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12/20/10, 10:26 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 7,272
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rambler
I'm old
I'm fat
I don't exercise as I once did
For myself, I know the solution - but there are a lot of people out there who do not know and are merrily going about thinking the food on the shelves are good for us or our government wouldn't allow it to be there. Believe me, the numbers are astounding.
These people have grown up with television giving them most of the information they use in their life. I mean if you watched TV commercials, you would think people could have herbicides and pesticides over ice for a dinner drink. They have grown up believing, with all their hearts, that our government is working for them and is a great watchdog for their health and safety. It is mind boggling how many believe that.
I do not blame anyone for my situation - I do blame them for the health situation of the majority of the people in this country - especially children and young people.
I do blame the food processors for putting things in food that is bad for you, simply for higher profits to make it last longer on the shelf. I do blame them for false advertising asserting that something is 'heart smart' or 'heart healthy', when it is anything but, or if it doesn't actually hurt your heart, it may kill your kidneys. Did you know Coke now has a 'heart healthy (or something like that) logo on it?? Imagine that - a can of chemicals is touting itself as a healthy product?
I do blame our government for being in the pockets of the food processors and not acting in the best interest of the people.
Does anyone truly believe if tomorrow proof came out that GMO products, aspartame, flouride, high fructose corn syrup, msg, or whatever - was harmful and should not be ingested - that our government would demand it's use be stopped? Of course not. If they did, our lawmakers, and tons of bureaucrats would loose their extra incomes as well as their cushy jobs. It's pure folly to believe our government operates in the best interest of the people.
That's assuming, of course, the media would even let it get out.
Believe me, there are people out there who do not know that much of the food out there is not good - many, many people. When someone tries to tell them, we get the same old - 'our food is the best in the world', etc, etc., and of course, people believe what they want to believe.
Margarine is a perfect example - I remember the hype about heart healthy margarine - throw out the butter - it'll kill ya. Oh, and remember eggs - must stop eating eggs.
And the best, 'saccharin causes tumors (in rats)' and aspartame - with some real health questions got a foothold in our food - aspartame is in chewing gum for goodness sakes - and I don't mean diet gum either.
Of course, our government has finally let it out that saccharin may not be all that hazardous to your health.
arabian knight We can't make a problem go away by pretending it's nothing new.
This problem of widespread obesity and Type II diabetes, is a fairly recent thing. It wasn't the way things were 40-50 years ago - even 30 years ago. We have not added 20-30 years to our lifespan in that period of time.
I don't know if I have posted this earlier, but the industry is responding to people's concern about high fructose corn syrup - they are changing the name of it!!!
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12/20/10, 10:37 PM
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The cream separator guy
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Southern MO
Posts: 3,919
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According to In Defense of Food:
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In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income of food and 5.2 percent of national income of health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income.
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Make money on them while they're alive, make money on them when they're sick, make money on them when they're dead...
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12/20/10, 10:48 PM
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Southern California
Posts: 1,013
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I darned nearly got a minor in chemistry in college (I was just unwilling to suffer through Physical Chemistry, toughest course of all) and I can't for the life of me figure out A: why anybody would WANT to put MSG on crops; and B: what harm it could possibly do even if they did. And I DO have degrees in microbiology and veterinary medicine.
While I find the practice puzzling, I see no need to condemn it out of hand. And there is no difference between the MSG found in nature and the MSG synthesized however they did it. A chemical substance has a certain formula, in this case it's the glutamate structure with a single sodium atom attached.
I don't get the fuss.
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12/20/10, 11:04 PM
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Miniature Horse lover
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: West Central WI.
Posts: 21,244
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Trixie
rambler
arabian knight We can't make a problem go away by pretending it's nothing new.
This problem of widespread obesity and Type II diabetes, is a fairly recent thing. It wasn't the way things were 40-50 years ago - even 30 years ago. We have not added 20-30 years to our lifespan in that period of time.
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Ya I know as a FOOD additive.
BUT the article was about using MSG as a Fertilizer and Not as a Food Additive.
