Food- The illusion of healthy and safe food

[iCe]

I couldn't think of a good title so I did what the media does and made something up

Before I start this diatribe I should point out that I have worked in the oil and gas industry all of my life. I love what I do and the industry has been good to me so this isn’t intended to be a demonization of the oil industry. It is, however, intended to be an eye opener for what has happened to our food supply.

Oil- The world has become so dependent on products derived from oil that I am increasingly skeptical that we have the capacity to break the cycle. An example how interwoven oil is into our life can be found in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" (everyone should read this book). The industrial food machine is a big consumer of oil. Most of the following is paraphrased from a couple of chapters from the book.

Every acre of corn grown requires at least 50 gallons of oil and there are a lot of acres planted ever year. Everything from the fuel required for planting, tending, harvesting, and transporting the crop to the fertilizers and pesticides that have to be applied to the crop consumes oil. More than 1/2 of all of the synthetic nitrogen made is applied to corn. Synthetic nitrogen is derived from natural gas. Hybrid corn is "designed" to convert nitrogen to food at greater speed. The trade-off (among many) is that it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food. As a form of insurance most farmers over fertilize. (On a personal note: In my hay farming days I would read the soil report and kick the recommended application rate up a little to make sure that I got a good crop. It turned out that rain was a bigger determinant for yield than fertilizer applied.) The irony is that plants have a limited capacity for taking in nitrogen. What they don't take up evaporates into the air where it acidifies rain. Ammonium Nitrate is transformed into Nitrous Oxide which is one of the greenhouse gases that everyone is so excited about. Some seeps into the water table (along with pesticide residue). The rest is washed into creeks and rivers during the spring rains. During the spring rains, some cities actually have something called blue baby alerts that warn parents not to give their babies water from the tap. The nitrates in the water (from fertilizer runoff) convert to nitrite, which binds to hemoglobin, which compromises the ability of blood to carry oxygen to the brain.

More than half of the world’s supply of nitrogen is man made. The excess fertilizer has made it to the Gulf of Mexico where the nitrates poison the marine ecosystems. Google earth shows the locations of marine dead zones, some of which are caused when the excess nitrogen stimulates algae growth, which smother the fish, which creates a hypoxic zone as big as the state of New Jersey. Pre-fertilizer the local farm ecology was a sun-driven cycle of fertility. Legumes fed the corn. The corn fed livestock. Livestock manure fed corn. The loop was closed.

Corn is cheap protein. It wasn't always so. At one time the US had farm programs designed to limit production and support prices (and farmers). In the Nixon era the programs were redesigned to increase production and drive prices down. When the book was written the price of a bushel of corn was about a dollar less than the actual cost to grow it. In a strange twist of economic madness, the farm programs that are in place now drive production up and prices down. A farm family needs a certain amount of cash flow every year to support itself (don't we all), and if corn prices fall, the only way to stay even is to sell more corn. Desperate to boost their yields, farmers degrade their land, plowing and planting marginal land, applying more nitrogen, anything to squeeze out a few more bushels for the soil. Yet the more bushels the farmer produces the lower the prices go thus stimulating the spiral of overproduction. This is where the free market seems to fail. Most farmers work second jobs to support their families. If you want to see an example of the "abundance" of corn go to an elevator at harvest time and see the waste. Not to worry though, big agriculture is working tirelessly to create new and different uses for corn. Things like High Fructose Corn Syrup (probably the most significant contributor to the health problems of today). Government subsidies for things like ethanol synthesized from corn will ensure that the excess corn, 10 billion bushels when the book was written, has a use. 3 out of 5 kernels of the corn produced ends up on the factory farm where hundreds of millions of animals eat it and convert it to meat. It might surprise most people to know that the cow, a major player in this enterprise, is not by nature a corn eater.

With the advent of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations the market has seen the advent of cheap meat. Not so cheap however when you look at the contribution to environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, new and deadly pathogens.

Steers bound for C.A.F.O's start out on grass pastures. At about 500 - 600 pounds they are weaned from their mothers, taught to eat from a trough, and gradually acclimated to eating corn, a food that they are not designed to eat. Once the steer has been acclimated it is shipped to a feedlot where it is finished on a diet of crushed, steamed corn flakes, liquefied fat (beef tallow from the processing plant in a lot of cases), protein supplement consisting of molasses and urea (synthetic nitrogen), antibiotics, and growth hormones. They used to use rendered cow parts from the processing plants but mad cow disease put a stop to that. However the FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat. Things like feather meal and chicken litter (bedding, feces, and discarded feed) are permitted feeds.

