FOOD TECHNOLOGY RUN AMUCK

[Guest guest]

FOOD TECHNOLOGY RUN AMUCK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.newswithviews.com/Dean/carolyn35.htm

 

Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and

Elissa Meininger

March 3, 2006

NewsWithViews.com

 

Nothing symbolizes Western culture and advancement more than modern

technology. I remember many years ago excitedly passing around my fax

number as if it were magic to use telephone wires to transport photos

and text instantly around the world. Now we have camera-cell phones,

iPods, internet communications, bank cards, and in the not too

distant future, chip implants that will take over all electronic

functions in our life. The downside to electronic technology is

barely even considered. The headaches and brain cancers from cell

phones, our total loss of privacy, and rampant stress from being

plugged in and accessible 24/7/365 are all very real results of its

influence.

 

When it comes to the rapid changes in food technology since WW II,

I'll bet most people have never taken a moment to consider that the

current state of our physical health is likely due to eating food

that is no longer compatible with our physical bodies.

 

Food technology came out of the need to store food for long periods

of time as well as to package and ship food over a distance so that

it wouldn't spoil. In simpler times, drying, salting, pickling,

canning and freezing covered much of the food preservation process.

Some of these methods actually have the ability to preserve

nutritional value along with making sure the food is appetizing and

edible. A longer shelf life for products also saves manufacturers

countless dollars from waste as well as the ability to provide wider

varieties of food than ever before.

 

However, in recent years, as methods of processing food have become

more sophisticated, these methods have incrementally diminished the

quality of food. Anyone who has ever eaten a juicy, vine-ripe tomato

fresh from their garden knows the rock-hard grocery-store version is

a far cry from the real thing. Food, or that which passes for food,

is now a commodity in a well-designed box, loaded with additives to

make it look and taste edible and treated like any other commercial

product with no regard to its ability to give us life or take it away

and we wonder why we are a nation of chronically-ill people. Sad to

say, food technology starts in the labs of the world's great chemical

conglomerates before the first seed is planted on the farm and ends

on the tip of our forks. In fact, it is very hard to escape from

eating manipulated food.

 

What Happened to Our Farms?

 

Following is a quote from Kirkpatrick Sale who wrote in The Nation,

June 5, 1995.

 

" When U.S. industrialism turned to agriculture after World War II…it

went at it with all that it had just learned on the battlefield,

using tractors modeled on wartime tanks to cut up vast fields, crop-

dusters modeled on wartime planes to spray poisons, and pesticides

and herbicides developed from wartime chemical weapons and defoliants

to destroy unwanted species. It was a war on the land, sweeping and

sophisticated as modern mechanization can be, capable of depleting

topsoil at the rate of 3 billion tons a year and water at the rate of

10 billion gallons a year. It could be no other way: If a nation like

this beats its swords into plowshares, they will still be violent and

deadly tools. "

According to biochemist, Dr. Ross Hume Hall " Man can never be more

than what he eats. " In his 1974 book, Food for Nought he wrote:

 

Nourishment of the American populace has undergone a startling

transformation since WW II. A highly individual system of growing and

marketing food has been transformed into a gigantic, highly

integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or

even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of

fabricated products.

Dr. Hall was concerned that " The transformation has gone unmarked by

government agencies and learned bodies. " And that " The effects of the

transformation do not lend themselves to traditional methods of

scientific and social analysis. " Hall also said that " The energy

crisis and food/population imbalance are issues that are flogged to

justify greater intensification of a machinelike agricultural system,

at a biological cost that mounts every year. "

 

Presently there are about 2,500 pesticides, herbicides, and food

additives used in the food industry. Reliable sources tell us that

potatoes can be contaminated with up to 29 different pesticides. You

can get more information on this type of abuse at The Organic

Consumers Association www.organicconsumers.org.

 

What about the Science of Nutrition?

