http://www.alternet.org/story/149392/

The television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, shocks young parents today with scenes of children riding in station wagons without seat belts and putting dry cleaning bags over their heads for fun. Thank goodness we know so much more about keeping our kids healthy, we chuckle.

But as any one of the smooth advertising executives from the show would tell you, don’t underestimate the power of a well-crafted sales pitch.

Today, one of the most troubling and fastest growing threats to our children’s health is their diet. Pediatricians have seen an astounding jump for their patients in dangerous, diet-related ailments, such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and asthma.

The best-documented cause is the increased consumption of fast food. It’s a trend propelled in large part by sophisticated and pervasive advertising aimed at children too young to understand the difference between marketing and facts. Don Draper would be proud.

The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that “advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age.” This past June, a study published in the journal Pediatrics reported that children significantly preferred the taste of food when it was packaged with cartoon characters, and that effect was magnified for calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods.

Food and beverage corporations certainly know that advertising works. That’s why these corporations spend more than a half billion dollars each year on advertisements for fast food and toy giveaways targeting teens and children. Despite the attention paid to the childhood epidemic of diet-related disease, they aren’t slowing down their marketing.

In November, Yale University researchers found that preschoolers were exposed to 21 percent more fast food advertisements in 2009 than in 2003. The study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity also concluded that large fast food chains only offer parents healthy alternatives for their children 15 percent of the time. Experts consider it the most comprehensive study of fast food nutrition and marketing ever conducted.

Five years before the Yale Rudd Study, the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, concluded that television ads sponsored by food and beverage corporations succeed in getting children to consume large amounts of unhealthy food, leading to a dramatic increase in childhood obesity and diabetes.

The Institute recommended that Congress should step in if the food and beverage industry doesn’t change its ways. Advertising Age said the report could be “a watershed on the scale of the 1964 surgeon general’s report on tobacco.”

It certainly feels like societal attitudes have made a clear shift from viewing the marketing of junk food to kids as an accepted practice to something to be shunned, or even resisted.

By adopting voluntary codes to reduce it, the industry tacitly acknowledges that marketing junk food to kids is wrong. But these steps have proved less than half-hearted and, predictably, ineffective.

For our part, my organization launched a campaign in March to convince McDonald’s to retire Ronald McDonald, its iconic advertising character, and the suite of predatory marketing practices of which the clown is at the heart. A study we commissioned by Lake Research Partners found that more than half of those polled say they “favor stopping corporations from using cartoons and other children’s characters to sell harmful products to children.”

Local elected officials are joining the cause, too. Los Angeles recently voted to make permanent a ban on the construction of new fast food restaurants in parts of the city. San Francisco has limited toy giveaway promotions to children’s meals that meet basic health criteria. The idea is spreading to other cities.

Elected leaders will find growing support for taking action. People now realize that protecting our children from diet-related disease requires protecting them from junk food advertising. There’s nothing mad about that.

Kelle Louaillier is executive director of Corporate Accountability International.

The global economy is still hemorrhaging from the global economic crisis, and we can’t turn on the television or look at the Internet without being reminded of the ecological crises that are unfolding all around us (including, of course, the growing disaster in the Gulf). Yet the answer to both sets of problems — ecologically and economically — are one and the same.

We can’t talk about sustainable environments without talking about sustainable economies. And we can’t have any type of economic model that doesn’t take our fundamental ecology into consideration. We’re actually talking about two sides to the same coin.

Our changing climate continues to make profound impacts on how people live, work and play. Everything from our food systems, water sources, oceans and deserts is negatively influenced by our obsession with mining, transporting and burning carbon-based fossil fuels. Using energy security and independence as a mantra, the United States government and fossil fuel industries are aiming to pump billions of dollars into oil exploration and mining the last bit of accessible coal.

While our national attention may be focused on oil, our coal addiction is similarly threatening our environmental, economic and human health. Proponents of coal argue that it’s plentiful, cheap and readily available, and with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), coal’s climate impacts can be mitigated.