The addition of antibiotics to the feed is necessary to keep the cow healthy enough to make it to slaughter on it's unnatural diet of corn and other "products" that are used for feed. The cow spends it's remaining days standing in it's own waste (and the waste of those before it). It eats 25 pounds a day of corn and on average will reach a weight of 1,200 pounds. In it's lifetime it will consume the equivalent of 35 gallons of oil, nearly a barrel for each of the 100 million cattle being fed in America at any given moment.

The process of milling corn for its components is a water and energy intensive operation. About 5 gallons of water is used to process each bushel. For every calorie produced in a wet milling operation ten calories of fossil fuel energy is burned. About 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest is turned into 17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup yet we can't seem to figure out why obesity is an epidemic.

Did you know that there is almost no chicken in a chicken McNugget? Of the 38 ingredients in a McNugget, 13 can be derived from corn: the corn fed chicken; modified corn starch (binds the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (these are emulsifiers. They are used to keep the fats and water from separating); chicken broth (restoration of flavor); yellow corn flour and more modified corn starch (batter);cornstarch (filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid (preservative). There is some wheat in the batter and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton, depending on market price and availability.

There are also some synthetic ingredients in a McNugget. The quasi-edible substances are derived from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant, not corn. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. First there are the leavening agents: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats in the nugget from turning rancid. Then there are antifoaming agents like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during frying. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrent adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effecter; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or inside the boxes it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (ie., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly on our food: It can comprise of no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget, which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting 5 grams can kill.

The average processed food item travels 1,500 miles before it is consumed.

And that's just food. I doubt if you can find a single thing in your environment that hasn't been touch by oil in some way. When people discuss alternatives to oil they forget about the things that the big fans on the prairie, dams on the rivers, and atom splitters can't do.


Happy New Year

[mercphoto]

Ever see "Food, Inc."?

[TxTowman]

You can add to this.

the seed corn is a hybrid, and chemical resistant. which means they spray the crop with "roundup" to control weeds and you get to eat that stuff too. roundup comes from petroleum also

Monsanto "owns" the soybean. If you grow soybeans and do not buy them from monsanto they will sue you and win.

roundup is a trademark of monsanto.

sid

[TxTowman]

EVERYONE should see Food inc. Trust me it will boil your blood!!!!

If it doesn't infuriate you, you are part of the problem.

And yes I am part of the problem too!

[Phisch]

Don't get me started. Oops, too late.

RE: food additives. Food labeling does not require all ingredients to be listed. Often things fall under the names "natural flavoring" or "spices." Breads and cereals are allowed to be listed as free of preservatives however their packaging is often sprayed with them (cereals/breads are highly absorbent).

TBHQ, BHT, and other similar ingredients are synthesized from petroleum products as are artificial colors and scents. My son in on a diet that eliminates them from his food and anything that touches the skin. Yes, it's hard to keep on top of! He has never been officially diagnosed with ADD/ADHD but when we put him on this diet three years ago now, he changed. He was someone who would flip out if something small went wrong and took 6 hours or more to do a page of math homework. After about 3 weeks on the diet---everyone was on it, too---we saw homework take 30 minutes and he gave me a hug and told me he loved me (something that hadn't happened in years!).

While I realize this is entirely anecdotal, we have personally seen the effect of petroleum-derived ingredients in our food. The organization that puts the diet together is proposing banning some of these ingredients (like they have in many European countries) but I'm not sure that's the best solution. It might be impossible to provide comprehensive lists of ingredients (do you really want to know how many mice hairs are in your hotdog?), they should at least list everything they do intentionally include in your food...including ingredients of ingredients (i.e., the preservative BHT in the vitamin A palmitate contained in most milk).

Preservatives are helpful for many because they help keep the cost of foods down so they are more accessible to many. It would help those of us who want to avoid them if we know where they are hiding.

Also...look up how Monsanto is dealing with the growing of canola/rapeseed in Canada.

I haven't seen Food, Inc. and I probably never will. It used to be that you could easily avoid the junk in food by shopping on the outside aisles where the non-processed products are found. You still can, but it's just a lot harder and takes more leg work on our parts to seek out raw milk providers/cheese, organic veggies, etc.