 

Back in the 1800s, life was not yet a packaged commodity and

promoting world trade above all else was not the main focus of public

policy and law. The growth of the natural health industry, in what

was an unfettered free enterprise system at its best, showed a public

desire to enjoy the quality and freshness of foods, and there was

even a growing number of health-promoting specialty foods, food

concentrates and herbal elixirs that represent the precursors of

today's health food stores and dietary supplement industry.

 

At the same time, the modern medical community, led by the American

Medical Association, pooh-poohed the idea that diet and nutrition had

anything to do with health. After all, with the discovery of germs

and the adoption of the Louis Pasteur version of the " germ theory "

that promised to save all mankind from all future diseases, once

synthetic drugs had been developed to kill each and every one of

them, the need to even give nutrition a second thought was dismissed.

 

During the time this same unfettered free enterprise system allowed

ordinary people to support the ever-growing nutrition industry,

several colossal nutrition deficiency epidemics occurred. Almost

laughable in retrospect, these epidemics are perfect examples of how

the arrogance and ignorance of the germ-fixated modern medical

community reacts, confronted with a national health crisis.

 

The first crisis involved the many unexpected outbreaks of scurvy

toward the end of the 19th Century. In 1898, the American Pediatric

Association published a report that the growing scurvy epidemic among

children was due to a bacteria-caused ptomaine poisoning. The fact

that the scurvy issue had already been dealt with as a nutritional

deficiency a century earlier not withstanding, fixation on germs

blinded medical " experts " from using common sense. The new belief

that scurvy was really an infectious disease also persisted during WW

I and was used to explain why there was an outbreak of the disease

among soldiers. Medical " experts " claimed that in unsanitary

conditions it was lice that transmitted scurvy to the soldiers.

 

When the truth became out, these scurvy outbreaks were found to be a

lack of vitamin C, caused, in many cases, by drinking boiled milk in

the process we call pasteurization, which was and still is being used

to protect people from germs believed to be found in raw milk.

Boiling milk destroys much of the nutritional value of milk including

destroying the vitamin C in it. With so many people, particularly

children, depending on milk as a main source of Vitamin C, the lack

of it caused a deficiency.

 

Another famous example of professional blindness to simple truths,

are the now infamous pellagra epidemics that went on for over a

century. So fixated on that old bugaboo…germs…. medical experts on

both sides of the Atlantic were convinced that pellagra was caused by

all manner of exposures to moldy corn, germ-infected sheep, and fungi-

contaminated corn excreted by chickens, to name some of the more

prominent theories.

 

As the pellagra outbreaks persisted, particularly in the southern

U.S., panic was everywhere. In some places, pellagra victims were put

into isolation and there was talk of general quarantines. Medical

teams at the now-venerated Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the

very model of the best in modern American medicine, were forbidden to

even discuss any cases in hospital there. At the same time, a new

theory of the cause of pellagra was emerging….pellagra was caused by

airborne insects.

 

Something drastic was needed to address this national crisis, so the

federal government formed the Thompson-McFadden Commission to study

the issue. After dismissing any dietary connections with the plague,

and the suggestion that it was brought in by Italian immigrants, the

official finding was that pellagra was caused by stable flies.

 

However, there was one level-headed and obscure Public Health officer

named Dr. Joseph Goldberger who went south and bothered to notice

things with powers of observation untainted by germ theory mania. He

visited the sick, either in rural areas or insane asylums, where many

were now housed to isolate them. It was through this simple system of

scientific inquiry and observation that he found his answer and

announced it at a medical conference in 1915.

 

Goldberger realized that pellegra was not an infectious disease; it

was not caused by germs. What he observed was that every single

victim of pellagra was a person who ate mostly corn but did not vary

his or her diet with other foods. Goldberger came to this conclusion

by simply noticing that, in the asylums, while all the inmates were

sick, not one single worker in any insane asylum had pellagra and all

of these people not only ate what the inmates ate but they also had

varied diets which included nutrient-rich vegetables and meats.

