Food Inc.

The movie is out now and is playing at many movie theaters nationally. You can most likely find it at a theater that usually carries independent and foreign films but some mainstream theaters are showing it too. This movie is a must see. If you read my BLOG and are getting something out of the posts I write, then go see this movie. It puts visuals to the things I have been talking about. You will see with your own eyes what a CAFO looks like. How the animals are treated, what they are fed, injected with and how short their pathetic lives are. You will see how strong big Agra's lobby is in Washington and how they are in bed with the FDA (who is supposedly out to protect us - right). Big Agra (Cargill and a couple of others) own the CAFO's, the corn elevators and the corn processing plants. They have even gotten into the fake sugar business (Truvia) as if they didn't have their hands in enough already. Cargill is one of the largest (if not the largest) privately held companies in the world. It wields a lot of power in this country, more than we are privy to. You will be witness to the extinction of the small farm and the proliferation of monoculture and corn/soy crops that wind up as the main ingredients in all processed foods. Food Inc. is an eye opener and will hopefully change the way we think about our diets. If enough people see this movie and actually do something about the way we eat, the horrible farming/herding/CAFO practices may become obsolete. Of course this will take time but we as the main consumers have the power. The power truly rests with us. If we choose not to eat this food, there will be less demand for it and eventually less supply. Be an activist (as a friend put it so nicely) and go see the movie. Then please share your comments about it on my BLOG. I would appreciate it!

Here is the link to the trailer - enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eKYyD14d_0

Fake Sugar = Poison

The diet craze has been upon us for decades now. One of the most ubiquitous signs of dieting has been no calorie sugar. We use it in our coffee, tea, and to sweeten cereals. More recently we have been able to bake with it as a substitute for refined sugar and even more plentiful are all the diet sodas out there that contain it. We know these sugars as Sweet n' Low, Equal and Splenda but their real names are aspertame, saccharine and sucralose. They have all been proven to cause cancer in high doses but why should we care? Well, over a lifetime, how much of these poisons do you think a regular user would consume? I am sure in combination with all the other synthetic chemicals we ingest, it would be enough to cause cancer or some other kind of disease. There is a reason why they say not to have these "fake" sugars while pregnant. So why would you want to consume them when you aren't? The scariest part of this is that these "fake" sugars are made by big pharma and are positioned as a healthy alternative to sugar (especially for diabetics) in the case of Splenda. Big Pharma has a huge lobby in Washington and a choke hold on the FDA. If they don't want a natural sugar substitute to make it on the shelves of our stores, it won't. They don't want the competition from a healthy option. I have had first hand experience with this. After I read The Hundred Year Lie, I was introduced to Stevia. This is a natural sweetener over 100 times sweeter than refined sugar with no calories. It is extracted from the Stevia plant and is 100% natural. One day while shopping in Whole Foods, I saw the Stevia extract on a tiny shelf way up high. I approached a sales associate so that she could help me reach it and also tell me more about it. She promptly told me that the FDA prohibits her from discussing anything about the product but I should feel free to buy it if I chose to. I was perplexed. Was the FDA really censoring people about the health benefits of Stevia? What has our government come to? Are they really just puppets for big companies that are trying to poison us? Its truly frightening.

Well, as time went on and the big "three" poisons continued to be used in abundant supply by the general public, a new brand emerged on the market. Truvia. This is supposed to be the answer to Stevia. Why stick with the natural form when you can add synthtic chemicals and kill people? All the commercials for Truvia say its "born" from the stevia plant but if you look closely, you will see that its manufactured by Cargill. Cargill is the company that I spoke about in my earlier posts. They own all the corn elevators, the CAFO's and processed corn that goes into our foods and makes us sick. Cargill is not looking out for our best interests. I highly doubt that Truvia is as good and healthy as the actual Stevia extract. I would caution anyone believing this as well.

If you want to avoid the poisons that are ALL OVER the marketplace, just use unrefined sugar. Or more commonly known as raw sugar. This sugar comes right from the cane and has not been stripped of its natural properties. It takes longer to raise your blood sugar (lower glycemic index) and tastes just as good. Yes, it has calories, but dieting shouldn't have to be posionous. Healthy food choices and exercise can help out instead of food substitutes that are just a boat load of synthtic chemicals proven to cause cancer.

My house has officially banned all diet sodas. I never drank them in the first place, but my husband did. We now drink water or organic juice. Raw sugar fills up my canisters and I cook with it and sweeten my coffee with it. It tastes absolutely great. Plus, I feel better knowing I am not killing myself with chemicals that big pharma doesn't mind marketing to the public. To them, its easy profit!!

