from obtaining the majority of its fuel from glucose stored as glycogen in your muscles and liver, to the fat stored in your tissues. This is one of the most effective ways I know of to burn off excess body fat and eliminate sugar cravings. These are all things that are well within your power to do. Next, I urge you to become involved with changing the system that has brought us to this unfortunate point in our evolution.Growing sprouts in your home is a powerful way to eat very healthy and inexpensively.

Changing your shopping patterns by supporting local agriculture will not only help improve your health, it will also help improve the environment and bring back our rural communities. One way to get involved is to simply buy more food from your local farmers. It is important to understand the impact you have when you spend your money on processed factory food.

There may be a convenient way to satiate your hunger while on the go, but fast food hamburgers appear to offer little in the way of actual meat content, according to a recent study published in the journal Annals of Diagnostic Pathology. Researchers from the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, found that, among eight popular fast food hamburgers analyzed, some were found to contain as little as two percent actual meat, which may come as a surprise to some.

A true American meal pastime, hamburgers are consumed at a rate of about five billion patties annually in the U.S. Most people who eat hamburgers likely assume that those succulent patties grilled over an open flame are pure meat from cows. But according to the histological data, hamburger patties are generally composed mostly of water, as well as varying percentages of random tissues, nerves, and a small percentage of actual meat.

Based on their analysis, Laurel School researchers found that the water content of fast food hamburgers typically ranges between 37.7 and 62.4 percent, with an average of about 49 percent. Electron microscopy revealed preserved skeletal muscle, which is good, as well as a variety of tissue types including blood vessels, peripheral nerves, adipose tissue (body fat), cartilage, and bone. But the kicker was the actual meat content.

According to the data, amongst the eight fast food hamburger patties tested, meat content ranged between 2.1 and 14.8 percent, with an average of about 12.1 percent. This means that for a half-pound burger, less than one ounce of it is composed of actual meat, on average. And for those burgers on the lowest end of the meat spectrum, a half-pound patty contains less than five grams of actual meat.

“Fast food hamburgers are comprised of little meat,” wrote the authors in their study abstract. “Approximately half of their weight is made up of water. Unexpected tissue types found in some hamburgers included bone, cartilage, and plant material; no brain tissue was present.”

Besides their lack of meat, some fast food hamburger patties were also found to contain potentially harmful bacteria and ammonia. Two of the hamburgers tested, for instance, were found to contain intracellular parasites, also known as Sarcocystis, which are basically cysts. In humans, undercooked meats containing Sarcocystis can cause diarrhea or muscle tenderness, and in more extreme cases breathing problems and even death.

Meat is supposed to contain water, but not bacteria and ammonia
Since all meat naturally contains relatively high levels of water, it is not necessarily unusual that the fast food hamburger patties tested in the study also contained high levels of water. It is the unexpected tissues, the bacteria, and the ammonia that are most concerning about this study’s findings, as they affirm what others have warned about in the past concerning the problems with fast food meat.

The authors of the study also did not identify which fast food hamburgers they tested, which some NaturalNews readers may find disconcerting. But many of the usual fast food suspects were likely included as part of the research, which means you can probably make your own educated guesses.

Regardless, the overall research still points to the same conclusion — that avoiding fast food hamburgers and cooking your own clean, grass-fed meats from local or verified suppliers is still the best route you and your family can take. There are simply too many unknowns with the conventional food supply these days to take the risk. Is sacrificing your health on the altar of convenience really worth it?

Sources for this article include:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

http://www.realfarmacy.com

The six decades’ old fast food franchise KFC recently rolled out Original Recipe boneless chicken in its 4,500 US locations.1 The new slogan: “No mess. No fuss. No bones about it.”

The company is so convinced boneless chicken is the way of the future that they’re actually considering eliminating on-the-bone chicken from its menu altogether. According to the featured article:

“McDonald’s execs began experimenting with a range of non-burger options: chicken pot-pies, bone-in fried chicken, deep-fried onion chunks. None of them were successful, until they offered customers deep fried chicken chunks. The McNugget was born.

That was 1980, when about 80 percent to 85 percent of chicken consumed in the US was unprocessed… Ten years later, the numbers had almost reversed…

While the rotisserie chicken made a bit of a comeback in the mid-‘90s, the idea of eating the whole bird was, for the most part, a thing of the past… According to internal KFC surveys, nearly four out of five servings of chicken in the US today are off-the-bone, the inverse of 30 years ago.”

Why might this be “a big deal”? Well, for one, processed chicken nuggets, regardless of brand, are far more likely to contain all sorts of additives and fillers you’d be better off without.

For example, I wrote about the questionable ingredients of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets back in 2010. Only half of Chicken McNuggets are actual meat. The other 50 percent includes corn derivatives, sugars, leavening agents and completely synthetic ingredients.

In a 2003 lawsuit against McDonald’s, Federal Judge Robert Sweet2 even questioned “whether customers understood the risks of eating McDonald’s chicken over regular chicken.” But there’s yet another reason for my questioning the trend of going boneless, and it’s even less savory than that…

The Future of Food: Bioengineered Meat

Few are talking about this, but scientists have been working on bioengineering “cultured” meat for the past decade. According to a September 2011 Huffington Post article,3 scientists at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands claimed to be as little as 12 months away from delivering the world’s first bioengineered synthetic hamburger.

As of this writing, the hamburger has yet to be presented, although I doubt that means the plan has been abandoned.

The article also pointed out that London’s Royal Society had released a global food supply report, in which they called for a synthetic meat solution to feed the world’s growing population without causing environmental destruction.

“The only barriers? Overcoming the social stigma and the RS scientists say it could take another decade before it rolls out to the masses,” the article states.

Then, in February 2012, The Economist4 followed up on the research. Other Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Mark Post at the Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, expressed hopes of decimating animal husbandry altogether by altering how meat for the masses is produced. The article explains how this laboratory-created meat is created:

“Dr. Post’s cultures, grown from stem cells, are sheets 3cm long, 1.5cm wide and half a millimeter deep. To make the world’s most expensive hamburger 3,000 of them will be needed. The stem cells themselves are extracted from cattle muscle and then multiplied a millionfold before they are put in Petri dishes and allowed to turn into muscle cells.

When they have done so, they are encouraged to exercise and build up their strength by being given their own gym equipment (pieces of Velcro to which they can anchor themselves in order to stretch and relax spontaneously). The fatty cells of adipose tissue, needed for juiciness, are grown separately and then combined with the muscle cells before the whole thing is cooked.

Producing meat in Petri dishes is not commercially viable, but Dr. Post hopes to scale things up—first by growing the cells on small spheres floating in tanks and ultimately by using scaffolds made of biodegradable polymer tubes, which would both add the third dimension needed for a juicy steak and provide a way of delivering nutrients and oxygen to the steak’s interior.”

Sure, companies like KFC may have a point when they say they’re just changing their meals to meet the needs of the “chicken nugget generation.” But a side effect of getting used to the idea that chicken meat doesn’t have bones is that, at any point, the meat used in these processed nuggets could be exchanged for bioengineered meat, and no one would be the wiser…

I sincerely doubt bioengineered meat would be advertised, since it’s hardly a selling point—at least in the beginning. What the potential health ramifications might be from eating such meats are completely unknown, but it’s clearly not going to be identical to meat from an animal.

More Data Ties Human Illness to Farm Antibiotics

Seeing how commercially available bioengineered meat is still a ways away from being a reality you have to contend with, let’s bring the focus back to something more relevant to the present day, namely antibiotics in CAFO meats. Animals are often fed antibiotics at low doses for disease prevention and growth promotion. These agricultural uses account for about 80 percent of all antibiotic use in the US,5 so it’s a MAJOR source of human antibiotic consumption.

According to a recent NPR report,6 data published by a joint government program7 from tests conducted on supermarket meat samples collected in 2011 by the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, reveals the presence of several disease-causing bacteria, including the super-hardy antibiotic-resistant versions of salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli. According to NPR:8

“The implications were significant — that the bacteria had become resistant to antibiotics back at the farm because farmers were overusing them. The findings, released through the joint program of the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got little attention when they were published in February. But this week, the Environmental Working Group, which opposes some of the livestock industry’s use of antibiotics, analyzed the government data and highlighted some of their startling implications in a report.”