In reality though, coal is anything but cheap when health and environmental costs are taken into consideration. Coal is responsible for over 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions and yet the aim is to mine and burn more of it. The so-called magic bullet of CCS is very costly to implement and according to an MIT study titled “The Future of Coal” the first commercial CCS plant won’t be on stream until 2030 at the earliest. It may prove to be too little, too late — and even if the technology is ever viable, burning coal more cleanly will never solve the problem of the impacts of coal extraction.

In most parts of coal country (Appalachia, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado) local communities have not seen the direct benefits of coal. In fact most of these communities suffer from serious health impacts, limited supply of drinking water, restricted access to natural resources, poor education and health systems that are sorely lacking. It is no coincidence that some of the poorest counties in the U.S. are found in the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky. Coal has shown little economic promise and its economic, health and ecological legacy are devastating.

The impact of coal on health may be the best way to open the dialogue about the costs of coal. Coal combustion emissions damage the respiratory, cardiovascular and nervous systems and contribute to four of the top five leading causes of death in the U.S. A 2008 West Virginia University study published in the American Journal of Public Health has found that as coal production increases in an area, so does the “incidence of chronic illness in nearby communities.” The main findings from the study show that people in coal mining communities have a 70 percent increased risk for developing kidney disease; a 64 percent increased risk for developing chronic lung diseases such as emphysema; and are 30 percent more likely to report high blood pressure.

The data and evidence on coal’s impact on our health is mounting daily, and yet we fail to focus on coal as a health risk. Given the evidence, the time has come to turn coal into a pariah.

The true cost of coal, including the environmental and the health costs, will affect large swaths of the population. With emerging data in the last year and a half showing the consequences of coal on people’s health, the environmental justice movement needs to partner with the medical establishment to publicize the facts. We need to make coal the next tobacco..

We should start by waging a serious campaign that would involve doctors, nurses, public health officials and patients speaking out about the connection between consumers of coal energy and their immediate health concerns. By connecting the human element to the issue we can expand the climate discussion beyond the environmental community. From there we can have campaigns to divest from coal and shareholder actions, exposing the fiduciary risks of investing in coal. Perhaps even a national ad campaign akin to the anti-tobacco ads — using health as a vector to raise the public consciousness about climate and energy.

After all, climate change is not solely an environmental problem — it is a human/planetary problem. If we are going to rely on a small base of environmentalists to carry us through this crisis, we are in trouble. Our spokespeople on this issue have to come from a wide spectrum of citizens and leaders. The mainstream movement has lost sight of the justice element of the work and is less interested in building a broad, national movement to pressure and push for change. The problem is that the debate around climate is very wonky and policy-oriented, which leaves most communities out of the conversation. We have to build bigger and broader constituencies to make a difference. Without such a base, our future depends on Washington insiders and mainstream environmental groups. Compromise and backroom deals will prevail and we will make no significant progress in reversing climate change.

Of course, we have to go beyond a health campaign; without providing alternatives to and a transition from coal, an anti-coal campaign is weak. How coal is replaced as a base-load energy source requires political will and significant investments. Jobs that are dependent on the mining, transporting and burning of coal need to be replaced and workers retrained. This places us squarely in the green jobs/economy discussions. The new energy economy has a lot of potential for providing good, clean and green jobs — but that will not happen on its own and it will require strong voices to demand it and demonstrate how it can be done.

Rethinking a green economic model requires bringing together labor, community organizations, environmentalists, progressive economists, government leaders and policy makers, along with the private sector to have a conversation about sustainability, the economy and ecology.

Can old manufacturing centers be revamped to produce parts for wind turbines? Can resources go into developing new solar technologies with local production? This is where we should be focusing our expertise. Exploring and expanding on alternative energy sources and green manufacturing provides jobs and even expands the economy, while sustaining our environment — this should be a risk worth taking.

Heeten Kalan is senior program officer for the Environmental Health and Justice fund at the New World Foundation.

Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and the military. But that’s not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have saved many lives – not only the lives of people who are discouraged from smoking as much as they would if cigarettes were cheap, but also the lives of others who spend less time passively inhaling smoke.

No reasonable person would want to abolish the tax on cigarettes. Unless, perhaps, they were proposing banning cigarettes altogether – as New York City is doing with transfats served by restaurants.