So preaching so much against MSG has nothing to do with its use as a sprayed on fertilizer, isa counter productive. As that is not what the OP was about. Period. Many other threads in the past have been about adding and stopping MSG as a food additive. But that is not what this thread is about. Unless that is what the OP wanted it to be about, and in doing so is not getting much support in doing so.
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12/20/10, 11:05 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 7,272
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insocal You know if they are doing it, they are doing it for a reason. That reason would have to be because it will be monetarily beneficial for the ones doing it - in some way or another. What is monetarily beneficial to big business is not always monetarily and certainly not always physically beneficial to the population.
I think the 'why' is what makes me uneasy about it -
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12/20/10, 11:07 PM
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Miniature Horse lover
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: West Central WI.
Posts: 21,244
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Quote:
Originally Posted by insocal
I don't get the fuss.
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I don't either because there is no prove that any such use of MSG being sprayed on any crop, is detrimental in the ripen fruit once it has been harvested.
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12/20/10, 11:12 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 7,272
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arabian knightPeople are living longer and when the people live longer you will find more things happening to them. It IS Called Aging.
When years ago people didn't life as long so they didn't most of them anyways didn't develop ALL these things as they are today. When you tack on 20 30 years more to a persons life yes things will show up and that then goes into the data base and before long you have more people getting things.
My post was in response to this. It is common for someone to assert that things are no different than they were. The fact is, this is a different situation.
A lot of people might like everyone to believe that, but it just isn't true, if you give it just a little thought.
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12/20/10, 11:22 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 2,813
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http://michaelpollan.com/articles-ar...what-you-grow/
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A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?
Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods–dairy, meat, fish and produce–line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.
As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly–and get fat.
This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?
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.
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12/21/10, 03:21 PM
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The cream separator guy
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Southern MO
Posts: 3,919
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Trixie
rambler
For myself, I know the solution - but there are a lot of people out there who do not know and are merrily going about thinking the food on the shelves are good for us or our government wouldn't allow it to be there. Believe me, the numbers are astounding.
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Yes, I know several people who appear to be convinced that even though they are loading their carts up with chemicalized imitation dead "food", it is somehow healthy because none of it has saturated fats or trans fats in it!
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12/21/10, 05:36 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 107
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But, but,... they are not full of "hype and speculations" 
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12/21/10, 08:07 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 7,272
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Heritagefarm
Yes, I know several people who appear to be convinced that even though they are loading their carts up with chemicalized imitation dead "food", it is somehow healthy because none of it has saturated fats or trans fats in it!
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Absolutely, that's where the advertising comes in. And there are even more who don't even bother to read labels or think about it because, again, they just can't imagine that anything our government allows can be unhealthy or even deadly.
When we were raising children, we raised probably 95% of everything we ate, maybe more. We ate anything and everything we wanted and there wasn't an ounce of fat on us. Yes, we worked, but we weren't 'toiling' every minute. There were periods of work, like planting seasons, harvesting and canning - but the rest of the time, it was not a lot of work.
We got to spend about 9 months in AZ a few years ago. This was after we got old and I got fat. There was a fruit and veggie stand near that sold their produce really, really cheap - compared. We also bought organic meat, which was readily available and no more expensive than any other. We ate as much as we wanted. We didn't exercise much, as we were 'sunbirds' - during the hot part of the year and we both lost weight - I lost 2 sizes in clothing.
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12/21/10, 09:32 PM
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Eastern North Carolina
Posts: 34,191
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Quote:
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In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income of food and 5.2 percent of national income of health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income.
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Food hasn't changed much compared to the advances in medicine in that time period.
Prices on some things have gone down DUE to modern farming techniques
Any direct "comparison" is foolish, qand done simply to push your agenda
__________________
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
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12/21/10, 10:10 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 107
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bearfootfarm
Food hasn't changed much compared to the advances in medicine in that time period.
Prices on some things have gone down DUE to modern farming techniques
Any direct "comparison" is foolish, qand done simply to push your agenda
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Strong statements but they are not supported by any facts. Here, a simple Google search will contradict your first statement:
1962- first polio oral vaccine
1963- first lung and liver transplant
1965- first commercial ultrasound
1967- first heart transplant on humans
This is only from the '60s...