The report9 in question, aptly named “Superbugs Invade American Supermarkets,” points out that many of the meats tested contained “startlingly high levels” of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on:
•81 percent of ground turkey
•69 percent of pork chops
•55 percent of ground beef
•39 percent of chicken breasts, wings and thighs

Want Safer Meat? Buy Organic Pastured/Grass-Fed

Writing for the New York Times,10 David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 1990 to 1997, also recently sounded warning bells over the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in livestock, urging the FDA to take the matter seriously. So far, the agency has only restricted on class of antibiotics, cephalosporin, from routine use in livestock.11

“While the FDA can see what kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are coming out of livestock facilities, the agency doesn’t know enough about the antibiotics that are being fed to these animals,” he writes. “This is a major public health problem, because giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that can infect people. We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The results could be a matter of life and death.”

The misuse of antibiotics in livestock has now become “a direct source of foodborne illness,” EWG points out. Worse yet, because animals are given these antibiotics continuously, in low doses, pathogens are becoming increasingly resistant to the drugs, which means they no longer work to treat human disease either. The end result is that people are dying from infections that were once easily treatable.

Despite this, organic foods, which are by law produced without such pathogen-promoting methods, are the ones being consistently targeted “for safety reasons.” The truth of the matter is, conventionally grown mass-produced foods pose the greatest danger to your health, in multiple ways, and are the ones to be avoided if you’re at all concerned about food safety.

“To be safe, consumers should treat all meat as if it may be contaminated, mainly by cooking thoroughly and using safe shopping and kitchen practices (see EWG’s downloadable Tips to Avoiding Superbugs in Meat),”12 EWG suggests.13

One of the best ways to avoid contaminated meat is to avoid meat from animals raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), aka “factory farms,” and buying organic, pastured or grass-fed meats instead. Growth promoters such as antibiotics are not permitted in organic animal farming, and organically-raised animals are also healthier as a result of being pastured, so overall you’re getting far “cleaner,” healthier meat.

Organic, Cage-Free, Free-Range, or Pasture-Raised?

When it comes to chicken, there are a number of designations floating around, such as “organic,” “free-range,” “pastured” and “cage-free.” But while you may think these are interchangeable, they’re actually not. In many ways these labels are little more than creative advertising.

The definitions of “free-range” are such that the commercial egg industry can run industrial farm egg laying facilities and still call them “free-range” eggs, despite the fact that the birds’ foraging conditions are far from what you’d call natural. For example, regulations on the use of the term “free-range” do not specify the amount of time the hens must spend outdoors or the amount of outdoor space each hen must have access to. Nor do they indicate that the hen must have access to a pasture diet.

True free-range hens (and eggs), now increasingly referred to as “pasture-raised,” are from hens that roam freely outdoors on a pasture where they can forage for their natural diet, which includes seeds, green plants, insects, and worms.

Large commercial egg facilities typically house tens of thousands of hens and can even go up to hundreds of thousands of hens. Obviously they cannot allow all of them to forage freely. They can still be called “cage-free” or “free-range” though, if they’re not confined to an individual cage. But these labels say nothing about the conditions they ARE raised in, which are still deplorable. So, while flimsy definitions of “free range” and “cage-free” allow such facilities to sell their products as free range, please beware that a hen that is let outside into a barren lot for mere minutes a day, and is fed a diet of corn, soy, cottonseed meals and synthetic additives is NOT a free-range hen, and simply will not produce the same quality meat and/or eggs as its foraging counterpart.

Certified organic poultry is also the only poultry product that is 100 percent guaranteed to be antibiotic-free.14

So to summarize, what you’re really looking for is chicken and eggs that are both certified organic and true pasture-raised. Barring organic certification, which is cost-prohibitive for many small farmers, you could just make sure the farmer raises his chickens according to organic, free-range standards, allowing his flock to forage freely for their natural diet, and aren’t fed antibiotics, corn and soy. Last year, I visited Joel Salatin at his Polyface farm in Virginia. He’s truly one of the pioneers in sustainable agriculture, and you can take a virtual tour through his pasture-raised chicken farm operation in the following video.

Shopping Guidelines for Real, Health-Promoting Food

It is very difficult to control the quality of your food if you’re eating in a restaurant, which is why I recommend that you prepare the vast majority of your food yourself. If you’re going to occasionally dine out, you would be best served to avoid fast food places. Reclaiming your kitchen is part and parcel of healthful living, so you know exactly what you’re putting in your body. Whether you are grocery shopping or looking for dining options, the table that follows lists criteria to look for in identifying high-quality, health-promoting foods. If the food meets these criteria, it is most likely a wise choice and would fall under the designation of “real food.”

Grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers (organic foods fit this description, but so do some non-organic foods)

Not genetically modified

Contains no added growth hormones, antibiotics, or other drugs

Does not contain any artificial ingredients, including chemical preservatives

Fresh (keep in mind that if you have to choose between wilted organic produce or fresh conventional produce, the latter may be the better option)

Did not come from a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO)

Grown with the laws of nature in mind (meaning animals are fed their native diets, not a mix of grains and animal byproducts, and have free access to the outdoors)

Grown in a sustainable way (using minimal amounts of water, protecting the soil from burnout, and turning animal wastes into natural fertilizers instead of environmental pollutants)

If you’re “hooked” on fast food and other processed foods, please review my article about how to wean yourself off fast food in seven easy steps. If you’re currently sustaining yourself on fast food and processed foods, this is probably the most positive life change you could ever make.

And if you have children, remember that feeding your children home cooked meals can have far reaching benefits, extending even to your future grandchildren. Yes, that’s right! It is now well known that dietary changes can prompt epigenetic DNA changes that can be passed on to future generations. For instance, pregnant rats fed a fatty junk food diet had daughters and granddaughters with a greater risk of breast cancer. Making wise food decisions can literally “override” genetic predispositions for disease.

Vani Hari, better known as “Food Babe,” is a blogger and food activist in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her blog, FoodBabe.com1, and her “leading by example” style of activism is an inspiration to a growing number of people not just in the US but around the world.

One of her most celebrated achievements is her participation in the Democratic National Convention, in which she drew massive media attention by standing up with a makeshift “Label GMOs” sign in the front row, during Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack’s speech.

This interview was taped a week after the March Against Monsanto where I participated in one of the local marches and had a chance to witness first-hand people working in the activist movement. It really helped me understand that there’s a widespread opportunity for virtually anyone to participate, get inspired, and to really make a difference.

Vani’s personal story is a perfect example of just how influential a single person can be, not just in educating others, but also in enticing major food chains to do the right thing and make positive changes.

The Painful ‘Birth’ of a Food Activist

Perhaps she was destined for the role of the activist, as her name actually means “voice” in Hindi. Indeed, a nationally ranked debater during her school years, Vani does not shy away from voicing her beliefs and sharing her ideals, and there’s little doubt the world is becoming better for it.

“Shortly after college, realizing that debate wasn’t really going to get me a job, I ended up switching my major to computer science and did what everybody else did. I entered the rat race,” she says.

“I got picked up by one of the top consulting firms in the country… managing large-scale projects, mergers, acquisitions, and integration work. I was travelling Sunday through Thursday, and quickly, at the age of 22 to 23 years old, I became really sick…

It was that life-changing moment that I realized, ‘Wait a minute, I gained 25 to 30 pounds within a three-month period, and then I had appendicitis?’ There’s something seriously wrong with what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been eating. What’s in the food, and what caused my body to be so out of whack?

Everyone says appendicitis is this random occurrence… But I don’t think it’s random, because it’s definitely related to your digestive system. And I was overloading my digestive system with tons of toxins.”

So, when she was 22, Vani made the decision to make her health her number one priority, vowing not to let work get in the way. By doing her own homework, she quickly realized that, first of all, not all calories are created equal—a concept clearly described by Dr. Robert Lustig, who states that fructose is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.”

This means you can have the same amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different despite the identical calorie count. This is largely because different nutrients provoke different hormonal responses, and those hormonal responses determine, among other things, how much fat you accumulate.