A tax on sodas containing sugar has also been under consideration, by Governor Paterson among others. In view of our obesity epidemic, and the extra burden it places on our health care system – not to mention the problems it causes on a crowded New York subway when your neighbor can’t fit into a single seat – it’s a reasonable proposal.

But in all these moves against tobacco, transfats and sodas, we’ve been ignoring the cow in the room.

That’s right, cow. We don’t eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of cigarettes, transfats or sugary drinks. 

First, eating red meat is likely to kill you. Large studies have shown that the daily consumption of red meat increases the risk that you will die prematurely of heart disease or bowel cancer. This is now beyond serious scientific dispute. When the beef industry tries to deny the evidence, it is just repeating what the tobacco industry did 30 years ago.

Second, we have laws that ban cruelty to animals. Unfortunately in the states in which most animals are raised for meat, the agribusiness lobby is so powerful that it has carved out exemptions to the usual laws against cruelty.

The exemptions allow producers to crowd chickens, pigs and calves in stinking sheds, never letting them go outside in fresh air and sunlight, often confining them so closely that they can’t even stretch their limbs or turn around. Debeaking – cutting through the sensitive beak of a young chick with a hot blade – is standard in the egg industry.

Undercover investigations repeatedly turn up new scandals – downed cows being dragged to slaughter, workers hitting pigs with steel pipes or playing football with live chickens. We may not be able to improve the laws in those farming states, but taxes on meat would discourage people from supporting these cruel practices.

Third, industrial meat production wastes food – we feed the animals vast quantities of grains and soybeans, and they burn up most of the nutritional value of these crops just living and breathing and developing bones and other unpalatable body parts. We get back only a fraction of the food value we put into them.

That puts unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to rise all over the world. Converting corn to biofuel has been criticized because it raises food prices for the world’s poor, but seven times as much grain gets fed to animals as is made into biofuel.

Fourth, agricultural runoff — much of it from livestock production, or from the fertilizers used to grow the grain fed to the livestock — is the biggest single source of pollution of the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the EPA. A meat tax would be an important step towards cleaner rivers. By reducing the amount of nitrogen that runs off fields in the Midwest into the Mississippi, it would also stop the vast ?dead zone? that forms in the Gulf of Mexico each year.

The clincher is that taxing meat would be a highly effective way of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Here’s just how bad eating meat is for global warming.

Many people think that buying locally produced food is a good way to reduce their carbon footprint. But the average American would do more for the planet by going vegetarian just one day per week than by switching to a totally local diet.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization surprised many people when it produced a report showing that livestock are responsible for more emissions than all forms of transportation combined. It’s now clear that that report seriously underestimated the contribution that livestock — especially ruminant animals like cattle and sheep – are making to global warming.

As a more recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown, over the critical next 20 years, the methane these animals produce will be almost three times as potent in warming the planet as the FAO report assumed.

Meat-eaters impose costs on others, and the more meat they eat, the greater the costs.

They push up our health insurance premiums, increase Medicare and Medicaid costs for taxpayers, pollute our rivers, threaten the survival of fishing communities in the Gulf of Mexico, push up food prices for the world’s poor, and accelerate climate change.

Red meat is the worst for global warming, but a tax on red meat alone would merely push meat-eaters to chicken, and British animal welfare expert Professor John Webster has described the intensive chicken industry as “the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.?

So let’s start with a 50% tax on the retail value of all meat, and see what difference that makes to present consumption habits. If it is not enough to bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to go higher.

Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University, the author of “Animal Liberation” and the author, with Jim Masion, of “The Ethics of What We Eat.”

In addition to vitamins, minerals and fiber, fruits and vegetables contain phytonutrients, believed to come from the com-pounds that give these foods their vibrant colors. These phytonutrients provide a wide range of health benefits, includ-ing supporting a healthy immune system.

A new study, America’s Phytonutrient Report, found eight in 10 Americans are missing out on the health benefits of a diet rich in colorful fruits and veggies, resulting in a phytonutrient gap. The report looked at fruit and vegetable consumption in five color categories, specifically green, red, white, blue/purple and yellow/orange, and the phytonutrients found in each color category.

Eating a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables is one way to help keep you and your family healthy. Foods in the red category are especially helpful to our immune systems, in addition to supporting heart health. Tomatoes, pomegranate, red cabbage, cranberries, even pink grapefruit provide the phytonutrients lycopene and ellagic acid.