 

Goldberger's findings were rejected by the Thompson-McFadden

Commission in 1915 and the germ-theory armies vehemently campaigned

against such thinking claiming that his ideas were dangerous.

 

While Goldberger continued to do experiments to prove his ideas until

he died in 1930. However the epidemic disappeared not soon after

thanks to better diets available by then and the isolation of niacin

in the laboratory, the specific nutrient that was lacking in the

diet –the true cause of pellagra.

 

My book, The Miracle of Magnesium proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt,

that magnesium deficiency can cause, trigger, or worsen 22 diseases

including heart disease, osteoporosis, migraines, severe muscle

cramps, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol. However,

magnesium is either ignored or outright rejected by a medical

establishment that promotes patented medications with innumerable

side effects for all these conditions.

 

The ongoing disconnect between food and life not only occurs in

corporate food technology labs around the world but also in

universities everywhere. When medical research started discovering

vitamins, nutrition, such as modern medicine understands it, became a

subset of biochemistry. By the 1950s, researchers thought they had

discovered all the vitamins and, strange as this sounds, getting on

with the real study of nutrition fell by the waysi

 

Worse yet, while the scientific community could claim to have

discovered vitamins, the FDA, with the help of the AMA, ratcheted up

a campaign to get rid of what the FDA referred to as " nutritional

nonsense " …or, whatever the FDA, the AMA or their backers disagreed

with, a campaign that continues today, despite massive public support

of nutritional health.

 

 

 

Presently, nutrition may be regarded as a subspecialty of Internal

Medicine, yet there is a whole medical specialty called Bariatrics

(Weight Loss Management), which deals with the end result of poor

nutrition! Clinical nutrition itself is not a medical specialty; it

was given over to dieticians who develop those famous school lunches

and hospital fare and who supply diets to people based on the four

food groups and prescriptions from doctors who know very little about

nutrition. For part 2 click below.

 

FOOD TECHNOLOGY RUN AMUCK

PART 2 of 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and

Elissa Meininger

March 3, 2006

NewsWithViews.com

 

Even the recently discovered vitamins such as coenzyme Q-10 aren't

even regarded as such. Allopathic medicine files them under optional

nutritional supplements and not the essential nutrients they really

are. All vitamins and minerals are coenzymes and cofactors in the

metabolic processes of the body. We are finding out more about them

as they are depleted by drug therapies and poor diets. For example,

statin drugs create a deficiency of coenzyme Q-10. And diets

deficient in B vitamins and magnesium are responsible for elevating

homocysteine, an amino acid that is a much greater marker for heart

disease than cholesterol. Even gene expression is controlled by

vitamins. For example, studies of genetically obese mice show that if

those mice are given sufficient B vitamins in their diet they don't

become obese—in a vitamin deficient diet they express their obesity.

 

Even these few examples of nutritional imbalance are earth shattering

and should receive BANNER HEADLINES. But there is no nutrition

propaganda machine. Instead there is the commodification of our food

and the PR that makes us all addicted to food laced with chemicals,

fat, and sugar.

 

The Failings of Science

 

Science studies nature and natural law dissecting things into smaller

and smaller bits. What it does not study is modern corporate food

technology itself and its effects on the population. While the

majority of our food dollar is spent on processed food and junk food,

no research money is spent on finding out what this type of food does

to the human body. We also have no idea of the effects on the

nutrients in foods throughout the following stages of food

modification: agricultural practices; harvesting methods; storage

methods; and food processing, refining, packaging, and shipping.

 

William Longgood who wrote " The Poisons in Your Food " in 1960 knew

the extent of food fabrication long ago and is famous for the

following quote:

 

Virtually every bit of food you eat has been treated with some

chemical somewhere along the line. Dyes, bleaches, emulsifiers,

preservatives, flavors, buffers, noxious sprays, acidifiers,

alkalizers, deodorants, moisteners, drying agents, gases, extenders,

thickeners, disinfectants, fungicides, neutralizers, anticaking and

antifoaming agents, conditioners, curers, hydrolizers, hydrogenators,

and many others. These are the tools of the food technician…His

alchemy can make stale food appear fresh, permit unsanitary

practices, mask inferior quality, substitute nutritionally inferior

or worthless chemicals for more costly ingredients.