She also realized that not only are the vast majority of American food products loaded with toxic ingredients, from pesticides like glyphosate to artificial additives banned in many other countries, the food she was eating also fell short in terms of healthful nutrients—especially healthy fats like saturated fat.

“I’d been duped by the food industry,” she says. “I thought that eating a six-gram fat or less; 250-calorie or less Subway sandwich was healthy for me. I didn’t realize that the nine-grain bread had over 50 ingredients, with one ingredient that’s banned in Singapore. If you get caught using it, you get fined 450,000 dollars. I didn’t know that information. I ate those things because of the calories.

I thought, ‘Oh, look at all these vegetables inside.’ But I didn’t realize that the jalapenos have been dipped in petroleum-based dyes: Yellow #5 and Yellow #6. I didn’t realize that all of these buildups of chemicals in my body were causing these issues. And it wasn’t just appendicitis. I had asthma and allergies growing up. I was on three or four asthma medications… I had to see the doctor on a very frequent basis, even put on steroids to control my asthma. Now I have zero asthma. I’m on zero medications right now.”

The Power of One

Her corporate work, which involved loads of travel, forced her to perfect the art of eating organically while on the road—a feat that can be quite challenging. Her solution was to travel with a cooler stocked with her own food, and looking for organic food sources in the various cities she traveled to regularly. Spurred on by friends and coworkers who wanted to learn more, she started blogging about her discoveries in 2011. The following story is a potent example of just how influential a blogger can be:

“One day, I saw this frozen yogurt company at the mall, and their sign said, ‘Organic tastes better.’ I thought, ‘Oh, organic frozen yogurt at the mall. This is fabulous!’ I went in and asked for the ingredients, and they couldn’t give them to me. I went through my same investigative research that I developed in high school and tried to find out exactly what was in the ingredients.

I found out that they were using a little bit of organic milk, but then they were adding a slew of other chemicals, including trans fat and Blue #1 and Blue #2 to color my favorite flavor that I thought was organic… I started writing about that. It went viral. This was a local so-called organic yogurt company [with] about 30 or 40 stores. The CEO wrote me a letter, and they took down the signs. I said right then, ‘Wait a minute, hold on. I have this power as a blogger. I have this power as an activist to change the food system. If I can get a yogurt company to take down a sign, what else can I do?’”

This was the beginning of a series called “Food Babe Investigates,” where she digs deeply into the products sold by major food companies, such as Starbucks, Subway, and Chipotle. The latter resulted in another “one-woman victory” for Vani. Chipotle did not have a list of ingredients on their menus or website, and the corporate headquarters refused to supply her with one when she contacted them directly2.

“I said, ‘But your label says ‘Food with Integrity.’ How am I going to know that it’s food with integrity if I can’t know the ingredients and I can’t read them for myself?’” she says.

Shortly after her article appeared on her blog, Chipotle called her. The chain recently made the decision to not only release the lists of ingredients, but also started labeling genetically engineered (GE) ingredients for full transparency. They’ve also swapped out some of the GE ingredients, such as soybean oil, replacing it with rice bran oil.

Food Babe Takes on Kraft

These successes inspired her to take on Kraft, one of the biggest food corporations in America. Kraft, like many other companies, uses toxic ingredients in the products made for the US market, while formulating the exact same products differently for other countries. It’s quite eye-opening to compare the labels of the same food sold in the US compared to the exact same food sold in, say, the UK.

“For example, McDonalds French fries here in the United States are made with genetically engineered ingredients, trans fat oils that clog the heart (people say you shouldn’t even have 40 calories of that a day and that it increases your risk of heart disease by 23 percent), and they have this ingredient that is the key ingredient in Silly Putty to prevent the foaming of the oil.

In the UK, they have the exact same French fry. It’s made with basic ingredients: sunflower oil, potatoes, salt (actually, they add the salt after they cook it, so you control the salt), and a little dextrose, which is sugar. Completely different ingredient list, the same exact product. The same goes for Betty Crocker cake mix,” she says.

Clearly, food companies have the capacity to simply switch over to selling the same formulations in the US as they do in other countries. But they consciously choose, depending on the market, what is the most economical and profitable approach to use. In this case, Americans get the synthetic additives because it’s cheaper to make and we don’t demand “the good stuff.” Many other countries also seem to have more health conscious regulators who actually have a modicum of concern for their citizens’ welfare.

“Exactly. I found out that they did this for Kraft macaroni and cheese,” she says. “They actually took out two petroleum-based dyes [from the European version] because they didn’t want to put a label on their product that says, “May cause adverse effects on activity and attention in children.

The European version of Kraft macaroni and cheese has paprika and beta-carotene, but the one here [in the US] has Yellow #5 and Yellow #6. Attention deficit disorder, autism, and all of these things linked to hyperactivity disorder have increased dramatically in the United States. Nobody’s really looking at the chemicals, and kids everywhere are eating this Mac & Cheese. It’s really not fair that Kraft figured out that this ingredient was causing harm—because they found out when the Europeans told them: “You’re going to have to put this label on there, or you’re going to have to reformulate it.” They reformulated it, so it’s not like we’re asking them to reinvent the wheel.”

Why Won’t Kraft Give American Kids a Safer Mac & Cheese?

To address the issue and raise awareness, Vani started a Change.org petition3 asking Kraft to remove artificial dyes from American Mac & Cheese. The petition went viral, collecting more than 200,000 signatures within the first couple of days. A month later, she hand-delivered about 270,000 signatures to Kraft’s Chicago headquarters. Yet to this day, Kraft has not responded to the petition that has gathered 336,000 signatures as of this writing, and the company has not in any way indicated that it’s considering changing their formulation to protect American children from the well-known harms of these ingredients… Instead, Kraft responded by stating that:

“We carefully follow the laws and regulations in the countries where our products are sold. So in the US, we only use colors that are approved and deemed safe for food use by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Again, Kraft clearly knows the ingredients in question have been linked to adverse effects on activity and attention in children because regulators in Europe have informed them of this. The moral thing would be to acknowledge the discrepancy and apply the precautionary principle. Just because the FDA says it’s okay doesn’t mean they have to use those ingredients!

Still, there is hope. By inspiring people to collectively act together, our voices can be heard, because we clearly outnumber the people running these food companies. The challenge is that we’re not effectively organized to let them know our views and understand the intention of those views. Yet this is the transformative power that we have, and Vani is an excellent example of how we can make a difference.

Americans are Denied Fundamental Right to Make Informed Food Choices

As I’ve stated on many occasions, over 90 percent of processed foods sold in the US contain genetically engineered (GE) corn and soy. These two ingredients are so pervasive they’re in foods you’d never expect, including baby food and condiments of every sort.

“They can actually mimic other real food ingredients using corn and soy,” Vani says. “The majority of the food that I’d been eating was either GE corn or soy. No wonder my entire body was acidic, not alkaline, and was completely overrun with the lack of nutrition, because I was getting my nutrition from one or two ingredients. I wasn’t getting my nutrition from kale, superfoods, and good sources of nutrition.”

And then I found out that not only is it in the 90 percent of the processed foods, it’s in 90 percent of the restaurants. It’s in almost all foods in America, but not in other countries. They require a label in other countries. Over 65 countries right now require some type of regulation [on GMOs]. And the United States does not. Our fundamental rights are being denied right now as Americans.”

Indeed, Monsanto has repeatedly demonstrated its cleverness, sophistication, and overwhelmingly successful lobbying efforts, to prevent GMO labeling in the US and to keep Americans in the dark about what we’re eating. Monsanto now controls virtually every single federal regulatory agency that has governance over their ability to do their business. They’ve effectively circumvented all the possibilities of regulating them through the federal process.

That’s why we’re so excited that last year’s ballot initiative in California was able to act as such a tremendous springboard to catapult Americans into greater awareness. We’re now seeing this explosion of states taking local measures to counteract the willful ineptitude and corruption within our federal agencies. So although it looked like we lost, and Monsanto undoubtedly uncorked quite a few bottles of champagne when Prop 37 failed, I believe we actually won the war despite losing that battle. Prop 37 catalyzed a tremendous amount of interest and activism that has since inspired a whole network of grassroots action.

