Nutrition Travesties
HFC's
The Omnivore's Dilemma, explored the American
food manufacturing system. The book's most significant contribution was the
assertion that a combination of political and biological factors had done
almost indescribable damage to the overall health of Americans.
Specifically, he traced how a single political decision made in the 70's
having to do with farm subsidies led to a single grain —
corn — being mass grown without the
limitations normally imposed by supply and demand.
Corn became so abundant and consequently so cheap that manufacturers began
looking for novel ways to use it. This led to the inclusion of high-fructose
corn syrup in hundreds of products and the invention of a dazzling array of
corn-based cereals and snack foods.
With all those cheap, salted, and sugared calories to be had, Americans grew
increasingly fat and increasingly diabetic. Perhaps worse, though, was the
wide-spread use of corn as cattle feed.
Cattle don't do well on grains. It makes them sick and they then require
antibiotics. Furthermore, it changed the fatty acid content of their meat.
Whereas normally the grass-fed creatures had omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid
ratios more consistent with wild game or wild salmon, the corn-feeding
turned them into hoofed heart attacks in waiting, the ingestion of which
slowly clogged the nation's arteries.
Corn
Cattle are superbly adapted to thrive on high-cellulose
foods like grass. That's why they're called herbivores ("grass eaters").
When you feed cattle a diet based on corn, soybeans, and other grains, they
get fat and sickly, just like people. The meat becomes loaded with
pro-inflammatory omega-6s and saturated fat; the anti-inflammatory omega-3s
are practically nonexistent.
It takes about 16 pounds of corn and soy to make just one pound of grain-fed
beef. Multiply that by the thousands of tons of grain fed beef produced
annually in this country. Under normal supply and demand, corn-fed beef
wouldn't exist: it's only possible (by which we mean "profitable") because
of ... government subsidies.
Simply stated, the government uses your tax dollars to pay off farmers and
cattle growers who produce inferior food that in fact poisons you.
Butter vs. Margarine
"Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When
it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research
wanted a payback. So they put their heads together to figure out what to do with
this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food
appeal, so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place
of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new
flavorings."
"Do you know the difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end.
Gets very interesting!
- Both have the same amount of calories.
- Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.
- Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the
same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.
- Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
- Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few,
only because they are added!
- Butter tastes much better than margarine, and it can enhance the flavors of
other foods.
- Butter has been around for centuries, whereas margarine has been around for
less than 100 years.
And now, for Margarine:
- Very high in trans fatty acids.
- Triple the risk of coronary heart disease.
- Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers
HDL cholesterol (the good cholesterol)
- Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.
- Lowers quality of breast milk.
- Decreases immune response.
- Decreases insulin response.
And here's the most disturbing fact. HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!
Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC. This fact alone was
enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is
hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of
the substance).
You can try this yourself:
Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a
couple of days you will note a couple of things:
* no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell
you something)
* it does not rot or smell differently, because it has no nutritional value.
Nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a
home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware
and spread that on your toast? -
From Michael pollan
" For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely
unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes
around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for
the American food system--indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world's food
system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and
which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as
currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root.
Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of
carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat--three of the five
commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a
year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades--indeed,
for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning--U.S.
agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the
overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
That's because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a
check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting
prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food
system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly
from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By
comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh
produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your
supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000
increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid
corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the
supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages
farmers to grow.
A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation
faced with what its surgeon general has called "an epidemic" of obesity would at
the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose
corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation's
agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health
objectives. And the subsidies are only part of the problem. The farm bill helps
determine what sort of food your children will have for lunch in school
tomorrow. The school-lunch program began at a time when the public-health
problem of America's children was undernourishment, so feeding surplus
agricultural commodities to kids seemed like a win-win strategy.
Today the problem is overnutrition, but a school lunch lady trying to prepare
healthful fresh food is apt to get dinged by U.S.D.A. inspectors for failing to
serve enough calories; if she dishes up a lunch that includes chicken nuggets
and Tater Tots, however, the inspector smiles and the reimbursements flow. The
farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the
unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to
overproduce.
Perils of Refined & Processed foods vs. Traditional Diet