The health benefits of foods in the yellow/orange category support a health immune function too…along with vision and heart health. And they help maintain skin hydration—important as we head into these cold, dry months. These foods pro-vide beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, lutein, quercetin and other phytonutrients that can be converted into Vitamin A. Deli-cious and nutritious yellow/orange fruits and vegetables available now include: carrots, squash, sweet potatoes and pi-neapple.

For optimal health, aim to eat two foods from each of the 5 color categories – green, red, white, blue/purple and orange/yellow – for a total of 10 servings each day. A few of Amy Hendel’s favorite tips to help fill phytonutrient gaps:

1. Instead of tossing out fruits or veggies that look a bit wilted or bruised, use them. Add chopped vegetables to canned soup. Bake cored apples with a bit of cinnamon, a sprinkle of raisins and lemon zest. Or, perk up a muf-fin recipe with by adding an over-riped banana.
2. When baking omega-3 rich fish, top with tomatoes, onions and other veggies, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with oregano, red pepper flakes and rosemary. Herbs and spices are packed with antioxidants too.
3. Pureed fruit added to baking recipes gives moisture AND phytonutrients, while cutting fat. Try pureed plums in brownies and mashed cherries in meatloaf or hamburgers.
4. Finally, while eating whole fruits and vegetables is the goal, a natural, plant-based supplement like those made by Nutrilite can help fill phytonutrient gaps in your diet.

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More information about phytonutrients and the phytonutrient gap , including America’s Phytonutrient Report and simple tips for coloring up your diet, can be found at http://www.pwrnewmedia.com/2009/nutrilite90921nmr/index.html

What could be more American than a glass of milk? Cow’s milk, that is. In light of this common perception, the time is long overdue to add the milk mustache to that ever-growing list of American myths. Human beings are not designed to drink any milk except human milk (only during infancy, of course). As you’ll see below, consuming dairy products — milk, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, etc. — is not green and it’s not healthy.

It’s also a nightmare for the cows themselves. Here’s a little of how the folks at GoVeg describe it: “The 9 million cows living on dairy farms in the United States spend most of their lives in large sheds or on feces-caked mud lots, where disease is rampant. Cows raised for their milk are repeatedly impregnated. Their babies are taken away so that humans can drink the milk intended for the calves. When their exhausted bodies can no longer provide enough milk, they are sent to slaughter and ground up for hamburgers.”

*Living dairy-free has never been easier…so here’s a little motivation to get you on the greener, cruelty-free, not-milk track.

Environmental Reasons to Avoid Milk

1. Dairy cows produce waste.

Lots of waste. In fact, your average dairy cow produces 120 pounds of waste every day — equal to that of more than two dozen people, but without toilets, sewers, or treatment plants.

2. Let me repeat: Dairy cows produce lots and lots of waste (and greenhouse gases).

California produces one-fifth of the country’s total milk supply. According to MilkSucks.com, “in the Central Valley of California, the cows produce as much excrement as a city of 21 million people, and even a smallish farm of 200 cows will produce as much nitrogen as in the sewage from a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people, according to a U.S. Senate report on animal waste.”

3. Milk production ultimately leads to climate change.

The dairy industry is an extension of the beef industry (used-up dairy cows are sent to the slaughterhouse after an average of four years, one-fifth their normal life expectancy) which means it plays a major role in creating climate change. Here’s the equation: The dairy industry uses cows before passing them on to be slaughtered by the beef industry which is now recognized as an environmental nightmare. “According to a UN report,” writes Brian Merchant, “cows are leading contributors to climate change … Accounting for putting out 18% of the world’s carbon dioxide, cows emit more greenhouse gases than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation combined.” That means the industry of exploiting all cows — including dairy cows — involves destructive practices like deforestation and polluting offshoots like runoff.

4. Milk often contains unwanted ingredients.

Under current industrial methods, cow’s milk is often a toxic bovine brew of man-made ingredients like bio-engineered hormones, antibiotics (55% of U.S. antibiotics are fed to livestock), and pesticides — all of which are bad for us and the environment. For example, unintentional pesticide poisonings kill an estimated 355,000 people globally each year. In addition the drugs pumped into livestock often re-visit us in our water supply.

