Office by Alex Penny
To supplement my post from yesterday.
(Source: davethomasperformance.com, via alli-bautista)
This guy did some research and I have to say, it’s a pretty insightful look into the history of our government’s politically motivated nutritional recommendations. We should probably look to our government to tell us what we should eat right? They only want the best for their citizens right? It has nothing to do with the interests of the ever-growing oligarchy that is the food industry right?
WRONG. Do read. Here’s an excerpt and the link:
From: A 110 Year History of Government Food Advice
Over the past few days I’ve been doing my darndest to research the history of America’s Food Pyramid in preparation for writing this entry and am amazed at a few things that immediately jump out in my few hours of reading.
- By my count, it’s been changed roughly 8-11 times in slightly over a century.
- It’s a very cryptic and difficult topic to research.
- It’s AMAZINGLY political.
- It somehow changes based on current events (specifically, wars)
- It’s never worked.
In 1902 a handsome, mysterious looking man named Atwater, with a whopping $10,000 subsidy from the government, published the first document on nutrition and essentially legitimized the calorie as the way to measure diet. In 1917, Caroline Hunt produced the first USDA food guide with a new focus not on calories but on vitamins and minerals. 1946 rolls round, America is kicking ass taking names across the pond and based on the newly established Recommended Dietary Allowances in 1943, Uncle Sam establishes the “Basic 7″ foods for health. Sammy baby changes his mind in 1956 and whittles it down to the “Basic 4″. Years later in the 60s and 70s, the world’s biggest a-hole combo come along, McGovern and Keys, and influence what essentially is the eradication of dietary fat. Americans embark on three decades of terrible, grain-based eating and in 1992, the first official USDA Food Pyramid is produced telling you to eat 11 servings of grains a day. We revise it in ’05, abolish it in 2011 and here we are today with Michelle Obama’s much improved but severely lacking MyPlate.
As Balko explains: ”Guy loses a bunch of weight, no longer diabetic. Starts a website to help others do the same. He’s now under criminal investigation for providing nutritional advice without a license. This is in North Carolina, the same state that went after a guy last year for practicing engineering without a license when he did some math for a citizens’ reports requesting a couple traffic lights.”
ugh.
Good nutrition/exercise practices can sometimes reverse medical conditions. Blood pressure can be brought down, cholesterol levels can be brought down, diabetes can sometimes even be reversed, just by eating well and staying at least somewhat active. This is viewed as a HUGE threat for big pharma, so naturally they try to scare people out of spreading that knowledge since it would cause a huge blow to the money they rake in through BP/Chol/Diabetes medication/treatment.
My sister was a pharamceutical rep for Schering/Plough and it was common knowledge within the industry that there is simply no money in cures, but there’s LOTS of money (in fact, billions of dollars) in treatment. The more often and the longer they can keep a patient on their medication, the more money they make. This is a billion-dollar industry, they do not fuck around.
(via hilker)
FDA: School supplier repackages moldy food
A Washington state fruit processor that supplies the nation’s schools and a babyfood maker is under scrutiny by federal health regulators for repackaging applesauce contaminated with several kinds of potentially dangerous, multi-colored molds…
OH HELL NO.
This is exactly why I’d never want my kids to eat whatever crap they serve at school cafeterias. I remember there being a baby food manufacuturer that got in trouble for packaging “apple juice” for babies when it was really just water with caramel colored food coloring. I’m pretty sure I reblogged the article a long time ago but I can’t find it right now.
Either way, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
Aspartame
Aspartame is a popular sweetener in a variety of foods including soft drinks… low-alcohol beer… candy… and dairy and frozen desserts…
It’s often available commercially as NutraSweet® and Equal®.
But it might not be so popular if people knew this: When Aspartame is warmed to more than 86° F the wood alcohol in the product changes to formaldehyde. Since the body’s temperature is more than 98º F. it kind of makes you wonder. Or do you think folks might be concerned if they knew formaldehyde is known to increase the risk of developing breast and prostate cancer?
You should also know recent studies in Europe found that the formaldehyde in Aspartame can accumulate in your brain—and seriously damage your central nervous system and immune system.
No matter how good it tastes—brain damage is a pretty high price to pay just to keep using a chemical sweetener!
Aaaand this is exactly why I don’t drink sodas, cheap beer, or pretty much anything but water and (some) juices, teas and coffee. I don’t generally buy those fake frozen desserts anyway, and the only dairy I consume is cheese, I rarely drink milk now, and whatever creams used in pasta sauces I like.
19 Studies Link GMO Foods to Organ Disruption
‘A new paper demonstrates that consuming genetically modified (GM) food leads to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice. Researchers reviewed data from 19 studies and found that parameters including blood and urine biochemistry and organ weights were significantly disrupted in the GM-fed animals.
The kidneys of males were the most affected, experiencing 43.5 percent of all the changes. The livers of females followed at more than 30 percent. Other organs may have been affected too, including the heart and spleen, and blood cells.
According to the Institute for Responsible Technology:
“The GM soybean and corn varieties used in the feeding trials ‘constitute 83 percent of the commercialized GMOs’ that are currently consumed by billions of people. While the findings may have serious ramifications for the human population, the authors demonstrate how a multitude of GMO-related health problems could easily pass undetected through the superficial and largely incompetent safety assessments that are used around the world.”’
The official story on fluoride sounds wonderful: Drink the stuff, and you won’t get cavities, we’re told. It’s a nice story. But there’s another side to this story — the side you’re never told. And it starts with the astonishing but verifiable fact that nearly all the fluoride dripped into municipal water supplies isn’t naturally occurring fluoride at all.
In fact, it’s actually a combination of hexafluorosilicic acid and sodium silicofluoride.
These two chemical are considered highly toxic by the EPA. They’re actually classified as hazardous waste and when packaged for transportation, they must be labeled as poison and handled by workers wearing industrial safety gear.
So what are hexafluorosilicic acid and sodium silicofluoride, and where do they come from?
That’s the part of this story that you probably won’t believe. That is, not until you check it out yourself. Because the more you look into the mythology of fluoride, the more bizarre this story becomes.
Whatever the truth may be, they’ve achieved their goal of totally disorienting us to the point of not knowing who or what to believe. It’s just like that scene in Princess Bride when Vezzini challenges Dread Pirate Roberts to a battle of wit, DPR puts poison in both goblets of wine and allows Vezzini, the self-proclaimed genius to choose which he put it in (he supposedly only put it in one). Vezzini goes back and forth saying initially it’s logical to think that DPR would put the poison in the glass in front of him, but knowing this, and knowing the great capacity of his mind, he probably knew he would suspect this and put the poison in thge glass in front of himself, and so forth… it’s a never ending loop and that’s just what they want us to get caught in. Question is, how do we obtain the real truth?
Coincidentally, that was the perfect metaphor. Ha.
Incredible…
One million pounds of food on 3 acres.
-10,000 fish
-300-500 yards worm compost
-3 acres of land in green houses
-Grow all year using heat from compost piles
-Using vertical space
-Simple 1-pump aquaponics
A packed greenhouse produces a crop value of $5/sq ft ($200,000/acre)via livingwind
Attorney Dee Miles said attorneys had Taco Bell’s “meat mixture” tested and found it contained less that 35 percent beef.
THIS IS ONE OF MANY REASONS I DON’T EAT FAST FOOD. Gross.
(via:edatrix)
Another TED talk worth watching (they’re all worth watching).
Jamie Oliver’s TED talk: Teach Every Child About Food.
Eat fresh food.