“I think voting with your dollars is such a powerful movement,” Vani says. “I love seeing people starting to boycott Kraft in general, because they haven’t listened to over 336,000 people on our petition [at the time of this writing].”

How Vani Made Headlines at 2012 Democratic National Convention

Vani became a delegate for North Carolina at the 2012 Democratic National Convention on the platform of genetically engineered foods. She’d previously helped get President Obama elected in 2008, and as you may recall, in 2007 Obama promised to label genetically engineered foods should he get into the White House.

Vani was outraged to realize that not one single activist group was represented at the Democratic National Convention. So, just as Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture and staunch Monsanto proponent, was about to speak, she made a makeshift sign out of her program leaflet by writing on it with her lipstick. “LABEL GMO’S” and then she stood up, in the front row, holding her sign high as Vilsack took to the podium.

“Within 20 seconds cameras besieged me,” she says. “I mean, completely took the focus off of his speech and completely besieged me. I was on C-SPAN, and people were writing on my Facebook page. ‘Oh, my God! Food Babe’s protesting at the Democratic National Convention.’ It was crazy.

My whole delegation behind me who were elected from other districts and who hadn’t heard my spiel during my district run were all confused. They’re like, ‘What is she doing? She’s causing a ruckus here?…’ It wasn’t until all of that commotion was of over that I realized the impact of what I did that day: I educated my entire delegation… People started reading about this labeling issue because the reporters were capturing it and it was being broadcasted across the nation. …. I got a personal security guard for the rest of the convention dedicated to me. He gave me a really hard time for the rest of the convention and I was banished to the back.”

The theme of last year’s Democratic Convention was “Moving Forward.” But how can we move forward as a country when our farm policy and our food policy are so backward and American citizens are getting increasingly ill from the food we eat, the water we drink, and pollutants in our immediate environment?

“The bottom line is that food is medicine. If our food is sick, we’re going to be sick,” she says.

What Can YOU Do to Create Change?

Here are a few of Vani’s tips to start becoming a food activist, starting with leading by example. Truly, one of the most powerful ways to inspire others to change is to demonstrate your beliefs by walking the talk and being the healthiest, happiest, most empowered version of yourself that you can be. This way, when people ask how you lost all that weight, or how you got that fabulous complexion, or how you’re able to keep your energy levels up all day without two pots of coffee, you can simply share what you know rather than preach to those who might not be open to hearing what you have to say.

“It’s really important for all of us – the people who are reading the blogs, participating, and caring about what they put in their food – to tell their friends and family about it. Do it from a loving, giving standpoint, not from a critical or judgmental standpoint,” Vani says

Other tips for cleaning up your own diet and reaching out to others to share what you’ve learned include:
•Figure out healthy replacement foods. “I think that’s one of the questions I get on the blog the most: ‘Food Babe, you’re taking away all my food. If I can’t eat all this stuff, what can I eat instead?’” she says. Rest assured, while it may not be immediately obvious for people who have grown up relying on ready-made, pre-packaged foods and snacks, you can replace those foods with something equally satisfying that will support, rather than wreck, your health.
•Swap out your local grocer. Swapping out your local grocery store for a natural health food store is one way that can help you find better replacement foods, since many of health food stores like Whole Foods and Earth Fare do not allow certain ingredients to begin with. Also, start shopping at the farmer’s market, and eliminate processed foods from your diet.
•Shop online. “That has been one of the most fascinating things to me: if I can’t find an ingredient in my town, I can usually get in on the Internet,” she says
•When eating out, ask your server about ingredients, such as: “Are you using any corn or soybean oil in these products that you’re feeding me today? My salad dressing, does it have soybean or corn oil?” You can open the conversation up in a positive way by asking questions about the foods you’re about to order at a time when everyone’s looking at ingredients anyway.
•Throw organic dinner parties. “Having people come over to your house and trying organic food has really helped inspire my friends to realize that you can eat really healthy and have organic food that tastes great,” Vani says. It’s also a great way to, again, lead by example and show how to cook without processed foods and questionable ingredients.

‘Pay the Farmer, or Pay the Hospital’

Vani brings up a point that I too have shared on countless occasions, which is that you can either spend your money on healthy foods now, or you can spend it on medical bills down the road. According to Vani:

“There’s this great young individual Birke Baehr, a 14-year-old genius who wants to be a farmer. He’s spreading his message. He came up with that. He says, “You can either pay the farmer, or you can pay the hospital.

I think people, when they start to eliminate processed foods, eliminate GMOs, buy organic food, eliminate the toxins and the chemicals in their food, and start feeling well… the people around them are going to say, ‘I want some of that. I want to feel like that person. Wow, look at her. Look at all the energy. And look what she’s giving back to the world.’ There is no way I would be able to have become a consultant, live that lifestyle, and started a blog, had I not been taking care of myself 100 percent. There’s no way I would have been able to give back to society that way. I wouldn’t be able to do it.

I think feeling good should be everyone’s kind of number one priority in life. What’s the point of living life, traveling the world, and doing things that you want to do, if you can’t feel good?

As someone who has spent the greater portion of my adult life making my health a priority in my life, I cannot think of anything that could possibly compete with feeling good and aging well. What’s your take?

Keep Fighting for Labeling of Genetically Engineered Foods

While California Prop. 37 failed to pass last November by a very narrow margin, the fight for GMO labeling is far from over. The field-of-play has now moved to the state of Washington, where the people’s initiative 522, “The People’s Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act,” will require food sold in retail outlets to be labeled if it contains genetically engineered ingredients.

Remember, as with CA Prop. 37, they need support of people like YOU to succeed. Prop. 37 failed with a very narrow margin simply because we didn’t have the funds to counter the massive ad campaigns created by the No on 37 camp, led by Monsanto and other major food companies. Let’s not allow Monsanto and its allies to confuse and mislead the people of Washington and Vermont as they did in California. So please, I urge you to get involved and help in any way you can.
•No matter where you live in the United States, please donate money to these labeling efforts through the Organic Consumers Fund.
•Sign up to learn more about how you can get involved by visiting Yeson522.com!
•For timely updates on issues relating to these and other labeling initiatives, please join the Organic Consumers Association on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.
•Talk to organic producers and stores and ask them to actively support the Washington initiative.

Dr. Boyd Eaton talks about ancestral health.

I was introduced to the Paleo Diet concept over 25 years ago in 1985 when I read Dr. Boyd Eaton’s seminal New England Journal of Medicine paper Paleolithic Nutrition. This was among the first to suggest that our genome evolved according to the nutrition requirements of ancient man, and modern-day dietary changes have occurred much too rapidly for adequate genetic adaptation.

The result is that the Standard American Diet now in no way resembles that of our ancestors, and this mismatch may be triggering some of the common “diseases of civilization,” such as:

Heart disease

Type 2 diabetes

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Hypertension

Lung and colon cancers

Obesity

Diverticulosis

Dental caries

Ancestors’ Diet Was Far Richer in Antioxidants

There are many experts who believe that one of the main benefits of following a Paleo-type diet is related to the enormous amount of antioxidants that were consumed. Our ancestors’ diet was made up of 50 percent fruits and vegetables, compared with just 13 percent today — and fruits and veggies are, of course, excellent sources of antioxidants.

As the generations have gone by, modern man has largely replaced fruits and vegetables with cereal grains, to the detriment of our waistlines and our health. According to Dr. Eaton, our antioxidant intake would be 4.5 times higher if we ate as many fruits and vegetables as our ancestors, and nearly 7 times higher if we ate wild fruits.

Why Fruit Used to be Healthier

You probably know that one of the primary ways you can improve your health and weight, and reduce your risk of chronic disease, is to limit your intake of fructose, including that found in fruit.

As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day. But for most people it would also be wise to limit your fructose from fruit to 15 grams or less, as you’re virtually guaranteed to consume “hidden” sources of fructose in processed foods.

The truth is that even though fruit is obviously much healthier than soda, too much of it can be nearly as detrimental to your health as soda. It is a quantity issue and once you exceed a threshold limit when you have insulin resistance, you are asking for trouble.