Which brings us to…

Health Reasons to Avoid Milk

5. Cow’s milk is for cows.

The biochemical make-up of cow’s milk is perfectly suited to turn a 65-pound newborn calf into a 400-pound cow in one year. It contains, for example, three times more protein and seven times more mineral content while human milk has 10 times as much essential fatty acids, three times as much selenium, and half the calcium. Some may like cow’s milk but drinking it is both unnecessary and potentially harmful.

6. Milk is actually a poor source for dietary calcium.

Humans, like cows, get all the calcium they need from a plant-based diet.

7. Contrary to popular belief, milk may increase the likelihood of osteoporosis.

It is still widely accepted that the calcium in dairy products will strengthen our bones and help prevent osteoporosis, but studies show that foods originating from animal sources (like milk) make the blood acidic. When this occurs, the blood leeches calcium from the bones to increase alkalinity. While this works wonders for the pH balance of your blood, it sets your calcium-depleted bones up for osteoporosis. As explained by John Robbins, “The only research that even begins to suggest that the consumption of dairy products might be helpful [in preventing osteoporosis] has been paid for by the National Dairy Council itself.”

8. Milk makes you fat.

In 2005, the Harvard School of Public Health had this to say on the consumption of dairy products: “Three glasses of low-fat milk add more than 300 calories a day. This is a real issue for the millions of Americans who are trying to control their weight. What’s more, millions of Americans are lactose intolerant, and even small amounts of milk or dairy products give them stomach aches, gas, or other problems.”

It’s easy to go dairy-free. Here are 7 easy vegan recipes to set you off on the right path.

Reposted from AlterNet.

Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us – ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair’s landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can’t even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming – our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous. A series of recalls involving contaminated foods this year – including an outbreak of salmonella from tainted peanuts that killed at least eight people and sickened 600 – has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system – from seed to 7‑Eleven – that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America’s obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. “The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us,” says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). (See pictures of what the world eats.)

Some Americans are heeding such warnings and working to transform the way the country eats – ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food in ways that don’t bankrupt the earth. Documentaries like the scathing Food Inc. and the work of investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are reprising Sinclair’s work, awakening a sleeping public to the uncomfortable realities of how we eat. Change is also coming from the very top. First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden has so far yielded more than 225 lb. of organic produce – and tons of powerful symbolism. But hers is still a losing battle. Despite increasing public awareness, sustainable agriculture, while the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, remains a tiny enterprise: according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. Sustainable food is also pricier than conventional food and harder to find. And while large companies like General Mills have opened organic divisions, purists worry that the very definition of sustainability will be co-opted as a result. (See pictures of urban farming around the world.)

But we don’t have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil – which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills – our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy – demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 – but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs – and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants – and as every farmer knows, if you don’t take care of your land, it can’t take care of you.

See 10 things to buy during the recession.

See the top 10 food trends of 2008.

The Downside of Cheap
For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you’ve never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat. According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bu. annually, up from 4 billion bu. as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we’re eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa.

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized – both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop – at least until corn ethanol skewed the market – artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 – a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)

So what’s wrong with cheap food and cheap meat – especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don’t receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories – some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s – but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it’s no surprise we’re so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone – and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what’s known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

The food industry’s degradation of animal life, of course, isn’t limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals – 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs – are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren’t widgets with legs. They’re living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?

Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. “This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can’t even play in anymore,” says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.

To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we’re breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year – a figure that’s almost certainly higher now. “I don’t think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics,” says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

See more pictures of what the world eats.

See photos from a grocery store auction.

The livestock industry argues that estimates of antibiotics in food production are significantly overblown. Resistance “is the result of human use and not related to veterinary use,” according to Kristina Butts, the manager of legislative affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. But with wonder drugs losing their effectiveness, it makes sense to preserve them for as long as we can, and that means limiting them to human use as much as possible. “These antibiotics are not given to sick animals,” says Representative Louise Slaughter, who is sponsoring a bill to limit antibiotic use on farms. “It’s a preventive measure because they are kept in pretty unspeakable conditions.”