I say let's all chuck it and go back to having family farms so kids know where their meat comes from! I kid, I kid! Kinda.

[Jake]

Originally Posted by Phisch

.....He was someone who would flip out if something small went wrong and took 6 hours or more to do a page of math homework......

That sounds just like my youngest son. I'm going to start looking out for tertiary butylhydroquinone for sure.
Any more info on the diet you put him on would be great.

[Phisch]

Jake, the diet info is here: The Feingold Diet Program for ADHD

The membership is $70 a year. It's crazy overwhelming the first time you go shopping while on this diet. We stuck with it, though because we were fortunate enough to see a huge difference within a matter of three or four weeks.

I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any. It's quite a commitment.

[Jake]

Originally Posted by Phisch

Jake, the diet info is here: The Feingold Diet Program for ADHD

The membership is $70 a year. It's crazy overwhelming the first time you go shopping while on this diet. We stuck with it, though because we were fortunate enough to see a huge difference within a matter of three or four weeks.

I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any. It's quite a commitment.

Thanks!

[iCe]

Originally Posted by mercphoto

Ever see "Food, Inc."?

Yep... "Dilemma" makes that seem mild.

[hue-e]

Over the past couple years, as I see movies, and lots of reading about this, like Food Inc (and SO MANY OTHERS, watch them all, they will change your life), I've become a vegetarian, almost vegan most days because of how horrible any food, processed or boxed (tv dinners, etc), ends up being the cause of most of our countries health problems.

I've boycotted our meat industry, our fast food industry... or hell, anything pre packaged for the most part. I don't eat wheat (gluten is not actually good for you at all), soy, or HFCS. Doing this, I realized that about 1-5% of the food in any grocery store is barely acceptable for human consumption. Even then, still the best thing for anyone to eat is in that small area of the produce dept labeled "ORGANIC." But even then, there's gray area there so you don't really know if you're getting a 100% pure food.

At the end of the day, it's still all driven by oil so it's hard to boycot that part of it. However, the real solution is to basically grow your own food. Personally, I'm not a farmer, nor do I have the time to work a micro-farm, but I learn a bit more every year and hope to minimize my trips to the store more and more.

There are so many other things I've boycotted because of how toxic they are for you body... BPA (most plastic bottles) comes to mind... but I won't go on and on.

Basically, just about everything the majority of our citizens consume can cause cancer, or give you diabetes, etc etc etc.. the health problems go on and on.... my adivce to anyone that gives a sh!t about living a long, healthy life.... do yourself a favor, go organic vegetarian as much as you can and stay away from processed foods.

[groovyone]

Originally Posted by Phisch

Jake, the diet info is here: The Feingold Diet Program for ADHD

The membership is $70 a year. It's crazy overwhelming the first time you go shopping while on this diet. We stuck with it, though because we were fortunate enough to see a huge difference within a matter of three or four weeks.

I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any. It's quite a commitment.

Thanks for sharing that link! I have a niece and a friend who's kid may benefit!

[iCe]

I say let's all chuck it and go back to having family farms so kids know where their meat comes from!

Joel Salatin would give you a hug. He's been a proponent of family farms for a long time. His farm, called Polyface Farm, is kind of the benchmark for back to the basics local farming and infrastructure. His book- "Everything that I want to do is illegal" will blow your mind.

EatWild.com is a great resource for finding REAL food from family farms in your area. If I remember right the Dallas area has a lot of places that a person can shop.

Bear in mind that the huge post that I initially made was paraphrased from a few paragraphs in a few chapters. Make no mistake, commercial eggs have been recalled because of e. Coli for a reason. If I keep going this will be a 100 paragraph's long... investigate your food supply. It's not what you think it is.

I'm fortunate enough to have about 10 acres of grass to play on. Now if I can just figure out if I have the time...

[hue-e]

sodium nitrites (found in most processed red meat, hotdogs, lunchmeat, etc) causes a few different types of cancer.

[hue-e]

there's some good books on micro farming (for suburbanites)... do a google search on it and you'll find them all.

grow most of the veggies you eat... I love nothing more than going in my back yard and pulling a tomato off the vine... best damn mater I've ever had.

[iCe]

If you like eggs and have a little room in the back yard check this out- LINK

I'm not knocking the vegan / vegetarian diet... to each their own and all that... but we are classified as omnivore's. Eating meat is a natural act. That said- the meat you find in grocery stores is not fit for dogs or buzzards... so pass me a carrot and we'll talk about it