This was much less of an issue in ancient times because they were consuming wild fruits. The wild fruits of our ancestors were smaller and resembled most closely what a blueberry is today. Modern cultivated fruits are much larger, which means they have a lot more sweet inside and less skin. The sweet “pulp” or “flesh” of the fruit is where much of the fructose is, whereas the skin holds the antioxidants.

Since wild fruits were much smaller than today’s fruits and thus had a much larger proportion of their volume as skin and seeds, they provided a healthy source of antioxidants with limited amounts of fructose.

Since most of the wild type fruits are not commercially available to us today we need to be very careful about making sure we have a full complement of antioxidants that replicate our ancestors’ dietary patterns. For most of us this will mean supplementation since we simply do not have access to these types of fruits today.

Why it’s So Important to Eat a Wide Variety of Antioxidants

Antioxidants are nature’s way of defending your cells against attack by these free radicals, thereby helping you resist aging and disease. If you don’t have adequate antioxidants to step in and combat free radicals, then oxidative stress tends to lead to accelerated tissue and organ damage. This is what makes antioxidants so crucial to your health.

It’s important to understand, though, that there are different types of antioxidants.

Antioxidants are often lumped together into one category in how they protect your cells from free radicals, but they are actually very different. For instance, certain antioxidants are water-soluble while others are fat-soluble. Why is this important? Because the interior of your cells and the fluid between them are composed mainly of water, whereas your cell membranes are made largely of fat.

Free radicals can strike both the interior of your cells and the cell membrane, so you need to be sure you’re consuming both water-soluble and fat-soluble antioxidants to protect you.

If you consume only water-soluble antioxidants, such as anthocyanins, polyphenols or resveratrol, your cell membranes will still be vulnerable to free radical damage. Likewise, if you consume only fat-soluble antioxidants, such as astaxanthin and ubiquinol, the interior of your cells are still vulnerable. Consume them both, and you’re giving your cells a far more comprehensive shield against free radical damage.

Consuming plenty of raw, locally harvested, organic vegetables is one of the best ways to get the antioxidants your body needs, in levels that most closely replicate the Paleo diet. Juicing is a convenient way to increase your intake, especially if you eat the pulp.

Additionally, reducing your sugar and fructose intake will decrease your antioxidant stress so that you will need less, and the ones that you have will work better and last longer. So limit sugars, including fructose, and processed foods, and increase your intake of veggies to optimize your antioxidant intake. You can also wisely select targeted nutrients to supplement your food choices.

By Dr. Mercola

This is an area that has absolutely captured my passion and attention. The last six months I have been devouring as much information as I can about high-performance agriculture using natural methods.

As you know, I have been one of the leaders in warning of the dangers of GMOs but I am now convinced that we need to offer the world a safe and superior alternative to GMOs. I am convinced that this is not only possible, but also less expensive both in the short and long term.

Part of the reason for this is that the nutritional content of the conventional food supply has been rapidly declining for the last 50 years as a natural consequence of increasingly poor soil conditions on modern farms, and it is getting worse.

But food has actually been getting gradually less nutritious for far longer than that, as a direct result of humans’ preferences for sweeter, starchier and less colorful fruits and vegetables.

As written in the New York Times:1

“Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.”

I believe that natural high-performance agriculture techniques such as optimizing soil microbiology through composting, and mineral balancing and the use of sea solids in the soil are exciting alternatives, and I plan on updating you soon on this project.

Sweeter Plants Were More Appealing to Ancient Farmers…

Ancient wild plants provided an astounding level of phytonutrients that are largely absent from our modern cultivated fruits and veggies. For instance, wild dandelions contain seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, and purple potatoes native to Peru contain 28 times more anthocyanins than commonly consumed russet potatoes.2

In general, you can identify the healthiest superfoods simply by looks and taste: the more bitter and the more colorful a natural food is, the more potent antioxidants and other phytochemicals it’s likely to contain.

But disease-fighting bitter or astringent foods, such as arugula, mustard greens and Brussels sprouts, are often avoided by consumers today,3 and they were similarly avoided by our ancient ancestors as access to sweeter foods increased. So, too, was the case with colorful foods, which have slowly fallen out of favor in many cases.

The evolution of corn provides one of the most telling examples. The richly colored “Indian corn” now mostly used for holiday decorating was once widely consumed, and contained far more disease-fighting antioxidants and less sugar than today’s popular pale yellow sweet corn.

The New York Times explains it well:

“Throughout the ages, our farming ancestors have chosen the least bitter plants to grow in their gardens. It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste. Second, early farmers favored plants that were relatively low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil.

These energy-dense plants were pleasurable to eat and provided the calories needed to fuel a strenuous lifestyle. The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.”

Even Fruits Are Sweeter and Less Nutritious Than They Used to Be

The wild fruits consumed by our ancestors were smaller and resembled most closely what a blueberry is today. Modern cultivated fruits are much larger, which means they have a lot more sweet pulp inside and less skin. The sweet “pulp” or “flesh” of the fruit is where most of the fructose is, whereas the skin holds the antioxidants.

Since wild fruits were much smaller than today’s fruits and thus had a much larger proportion of their volume as skin and seeds, they provided a healthy source of powerful antioxidants with limited amounts of fructose. According to Dr. Boyd Eaton, our antioxidant intake would be nearly seven times higher simply if we ate wild fruits…

Stunning Corn Comparison: Genetically Modified (GM) Vs. Non-GM

Genetic modification is also making our modern food less nutritious than it used to be, according to a report given to MomsAcrossAmerica4 by an employee of De Dell Seed Company (Canada’s only non-GMO corn seed company). It offers a stunning picture of the nutritional differences between genetically modified (GM) and non-GM corn. Clearly, the former is NOT equivalent to the latter, which is the very premise by which genetically modified crops were approved in the first place. Here’s a small sampling of the nutritional differences found in this 2012 nutritional analysis:
•Calcium: GMO corn = 14 ppm / Non-GMO corn = 6,130 ppm (437 times more)
•Magnesium: GMO corn = 2 ppm / Non-GMO corn = 113 ppm (56 times more)
•Manganese: GMO corn = 2 ppm / Non-GMO corn = 14 ppm (7 times more)

GMO corn was also found to contain 13 ppm of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup Ready herbicide) compared to zero in non-GMO corn, along with extremely high levels of formaldehyde, which is a well-known carcinogenic byproduct of glyphosate metabolism. Perhaps it’s no wonder that animals, when given a choice, avoid genetically modified food. Yet, in the US upwards of 85 percent of all corn grown is now genetically modified.

There is no question that one wants to start with the highest quality seed and GMO seeds are vastly inferior to most ancient seeds. However, I believe epigenetic expression is every bit as valid in plants as it is in humans and if we optimize the plant’s nutrients through soil microbiology, we can improve the nutrient density of even GMO seeds to near optimal levels. And if these techniques are used for seeds with good genes you can far exceed those levels.

USDA Is Developing New Plants Without Regard to Nutritional Content

Unfortunately, the USDA is oblivious to this reality. Author Jo Robinson writes in the New York Times:5

“I’ve interviewed U.S.D.A. plant breeders who have spent a decade or more developing a new variety of pear or carrot without once measuring its nutritional content. We can’t increase the health benefits of our produce if we don’t know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health.”

Antioxidants are nature’s way of defending your cells against attack by these free radicals, thereby helping you resist aging and disease. If you don’t have adequate antioxidants to step in and neutralize free radicals, then oxidative stress tends to lead to accelerated tissue and organ damage. This is what makes antioxidants so crucial to your health.

Your diet is one of the key ways to make sure you’re getting the antioxidants, as well as the other critical vitamins and minerals, your body needs to function optimally. Yet, in developing new plant varieties, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is far more focused on creating disease-resistant plants than they are on enhancing, or even protecting, their nutritional content.

Is There a Secret to Finding More Nutritious Food?

As I said initially, I firmly believe the solution for more nutritious food is to optimize the microbiology of the soil so the microbes can provide the optimal nutrients for the plant and maximize their genetic expression. Composting, vortexed compost tea and mineral replacements are far superior to commercial fertilizers and also improve rather than degrade the quality of the soil. Ideally, you can grow these yourself or find someone locally that can do it for you. I will be going into far greater detail in future articles.