Sugar, Dairy, and Wheat

 

These three commodities make up the most commonly eaten fast foods

and junk foods on the market. Sugar in our bloodstreams is a mere 2

teaspoons, yet we compulsively imbibe sodas that contain 10 teaspoons

in 12 ounces. Who knows how much sugar is lurking in the super gulp

cups that you can barely hold! Dairy is no longer as safe as mother's

milk and has a long list of charges against it, including triggering

juvenile onset diabetes and cancer. Wheat has been hybrid to resist

frost, pesticides, and herbicides and not to enhance nutrient

content, yet it is eaten my most people several times a day in the

form of toast, bagels, rolls, sandwiches, cakes, pies etc.

 

Sugar versus Artificial Sweeteners

 

Even worse than sugar, presently our " better living through

chemistry " has us ingesting over 5,000 products with a chemical

sweetener that produces formaldehyde when broken down at body

temperature. It's called aspartame with the brand names of NutraSweet

and Equal. Efforts in New Mexico to ban the substance have mounted an

aspartame industry lobby attack equal to any war. Go to

www.dorway.com for action alerts on how you can help ban this poison.

 

What about Dairy?

 

Cows are injected with Bovine Growth Hormone that is supposed to

stimulate more milk production but instead produces cancer causing

hormones and mastitis in the cows. Mastitis—or inflammation of the

cow's udder, is treated with antibiotics even though cows are given

these drugs as part of their daily regimen. Unfortunately, antibiotic

resistance that produces fatal infections in the human population can

be traced to the overuse of antibiotics in animals.

 

You can go to www.notmilk.com and read Robert Cohen's assessment of

the dangers of milk. But not before you read about the benefits of

real milk at www.realmilk.com. The " real milk " proponents feel that

organic milk from cows fed on grass provides valuable nutrients,

which are lost in the process of pasteurization and homogenization

and whatever else is done to milk in the highly mechanized dairy

industry.

 

Why Wheat?

 

Wheat is grown on land stripped of minerals, hybrid and genetically

engineered (GM) to withstand the environment that includes assault

with deadly chemicals. All GM foods tested on animals show damage,

yet we don't even know if the wheat we are eating is GM because the

government does not require GM foods to be labeled. After harvest,

wheat is stored in silos that can easily develop mold. In fact, many

people who think they are allergic to wheat or have an overgrowth of

yeast (see www.yeastconnection.com) may be allergic to mold in wheat

or other grains. Wheat is milled to remove the nutritious wheat germ—

because it goes rancid and reduces shelf life. After removing about

80% of all the vitamins and minerals from wheat, manufacturers boast

that their products are " fortified " by tossing in a few milligrams of

synthetic nutrients in a pretense of making the product healthier.

The resulting white flour produced from wheat is then paired up with

sugar and fat to produce expensive confections with packaging that

costs more than the raw materials.

 

Food and the WTO

 

I began to study the World Trade Organization and Codex Alimentarius

after the World Trade Center bombings. Codex is the WHO and UN

organization that creates food and food supplement regulations for

international trade. I was scheduled to fly to Toronto a few days

after September 11th but had to go by car instead. I drove with a

former government official and we shared concerns about access to

food imports when borders are shut down during national emergencies.

Meetings I had throughout the next week with government and NGO

agencies about food safety confirmed my worst fears. There were

people and agencies at the international level that were already

laying out controls on our food supplies.

 

Over the next several years I became involved with the health freedom

movement and traveled to two Codex meetings. There I learned that

food and food supplements are being manipulated by the WTO purely for

the purposes of trade and decisions made have nothing to do with

health or nutrition. The grave concern that many of us feel is that

WTO trade agreements will block the free flow of quality food and

food supplements –only making way for low quality standardized

products.