And the timeline for food additives in America since the XVII century: http://www.google.com/#q=food+additi...0cfd04ba3c5cf9
Last edited by next1; 12/21/10 at 10:13 PM.
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12/22/10, 01:11 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Eastern North Carolina
Posts: 34,191
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Quote:
1962- first polio oral vaccine
1963- first lung and liver transplant
1965- first commercial ultrasound
1967- first heart transplant on humans
This is only from the '60s...
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Yes and the price comparison was for today, with another 50 years of medical advances
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Strong statements but they are not supported by any facts.
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Actually your source provides facts to support them
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an additive is defined as being a component of food and Includes everything from sugar and salt, to preservatives such as sodium vitamins, to colorings Familiar additives are sugar, salt and corn . food used In America.
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Just because there are more "additives" doesn't mean they are harmful, just like using "MSG" as fertilizer doesn't equate to spraying crops with poison, as Heritage seems to believe
__________________
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
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12/22/10, 03:51 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 7,272
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bearfootfarm
Food hasn't changed much compared to the advances in medicine in that time period.
Prices on some things have gone down DUE to modern farming techniques
Any direct "comparison" is foolish, qand done simply to push your agenda
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Were those 'advances' made necessary by our food supply? In other words, maybe if we had a cleaner food supply, there wouldn't be such need for all the new techniques - because we wouldn't have the problems.
The fact there have been advances doesn't negate they didn't come about because of needs caused by our food supply.
I'm am wondering exactly what things have gone down due to modern farming techniques? Not saying they haven't, but I don't see them.
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12/22/10, 08:58 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 107
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Bearfoot, if you take individual additives, look at them, one by one, side by side, they are indeed harmless... What can a little bit of sugar hurt you? Right? Or salt? Or corn syrup? Or genetically modified corn? How about this: small amounts of exfoliants, DDT, malathoin as in organochlorinate compounds, organophosphate compounds, carbamates? How about some petroleum based compounds or rocket fuel? How about some fertilizer; since it's so good for plants it must be good for us... Are these poisons? You might have a different agenda and disagree but vast majority of people on the western world believe that these are poisons...
Since 1960, L-glutamate as well as glutamic acid were targeted in numerous studies for the neuro-toxicity effect of MSG. Why? Because "they" know the potential... "They" know that an imbalance in glutamate is responsible for auto-immune diabetes and type 1 diabetes mellitus ( http://www.cell.com/neuron/retrieve/...9662739190077D)
"They" know the strong connection between glutamate and schizophrenia and bipolar disorders ( http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/ne...il.asp?id=1358)
"Just because there are more "additives" doesn't mean they are harmful..." Are you kidding me? The compounded effect of using all these chemicals is detrimental for LIFE. I want to add one more thing: I am not blaming the farmers for having all these chemicals in our food system, I am not associating these chemicals with a deliberate action of poisoning people by farmers...
Last edited by next1; 12/22/10 at 09:18 AM.
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12/22/10, 09:00 AM
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Miniature Horse lover
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: West Central WI.
Posts: 21,244
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This is getting way out there now. Not even based on fact but more from the lets go natural folks again. And that is all. "A Catalyst For Creative Thinking" Ya right. Need I say more.
Last edited by arabian knight; 12/22/10 at 09:07 AM.
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12/22/10, 09:45 AM
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Miniature Horse lover
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: West Central WI.
Posts: 21,244
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I just read that the Food Bill passed the house, it already passed the Senate so now all that is left is the president to sign it. This will help in many ways to keep our food stuffs safe to eat.
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12/22/10, 10:05 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 107
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Quote:
Originally Posted by arabian knight
This is getting way out there now. Not even based on fact but more from the lets go natural folks again. And that is all. "A Catalyst For Creative Thinking" Ya right. Need I say more.
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Yeah, I know.... you have to do some reading and some research and use critical thinking!
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12/22/10, 10:06 AM
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The cream separator guy
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Southern MO
Posts: 3,919
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Quote:
Originally Posted by arabian knight
I just read that the Food Bill passed the house, it already passed the Senate so now all that is left is the president to sign it. This will help in many ways to keep our food stuffs safe to eat.
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Blind faith.
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