In the meantime, consuming plenty of raw, locally harvested, organic vegetables is one of the best ways to get the key nutrients your body needs, in levels that most closely replicate those found in the wild foods of our ancestors. For starters, this will ensure that you’re avoiding all GM produce, which now appears to not only be far less nutritious than non-GM food but also less contaminated with agrichemicals and their toxic byproducts. Beyond this, there are several additional measures you can take to make sure you’re getting the most nutritious food available:
•Choose brightly colored foods: Produce in shades of blue, red, purple and dark green are among the most antioxidant-rich foods available.
•Eat more bitter foods: Many of the most potent, disease-fighting compounds in food (phenols and polyphenols, flavonoids, isoflavones, terpenes, and glucosinolates) are bitter, acrid or astringent in flavor. Expanding your diet to include these bitter-tasting foods is one of the healthiest moves you can make. Examples include grapefruit, arugula, collard greens, parsley, dandelion leaves, radicchio, cranberries, endive and pomegranates.
•Indulge in herbs and spices: Many herbs and spices remain largely unchanged from ancient times. Along with containing some of the highest antioxidant levels of all foods, herbs and spices are also very dense in other nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, and they also have medicinal properties. As a general rule, you really can’t go wrong when using herbs and spices and I recommend allowing your taste buds to dictate your choices when cooking. However, you can also choose spices based on their medicinal benefits.
•Grow your own foods from heirloom seeds, including sprouts: This is one of the best ways to access nutrient-dense food, especially if you use heirloom seeds that have been carefully cultivated to produce the best plants possible. You can plant an organic veggie garden even in small spaces, and sprouts, which are also among the most nutrient-dense foods available, can also be grown easily at home.
•Forage for wild, edible plants: Some of the “weeds” in your backyard or local environment are incredibly nutritious and very close to the wild plants consumed by our ancestors. Dandelion, stinging nettle, prickly lettuce, chickweed, sow thistle, red clover, burdock, cattails, Japanese knotweed, and sheep sorrel are examples of wild nutrient-rich foods. While you should only consume plants you are entirely sure are not poisonous, learning to gather safe, wild edible plants is quite simple.

One of the important strategies for healthy bones is to eat the right kind of foods. A diet full of processed foods will produce biochemical and metabolic conditions in your body that will decrease your bone density, so avoiding processed foods is definitely the first step in the right direction.

Eating high-quality, organic, biodynamic, locally-grown food will naturally increase your bone density and decrease your risk of developing osteoporosis. Along with your foods, your omega-3 fat content also has a major role in building healthy bone. I recommend krill oil, as I believe it’s a superior source of omega-3s.

Other nutrients, including calcium, vitamin D and K2, and magnesium, are also critical for strong bones—as is exercise, especially weight-bearing exercises.

Recent research presented at The Endocrine Society’s 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco suggests that the timing of calcium and vitamin D supplementation may actually influence how your bones adapt to exercise, and help decrease exercise-induced calcium loss.

As reported by Medical News Today:1

“The timing of calcium supplementation, and not just the amount of supplementation, may be an important factor in how your skeleton adapts to exercise training… Previous research has shown that a year of intense training is associated with substantial decreases in bone mineral density…

Experts believe that this kind of exercise-induced bone loss could be related to the loss of calcium during exercise. As blood calcium levels drop, the parathyroid gland produces excess parathyroid hormone, which can mobilize calcium from your skeleton.”

How Bone Adapts to Exercise May Be Affected by Timing of Supplementation

The featured research study indicated that taking calcium prior to hitting the gym may help keep your blood levels of calcium more stable, compared to taking calcium after your workout. However, the study did not assess the long-term effects this might have on your bone density, and this, of course, is of utmost importance for anyone interested in building healthy bones.

According to the featured article:

“[E]xercise-induced decrease in blood calcium occurred whether calcium supplements were taken before or after exercising. Pre-exercise supplementation, however, resulted in less of a decrease.

Although not statistically significant, parathyroid hormone levels increased slightly less among cyclists who took calcium before exercising… The timing of calcium supplementation did not cause a difference in blood levels of a compound that is a biological indicator of bone loss. Both the before- and after-exercise groups exhibited 50 percent increases in the level of this compound, called CTX…”

The Critical Role of Vitamin K2 for Bone Health

There’s plenty of controversy on the issue of using calcium supplementation to ensure strong healthy bones. It’s important to realize that calcium works synergistically with vitamins D and K2, so taking calcium supplements alone may actually end up doing more harm than good. Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue has authored a comprehensive book on this topic titled: Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little Known Vitamin Could Save Your Life.

Dr. Robert Thompson M.D. also addressed this important issue in his book, The Calcium Lie. One of the tenets of his book is that bone is composed of at least a dozen minerals, and if you focus exclusively on calcium supplementation you are likely going to worsen your bone density.

Additionally you will actually increase your risk of osteoporosis. Interestingly, he proposes that one of the best practical alternatives is the use of natural, unprocessed salts, such as Himalayan salt, as they are one of the best sources of a wide variety of trace minerals.

So, while the featured research is interesting, I believe it falls far short in terms of making a health recommendation that will result in improved bone health. And while the researchers argue that timing, and not just dosage may play a significant role in bone adaptation to exercise, I would add that nutrient ratios and combinations may be even more important…

The researchers did combine calcium with vitamin D, which is important, but they did not address vitamin K2, which is critical. I say critical because the biological role of vitamin K2 is to help move calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth. It also helps remove calcium from areas where it shouldn’t be, such as in your arteries and soft tissues.

Furthermore, if you take supplemental vitamin D, you also need to increase your intake of vitamin K2, because when you take vitamin D, your body creates more vitamin K2-dependent proteins—the proteins that help move the calcium around in your body. But you need vitamin K2 to activate those proteins. If they’re not activated, the calcium in your body will not be properly distributed and can lead to weaker bones and hardened arteries. In fact, vitamin K2 deficiency is actually what produces the symptoms of vitamin D toxicity, which includes inappropriate calcification that can lead to hardening of your arteries.

In a nutshell, it’s important to maintain the proper balance between all three of these nutrients: calcium, vitamin D and K2, as well as magnesium. Lack of balance between these four nutrients is why calcium supplements have become associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke…

The optimal amounts of vitamin K2 are still under investigation, but it seems likely that 180 to 200 micrograms of vitamin K2 daily should be enough to activate your body’s K2-dependent proteins to shuttle the calcium to and from the appropriate areas. Most Americans get nowhere near this amount though. In fact, an estimated 80 percent of Americans do not get enough vitamin K2 in their diet to activate their K2 proteins, which is similar to the deficiency rate of vitamin D.

How Can You Tell if You’re Lacking in Vitamin K2?

There is no test for vitamin K2 deficiency, but you can get an idea of whether or not you may be lacking in this critical nutrient simply by assessing your diet and lifestyle. If you have osteoporosis, heart disease or diabetes, then you’re likely deficient in vitamin K2 as these conditions are all associated with K2 deficiency. If you do not have any of those health conditions, but do NOT regularly eat high amounts of the following foods, then your likelihood of being vitamin K2 deficient is still very high:
•Grass-fed organic animal products (i.e. eggs, butter, dairy)
•Certain fermented foods such as natto, or vegetables fermented using a starter culture of vitamin K2-producing bacteria. Please note that most fermented vegetables are not really high in vitamin K2 and come in at about 50 mcg per serving. However, if specific starter cultures are used they can have ten times as much, or 500 mcg per serving.
•Goose liver pâté
•Certain cheeses such as Brie and Gouda (these two are particularly high in K2, containing about 75 mcg per ounce). While cheese from grass-fed milk would be an added boon, it’s not necessary for the cheese to be grass-fed because the K2 is not derived from the milk itself; it’s derived from the bacteria in the cheese. So what’s important is how the cheese was made.