Another great blog post about Truvia can be found at www.marksdailyapple.com/the-truth-on-truvia/ its worth checking out!

We Are What We Eat = CORN

After I finished reading The Hundred Year Lie, I moved on to the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I encouraged many of my friends to read this amazing book but most did not want to know the truth. I found this very discouraging but realized that maybe they just needed a "taste" of what the book was trying to explain. So this is what I intend to do here. I can not re-write the book but I can break it down into the basics to make it more understandable and easier to digest (no pun intended :)

Corn is cheap. Corn is a commodity. It wasn't always this way either. Before the Nixon administration, US farms were paid not to produce certain crops in order to keep prices stable on the domestic and international markets. But in came Earl Butz (Secy of Agriculture under the Nixon Administration) in the 1970's and everything changed forever. He believed in the consumption model. More is better. So he instituted a policy of govt. subsidies that encouraged farmers to produce as much corn as they possibly could and the government would pay for what they couldn't sell. In search of "unlimited" profits, these farms began to steer away from the diversity model of sustainable farming and chose to become large monoculture farms just growing corn. The more corn they grew, the more money they would make "in theory". New hybrid seeds were developed that increase yields. Fertilizer (made with fossil fuel) took the place of the sun to speed up the harvest and growing season. Yields were being achieved that had never been seen before. However, these monoculture farms were also unknowingly destroying the fertility of the land. Even more directly, as this commodity corn flooded the market, the price began to fall. Now there was a huge corn surplus and no one to buy the corn. That didn't last for long. With a cheap ingredient on the market, market forces took hold and news ways of using this cheap ingredient emerged. Corn became the main ingredient in animal feed and the rise of the CAFO (conentrated Animal Feeding Operation) came to be. I won't go into details of the horrible conditions on the CAFO but lets just say that cows, pigs and chickens were not really meant to consume all this corn. To begin with, the corn isn't even edible as it is. Its commodity corn which needs to be processed in order to be digested. But cows still can't properly digest it. They have rumens which are meant to digest grass. The corn just fattens them up (marbleing) and gets them sick (the need for antibiotics and vaccines). This is the majority of the meat that we consume in our diets today. Its the meat in restaurants and the meat in your grocery store. The bigger, the better, the more marbeling, the choicer the cut. Its insane but that is how the market was directed. We all believed it was good for us.

The corn that wasn't going to CAFO's went to the big processing plants that make all the basic sweeteners, thickeners, viscosity agents and shelf stabilizers found in most processed foods. I am talking about fructose, dextrose, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, gum arabic and most ubiquitously high fructose corn syrup. There are thousands of these "ingredients" in processed foods and most of them have over 25 letters in their name and can not even be pronounced. Look on your labels, I am sure you will see at least three or more of the ingredients I listed in all of the foods in your pantry. High fructose corn syrup, a highly concentrated sugar is found in almost all soda, cookies, candy, cake, bread, and most products found on the shelves of your local grocery store. These products are cheap because their ingredients are cheap. But sadly, this processed corn is a major contributing factor to the rise in Diabetes in today's society. Its no secret that Diabetes runs more rampant in socioeconomically poor communites. They can not afford to buy organic and thus are perfect prey for these mass marketed products. What's scary is that there is more corn than meat or bread in a happy meal at McDonalds. We are essentially walking ears of corn. But it all goes back to that cunsumption model of "more is better". Consume more and we will make more. We will make it bigger and cheaper and faster and "better" all so you can continue to purchase it on more occasions and consume it in a plethera of ways. This is not good for humans or the environment.
All those monoculture farms are running off the toxic chemicals from the fetilizer and it's getting into our streams and rivers, polluting wild life and creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The soil on these farms won't be usable in a couple of decades and then what will we do? Farms will begin to disappear and what was once a staple in the American economic system will cease to exist. Farms are already disappearing because their once profitable corn crop is now so unbelievably cheap that even the govt. subsidy can't cover the cost to grow it. Small farms are being bought up for their land and only the few and most profitable farms will survive. The story is heartbreaking.

Its hard to change this system now that the wheels are in motion and the train is rolling at 100mph. However, it is reversible but it will take a lot. The meat lobbyists are a powerful group in Washington and they are out to protect their own. Cargill (the owners of almost ALL of the CAFO's and corn elevators) pay large sums of money to the govt. to keep the corn cheap. Its a vicious cycle and no one is watching out for us guinea pigs or the poor helpless environment.
So I read this book and was disgusted. I wanted to go "off the grid" for my groceries and looked for ways to do it. Thats when I found the Weston A. Price Foundation.