From: Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com>
I'm waiting on the Millennium book to arrive, so I do not
yet know if this issue is covered, but since I just wrote
this up for a friend, I thought I would pass it along:
-------------------------------------------------------
Our "Toxic Food Environment"
According to Kelly Brownell, director of Yale's Center for Eating
and Weight Disorders, Americans live in a "toxic food environment".
I couldn't agree more.
Here are some of the really critical factors that combine to
create that environment:
* Fertilizers
All the left-over chemicals from WW-II got sold to farmers for
fertilizer. That kept the industries in business, too. Plants
only need nitrogen, potash, and phosphorous to grow. But we need
a lot more. The contents of the soil get "mined" as crops grow.
What becomes our food winds up either thrown into a landfill or
flushed down to the sea. After a while, it's no longer in the
soil. And if it's not in the soil, it's not in our food.
* Non-organic soils
It turns out that is microbes living in the soil that do the
work of binding minerals, which are then taken up into the plant
via the roots. Plowing up fields (instead of surface composting),
fertilizers that have none of the life-sustaining elements,
combined with pesticides, insecticides, and other life-killers
all combine to produce a sterile soil in which microbes do not
exist. Result: Even raw food has little or no food value.
* Phytochemicals
There are 2,000 we understand, 20,000 we know of, and potential
mathematical combinations of their components that amount to
2 million. Most are formed in the sunlight, during the latter
stages of ripening. But our food is picked green for shipment
to market. Frozen foods are typically better than "fresh" foods,
for that reason -- they are picked closer to full ripeness and
taken straight to the factory. But nothing beats taking it
straight off the vine.
* Storage
In addition to the many compounds that never develop, much of
what does develop decays during storage. Vitamin C and MSM
are both highly volatile, for example, so very little survives
in "fresh" food. Again, frozen is typically better than fresh,
but that doesn't make it ideal.
* Oil refining
Even worse than what we do to fresh foods is what we do to the
oils (fats) in our environment. Robert Erdmann's book, Fats that
Can Save Your Life, is a short read that will change your
perspective forever. To summarize: polyunsaturated fats are the
active part of basically every chemical process in the body: Nerve
and brain function, oxygen transport, transport of nutrients through
cell walls, and more.
"Active" = "Volatile". Because they are volatile, they are what
makes food spoil. Rancidity, bad smell, etc. are basically the
result of fats combining. Industry processes the oils so they won't
go bad. But the result is, at best, an oil with no value. But it
gets
worse.
* Partially Hydrogenated oil
Probably the worst offense perpetrated against nature and mankind
on behalf of the food industry is partially hydrogenated oils.
In nature, you have omega-9, omega-6, and omega-3 oils, depending
on whether you are missing one, two, or three hydrogen bonds. (The
more bonds missing, the more chemically active the fatty acid.) Each
of these occurs exactly ONE way in nature.
Having said how many bonds are missing, you know exactly where
the gaps are and how the fatty acid is configured. High-heat
processing
though, really messes them up. (Erdmann's book describes the
heating,
pressing, treating with caustic soda, boiling, and
steam-distillation
that takes place when refining oils -- and that's *nothing* compared
to partially hydrogenated oils.)
High-heat processing produces transfats (twisted configurations),
bond-shifted fats, cross-linked fats, and other variations of these
compounds that DO NOT OCCUR in nature. But the end of the fatty acid
that joins to become a phospholipid looks the same! The
phospholipids
then get built into cell walls -- but the fatty acids are chemically
incapaple of carrying out the metabolic functions they need to
perform.
In short, high-heat processing produces substances which are, quite
literally, metabolic poisons. And nothing in our 2 million years of
evolution has prepared us to deal with them. This fact alone is most
probably the cause for most of the diseases of industrial
civilization:
heart disease, cancer, diabetes, MS, and a host of other conditions.
(The science is there. It's only a matter of connecting the dots. I
did that a while ago for diabetes. Since then, I've seen a few
papers
presenting that view with detailed science.)
When you start reading labels, you'll find "partially hydrogenated
oil"
in most every cookie, chip, or bread you buy, too. Not to mention
margarine.
* Meats: pesticides, insecticides, antibiotics, growth hormones
In addition to the pesticides and insecticides that animals
concentrate
in their tissues, they are dosed with anitbiotics and growth
hormones
out the wazoo. That's why Paul Fernhout reported, "according to
the World Watch Institute, every person on the planet has 500
chemicals
in their body that did not exist before 1920.
(http://www.worldwatch.org/other/sow.html)"
That ain't good. Many of these substances set the stage for cancer
and other diseases, while our impaired immune systems and "hijacked"
metabolic systems are ill-equipped to deal with them.
* Industry-controlled breeding
When industry breeds new varieties, they focus on the wrong
targets
as far as you and I are concerned. They aim at apples that are
larger,
redder, and less likely to bruise during shipment so they sell
faster.
They work to get varieties that ripen all on the same day, to
simplify
picking. They are *not* focused on nutritive value, or varieties
that
can grow wild. In fact, self-reproducing "heirloom" seeds get no
attention, because there is no profit. The effort goes into sterile
seeds that must be resold to farmers, year after year.
* Genetic engineering
With genetic engineering, industry has powerful tools that lets
them
do in weeks what would have taken decades of breeding previously --
if it was possible at all. But not only are we looking a potentially
unknown effects from a tomato with a pig gene, but industry is once
again focused on the wrong targets. For example, they are
researching
to find a tomato that can withstand stronger pesticides, so they can
pump more and stronger pesticides into the soil. They may well
improve
yields. But the entire farm may not have as much nutritive value as
a single home-grown tomato.
* Use of radiation
Then there is industrial radiation of food to make it "safe". In
reality, the goal is to keep it from spoiling, and drive up profit
margarines. As for the effects on fatty acids...well, do we really
want to know?
* Nuclear wastes
I'm not sure if this one is an "urban legend" or not. But one
report
had low-level nuclear wastes going into the top of a silo, and
coming
out labeled "fertilizer" at the bottom. Pretty scary thought. But
definitely not beyond the capability of industry to attempt.
Industry
has an intense desire to sell anything they can, instead of paying
to
dispose of it. That's how we got into the fertilizer trap.
If I were to point the finger at *one* thing that has gotten
us the most deeply in trouble, it is the failure to achieve
"separation of business and state". We've separated church and
state, but government policy making is too heavily influenced
by lobbyists and campaign contributions. That severely limits
our capacity to react to this information in a timely way.
(Mistakes made in ignorance early last century were understandable.
But perpetuating the folly after the all the understanding that
developed in the latter half of the century is unforgivable.)
For example, the problems with partially hydrogenated oils have
been known for 20 or 30 years. One spokesman said that if they
knew then what they know now, they would not have not made it.
I'm not sure I even believe that anymore. But it is manifestly
clear how deadly the stuff is. It should be outlawed. Immediately.
Fat chance of that happening.
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