Fermented vegetables, which supply beneficial bacteria to your gut, can also be a great source of vitamin K if you ferment your own using the proper starter culture. We recently had samples of high-quality fermented organic vegetables made with our specific starter culture tested, and were shocked to discover that not only does a typical serving of about two to three ounces contain about 10 trillion beneficial bacteria, but it also contained 500 mcg of vitamin K2.

Note that not every strain of bacteria makes K2. For example, most yoghurt has almost no vitamin K2. Certain types of cheeses are very high in K2, and others are not. It really depends on the specific bacteria. You can’t assume that any fermented food will be high in K2, but some fermented foods are very high in K2, such as natto. Others, such as miso and tempeh, are not.

Mind Your Sodium-Potassium Levels as Well

Two additional nutrients that play an important role are sodium and potassium—you want the optimal ratio between these two in order to maintain your bone mass. If you eat a diet loaded with processed foods, there’s a good chance your potassium to sodium ratio is far from optimal, which is typically done by consuming a diet of processed foods, which are notoriously low in potassium while high in sodium.

An imbalanced sodium to potassium ratio can contribute to a number of diseases, including osteoporosis. To ensure you get these two important nutrients in more appropriate ratios, simply ditch processed foods, which are very high in processed salt and low in potassium and other essential nutrients. Instead, eat a diet of whole, unprocessed foods, ideally organically grown to ensure optimal nutrient content. This type of diet will naturally provide much larger amounts of potassium in relation to sodium, which is optimal for your bone health, and your overall health. If you find it difficult to eat the recommended amount of vegetables, give vegetable juicing a try.

Exercise Also Builds Strong Bones

The other component you can’t ignore if you want strong, healthy bones is weight bearing exercises like strength training. Bone-building is a dynamic process, so you want to make sure you exert enough force on your bones to stimulate the osteoblasts to build new bone. Further, bone is living tissue that requires regular physical activity in order to renew and rebuild itself, so you should make exercise a lifelong commitment.

Peak bone mass is achieved in adulthood and then begins a slow decline, but exercise can help you to maintain healthy bone mass as you get older, without having to resort to dangerous bisphosphonate drugs.

Weight-bearing exercise is actually one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis, because as you put more tension on your muscles it puts more pressure on your bones, which then respond by continuously creating fresh, new bone. In addition, as you build more muscle, and make the muscle that you already have stronger, you also put more constant pressure on your bones. A good weight-bearing exercise to incorporate into your routine (depending on your current level of fitness, of course) is a walking lunge, as it helps build bone density in your hips, even without any additional weights.

Ideally, though, your fitness program should be comprehensive, providing the necessary weight-bearing activities for bone health while also improving your cardiovascular fitness and fat-burning capabilities with high-intensity exercises. For a more complete, in-depth explanation of my Peak Fitness regimen, please review my previous article, The Major Exercise Mistake I Made for Over 30 Years. Implementing Peak Fitness — with its array of weight-bearing exercises for bone health and Peak Exercises for disease prevention, fat loss and more — may be one of the best lifestyle changes you could ever make.

The Power Plate—A Valuable Exercise Tool for Prevention and Treatment of Brittle Bones

Acceleration Training, a.k.a. Whole Body Vibrational Training (WBVT) using a Power Plate has also been shown to be a safe, natural way to ward off osteoporosis, and it’s gentle enough even for the disabled and elderly. For example, in one six-month long study, WBVT was found to produce a significant increase in hip area bone density in postmenopausal women, while conventional training was only able to slow the rate of deterioration.2 A total of 90 women, aged 58 to 70 years old, were divided into three groups:
1.The first group did up to 30 minutes of WBVT three times a week. Static and dynamic exercises for the upper leg and hip area included squats and lunges.
2.The second group did 60 minutes of conventional weight training three times per week.
3.The control group did not exercise at all.

The researchers concluded that Acceleration Training might be a solution for reversing bone loss and eliminating osteoporosis, stating that:

“The whole body vibration group got positive results: strength increased as much as 16 percent in upper leg muscles, while bone density at the hip increased by 1.5 percent. In addition, the whole body vibration group showed an improvement in postural control and balance, increased muscle strength and lean mass while losing body fat and fat mass. The conventionally trained subjects were able to slow the rate of bone loss, which is consistent with previous published studies on weight training and bone loss. The control group subjects continued to lose bone mineral density at the average rate.”

NASA has also tested vibration platforms to help prevent the bone loss that occurs during space travel. According to a 2001 article in NASA Science:3

“…NASA-funded scientists suggest that astronauts might prevent bone loss by standing on a lightly vibrating plate for 10 to 20 minutes each day… The same therapy, they say, might eventually be used to treat some of the millions of people who suffer from bone loss, called osteoporosis here on Earth.

…Although the vibrations are subtle they have had a profound effect on bone loss in laboratory animals such as turkeys, sheep, and rats. In one study (published in the October 2001 issue of The FASEB Journal), only 10 minutes per day of vibration therapy promoted near-normal rates of bone formation in rats that were prevented from bearing weight on their hind limbs during the rest of the day.”

Build Strong, Healthy Bones the Natural Way

To recap, your bones are actually composed of several different minerals, and if you focus on calcium alone, you will likely weaken your bones and increase your risk of osteoporosis as Dr. Robert Thompson explains in his book, The Calcium Lie. Remember, calcium, vitamins D and K2, and magnesium work synergistically together to promote strong, healthy bones, and your sodium to potassium ratio also play an important role in maintaining your bone mass. Ideally, you’d get all or most of these nutrients from your diet (with the exception of vitamin D). This includes:
•Plant-derived calcium: raw milk from pasture-raised cows (who eat the plants), leafy green vegetables, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, and sesame seeds
•Magnesium: raw organic cacao and supplemental magnesium threonate if need be
•Vitamin K2: Grass-fed organic animal products (i.e. eggs, butter, dairy), certain fermented foods such as natto, or vegetables fermented using a starter culture of vitamin K2-producing bacteria. Goose liver pâté, and certain cheeses such as Brie and Gouda
•Trace minerals: Himalayan Crystal Salt, which contains all 84 elements found in your body, or other natural, unprocessed salt (NOT regular table salt!)
•Vitamin D: Ideally from appropriate sun exposure (or a safe tanning bed), as it’s virtually impossible to get sufficient amounts from food. As a last resort, you could use a supplement, but if you do, you may also need to supplement with vitamin K2 to maintain ideal ratios

The bottom line?

One of the best ways to achieve healthy bones is a diet rich in fresh, raw whole foods that maximizes natural minerals so that your body has the raw materials it needs to do what it was designed to do. In addition, you need healthy sun exposure along with regular, weight-bearing exercise.

Monsanto’s efforts to usher genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) into the European Union (EU) have been largely stagnant in recent years, so the multinational corporation and others in the industry are taking a new and more evil approach to gain more market control. According to a recent announcement put forth by the human rights advocacy group No Patents on Seeds!, the European Patent Office (EPO) is now granting biotechnology companies patents on all-natural crops such as broccoli, which was recently handed over as private property to Monsanto.

Exploiting an egregious loophole in European patent law, Monsanto and others have been feverishly filing for patents on all sorts of natural crops, presumably in response to widespread resistance by members of the European public to its GMO offerings. Most recently, EPO granted Monsanto a patent on conventionally-bred broccoli, which includes not only broccoli seeds but also the “severed broccoli head” and the “plurality of broccoli plants … grown in a field of broccoli” – in other words, broccoli in all of its natural forms.

Though vehemently opposed by the European Parliament, EPO’s decision to legitimize private ownership of nature – in this case broccoli – is apparently becoming the norm throughout Europe. Since the biotechnology industry has failed at replacing nature with its own “Frankencrops” throughout Europe, it has set its sights on seizing ownership of nature itself by claiming patents on it. And unless the people step up to forcibly stop this, using whatever means necessary, then these crimes against humanity will only continue.

“We are calling for broad support of our opposition against the patent on ‘severed broccoli’,” said Christoph Then from the group No Patents on Seeds! recently. No Patents on Seeds! has formed a petition in opposition to patents on natural crops that recently topped two million signatures, and the group is joined by a cohort of other environmental advocacy and health freedom groups throughout Europe in its efforts. “We intend to send a clear signal that we will not let our food be monopolized.”