 

Such a battle already rages in the matter of GM foods. The WTO wants

GM foods to be commercially available worldwide. However, the

European Union (EU) has demonstrated great suspicion about the safety

of GM foods and won't allow them to be sold in the EU. In May 2003

the United States, Canada, and Argentina filed GM food trade

complaints to the WTO against the European Union (EU) for suspending

the sale of GM foods since 1998. A ban on GM foods, as imposed in the

EU, according to GM producers, is not " scientifically justified. " The

WTO ruled on this complaint and cited the inability of science to

justify that GM foods were significantly different from non-GM foods.

 

The WTO issued its interim ruling on February 7, 2006, and found that

the EU and six of its member states had violated international trade

rules by barring entry to GM crops and foods.

Global Implications of Codex

 

The following may be a little difficult to grasp but prior to the

filing of the GM trade complaints, an obscure international

committee, the ad hoc Codex Intergovernmental Task Force on Foods

Derived from Biotechnology, submitted reports to Codex in March 2002

and March 2003, recommending the adoption of four global guidelines

it had drawn up regarding the acceptance of GM foods. They were

adopted in July 2003 as new global standards. This paved the way for

the legitimacy for the complaints and shows the power of Codex.

 

The WTO ruling on GM foods is very recent—February 7, 2006, so we

don't know yet what is actually going to happen. We are sitting on

the edge of our seats wondering whether the EU will concede or will

it say that the WTO is powerless to enforce such a ruling. If the EU

faces off against the WTO, perhaps that will diminish its power and

give us new hope in saving the food supplement industry. Only time

will tell.

 

 

 

The GM issue has been raging for decades and the evidence mounts

every day that GM foods are unsafe for human consumption. To keep

current of what is happening with GM foods, visit The Science in

Society site at www.i-sis.org.uk. One of the founders of this

organization is Dr. Mae Wan Ho, a traditional scientist who several

years ago became a strong opponent of GM foods. Her most recent

article on GM foods, Feb. 6, 2006, is called " Dozens Ill & Five

Deaths in the Philippines. " In it she gives the most recent body

count on GM foods that are being documented near GM corn fields in

the Philippines. Dr. Wan-Ho lists the following " Damning Evidence

Against the Safety of GM Food and Feed " in her well-referenced

article.

 

Pregnant female rats fed GM soya gave birth to severely stunted

progeny and others in the litters that died within three weeks (see

main article)

 

 

GM-soya affected cells in the pancreas, liver and testes of young

mice (see main article)

 

 

Rats fed a Monsanto GM maize developed serious kidney and blood

abnormalities

 

 

Villagers in the south of the Philippines suffered mysterious

illnesses when a Monsanto GM maize hybrid came into flower;

antibodies to the Bt protein in the GM maize were found in the

villagers, and there have been five unexplained deaths (see main

article)

 

 

A dozen cows died after eating a Syngenta GM maize and more in the

herd had to be slaughtered due to mysterious illnesses

 

 

Dr. Arpad Pusztai and colleagues found young rats fed GM potatoes

were damaged in every organ system, including an increase in

thickness of the stomach lining to twice that in controls [15]

 

 

Scientists in Egypt found similar effects in mice fed another GM

potato

 

 

The US Food and Drug Administration had data dating back to early

1990s showing that rats fed GM tomatoes had developed small holes in

their stomach

 

 

Chickens fed Aventis' glufosinate-tolerant GM maize were twice as

likely to die compared with controls

 

 

New research demonstrated that a harmless protein in bean when

transferred to pea caused inflammation in the lungs of mice and

provoked reactions to other proteins in the diet ( " Transgenic pea

that made mice ill, " this series)

 

 

Since a high percentage of our produce is already contaminated with

GM foods our best advice is to grow, shop, and eat organic foods.

Support organic Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and local

organic farming. Join a CSA where you can buy a share in a local

organic farm and receive regular deliveries of organic produce.

www.csacenter.org.