You can access this petition here:
http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org

Monsanto also pushing for ownership of life in America as well
No Patents on Seeds! is joined by Bionext (Netherlands), The Berne Declaration (Switzerland), GeneWatch (UK), Greenpeace (Germany), Misereor (Germany), Development Fund (Norway), No Patents on Life (Germany), Rete Semi Rurali (Italy), Reseau Semences Paysannes (France), and Swissaid (Switzerland) in calling on European politicians to assume control over EPO for the purpose of amending the patent loophole.

“All the organizations involved are also making demands on European politicians,” explains No Patents on Seeds!. “They are urging them to take over control of the EPO in order to change the interpretation of the current patent law through the Administrative Council of the EPO, which is the assembly of the Member States.”

The group Avaaz.org has also created its own petition to stop Monsanto from patenting natural organisms in Europe, which you can sign here:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/monsanto_vs_mother_earth_twb/?tysEsab

Back in the U.S., Monsanto is busy pushing for similar patents on the elements of life. As reported by the Los Angeles Times (LAT), Monsanto will soon try to convince the Supreme Court to allow it to patent future generations of seeds that naturally reproduce from GM strains. If the company gets its way, a new precedent will be set in the U.S. for corporations to assume patent control over natural life forms.

“The case is a remarkable reflection on recent fundamental changes in farming. In the 200-plus years since the founding of this country, and for millenniums before that, seeds have been part of the public domain – available for farmers to exchange, save, modify through plant breeding and replant,” explains the NYT. “But today this history of seeds is seemingly forgotten in light of a patent system that, since the mid-1980s, has allowed corporations to own products of life.”

Sources for this article include:

http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org

http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org

http://articles.latimes.com

All of those antiquated government talking points about the alleged dangers of drinking raw milk have once again been debunked, this time by a series of scientific risk assessments recently published in the Journal of Food Protection. A press release published in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) explains that, based on the results of three new quantitative microbial risk assessments (QMRAs), as well as the review of dozens of other scholarly papers on the subject, raw milk is very clearly a low-risk food that is generally safe for everyone, including pregnant women and young children.

Presented at a recent meeting of the Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, the groundbreaking results of these QMRAs were offered up as some of the latest scientific evidence proving the safety of fresh milk during a presentation entitled Unpasteurized milk: myths and evidence. The main reviewer, Nadine Ijaz, M.S.c, divulged during this presentation how raw milk has been unfairly and wrongly categorized as a high-risk food since the 1930s when filthy, urban distillery dairies were churning out toxic “swill” milk that had to be pasteurized because it was causing people to become ill.

Distillery dairies were eventually decommissioned and replaced by real farm dairies, which eliminated virtually all the risks associated with raw milk, but the “science” behind milk pasteurization became crystallized into the American psyche thanks to tremendous pressures by many state departments of agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA, as many NaturalNews readers are well aware, still clings to the outmoded theory that all milk has to be pasteurized in order to be considered safe.

Leafy green vegetables more dangerous than raw milk, data shows
But when it is produced safely in accordance with accepted sanitary standards, raw milk is not at all the villain that the government continually claims it is. In fact, raw milk is among the safest foods a person can eat, ranking higher than other common foods like processed lunch meat, factory-produced chicken eggs, and even conventional vegetables. It may come as a shock, but the latest research shows that leafy green vegetables actually carry with them a higher food safety risk than raw milk.

“While it is clear that there remains some appreciable risk of food-borne illness from raw milk consumption, public health bodies should now update their policies and informational materials to reflect the most high-quality evidence, which characterizes this risk as low,” said Ijaz during the presentation. “Raw milk producers should continue to use rigorous managements practices to minimize any possible remaining risk.”

Naturally-occurring probiotic bacteria in raw milk protects it from deadly pathogens
Included within the peer-reviewed data sets that were used for the analyses was evidence showing that the pathogenic risk of raw milk is also particularly low. Contrary to popular belief, pathogens like Campylobacter, Shiga-toxin inducing E. coli, Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus are not very common in raw milk, and this is due to the fact that raw milk contains its own beneficial, probiotic pathogens that generally prevent them from forming.

“The scientific papers cited at the BC Centre for Disease Control presentation demonstrated a low risk of illness from unpasteurized milk consumption for each of the pathogens,” explains a press release about the finding. “This low risk profile applied to healthy adults as well as members of immunologically-susceptible groups: Pregnant women, children and the elderly.”

To learn more about the health benefits of raw milk, and where to find some in your area, visit:

Home

Also, be sure to check out the comprehensive blog The Complete Patient, which contains all sorts of pertinent information about raw milk, health freedom, and the political structures that interfere with humanity’s access to clean food:
http://thecompletepatient.com/

Sources for this article include:

Home

http://thebovine.wordpress.com

http://thecompletepatient.com

Most of us know that GMOs are required to be labeled or even completely banned in some other nations. Some nations have even outlawed certain pesticides and insecticides from agricultural use that are heavily promoted in the United States.

Those items are not surprising for most of us. But you will be surprised at how many toxic food processing agents and additives used in our foods are completely banned in many other nations.

Hopefully, this list will encourage you to avoid processed foods even more. Many of these items are even in processed foods sold from health foods.

Some sneaky toxic items allowed on USA grocery shelves
Synthetic food colorings are banned in the UK, Austria, France, Finland, and Norway. Just about all American candies and most cereals, especially cereals marketed to children, contain food colorings. They’re also used in sports drinks and packaged macaroni and cheese products, cakes, and pastries.

These dyes are petroleum based. They have been linked to hyperactivity and ADD among young children. Despite efforts to ban them in the USA, the FDA has decided to let them continue, even overruling their own scientists.

There are some naturally based dyes that are made toxic from the way they’re processed, and there are some wholesome natural dyes also. Find out more here (http://www.naturalnews.com/033820_food_coloring_chemicals.html).

Brominated vegetable oil (BVO) is so bad it’s banned in 100 countries. It’s used to keep synthetic dies from separating from sports drinks and some popular sodas. Without it, that lovely homogenized color would vanish as the dyes separate and collect at the bottom.

Bromine is a fire retardant, considered an environmental toxin even when it’s used in clothing, furniture, or carpeting (http://www.naturalnews.com/038869_Gatorade_BVO_flame_retardants.html).

Potassium bromate is derived from the same source as BVO. It’s banned in Canada, Europe, and China. Brominated or bromated flour is used to expedite commercial baking and make more stuff faster of course. Brominated flour has been linked to neurological disorders, kidney problems, and cancer.

Dairy hormones rBGH and rBST are GMO-derived synthetic growth hormones, first introduced by the biotech corporate monster Monsanto as recombinant bovine growth hormone and now as recombinant bovine somatrophin.

Monsanto owns the FDA so of course it was approved and even enforced here in the USA (http://www.naturalnews.com/023929_rBGH_health_Monsanto.html).

This growth hormone forces milking cows to produce more milk faster while causing gross udder infections. It’s also bad for humans, having been linked to various cancers while passing cow puss and more antibiotics through dairy products.

These synthetic growth hormones for dairy cows have been banned in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and 27 European countries.

Olestra or olean is a substitute cooking oil created by Proctor and Gamble and used for fat free processed fried foods, including chips of several types. It blocks mineral and vitamin absorption and can cause cramps and leaky bowels. So far it’s banned in the UK and Canada.

Azodicarbonamide is used to bleach flour and foamed plastic. It’s ubiquitous in white flour baked breads, cakes, and pastries. White flour in France and other nations are bleached from the sun. Most EU countries, the UK, and Australia have banned this bleaching agent. It has been linked to asthma and other health issues.

Arsenic is used in chicken feed to help make chicken meat look pink and fresh. Its use in chicken feed is banned by the European Union because some arsenic does wind up in meat sold from poultry fed arsenic (http://www.naturalnews.com/032659_arsenic_chicken.html).

Do you feel comforted when you hear or see the phrase FDA approved or USDA sanctioned? Don’t. They’re not here for you. These federal agencies are infiltrated and corrupted by large corporate interests, and corrupt politicians keep enabling them.

They protect Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Pharma, not us.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.buzzfeed.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_somatotropin