Such a measure would get at a symptom of the problem but not at the source. Just as the burning of fossil fuels that is causing global warming requires more than a tweaking of mileage standards, the manifold problems of our food system require a comprehensive solution. “There should be a recognition that what we are doing is unsustainable,” says Martin. And yet, still we must eat. So what can we do? (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)

Getting It Right
If a factory farm is hell for an animal, then Bill Niman’s seaside ranch in Bolinas, Calif., an hour north of San Francisco, must be heaven. The property’s cliffside view over the Pacific Ocean is worth millions, but the black Angus cattle that Niman and his wife Nicolette Hahn Niman raise keep their eyes on the ground, chewing contentedly on the pasture. Grass – and a trail of hay that Niman spreads from his truck periodically – is all the animals will eat during the nearly three years they’ll spend on the ranch. That all-natural, noncorn diet – along with the intensive, individual care that the Nimans provide their animals – produces beef that many connoisseurs consider to be among the best in the world. But for Niman, there is more at stake than just a good steak. He believes that his way of raising farm animals – in the open air, with no chemicals or drugs and with maximum care – is the only truly sustainable method and could be a model for a better food system. “What we need in this country is a completely different way of raising animals for food,” says Hahn Niman, a former attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. “This needs to be done in the right way.”

The Nimans like to call what they do “beyond organic,” and there are some signs that consumers are beginning to catch up. This November, California voters approved a ballot proposition that guarantees farm animals enough space to lie down, stand up and turn around. Worldwide, organic food – a sometimes slippery term but on the whole a practice more sustainable than conventional food – is worth more than $46 billion. That’s still a small slice of the overall food pie, but it’s growing, even in a global recession. “There is more pent-up demand for organic than there is production,” says Bill Wolf, a co-founder of the organic-food consultancy Wolf DiMatteo and Associates. (Watch TIME’s video “The New Frugality: The Organic Gardener.”)

So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It’s clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down – a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million – with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

It’s that very efficiency that’s led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash, reflected not just in the growth of farmers’ markets or the growing involvement of big corporations in organics but also in the local-food movement, in which restaurants and large catering services buy from suppliers in their areas, thereby improving freshness, supporting small-scale agriculture and reducing the so-called food miles between field and plate. That in turn slashes transportation costs and reduces the industry’s carbon footprint.

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits – and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades – that’s hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren’t the enemy – and they deserve real help. We’ve transformed the essential human profession – growing food – into an industry like any other. “We’re hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm,” says Hahn Niman. “We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it’s enjoyable work.”

See pictures of the global food crisis.

See pictures of the world’s most polluted places.

One model for how the new paradigm could work is Niman Ranch, a larger operation that Bill Niman founded in the 1990s, before he left in 2007. (By his own admission, he’s a better farmer than he is a businessman.) The company has knitted together hundreds of small-scale farmers into a network that sells all-natural pork, beef and lamb to retailers and restaurants. In doing so, it leverages economies of scale while letting the farmers take proper care of their land and animals. “We like to think of ourselves as a force for a local-farming community, not as a large corporation,” says Jeff Swain, Niman Ranch’s CEO.

Other examples include the Mexican-fast-food chain Chipotle, which now sources its pork from Niman Ranch and gets its other meats and much of its beans from natural and organic sources. It’s part of a commitment that Chipotle founder Steve Ells made years ago, not just because sustainable ingredients were better for the planet but because they tasted better too – a philosophy he calls Food with Integrity. It’s not cheap for Chipotle – food makes up more than 32% of its costs, the highest in the fast-food industry. But to Ells, the taste more than compensates, and Chipotle’s higher prices haven’t stopped the company’s rapid growth, from 16 stores in 1998 to over 900 today. “We put a lot of energy into finding farmers who are committed to raising better food,” says Ells. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Bon Appétit Management Company, a caterer based in Palo Alto, Calif., takes that commitment even further. The company sources as much of its produce as possible from within 150 miles of its kitchens and gets its meat from farmers who eschew antibiotics. Bon Appétit also tries to influence its customers’ habits by nudging them toward greener choices. That includes campaigns to reduce food waste, in part by encouraging servers at its kitchens to offer smaller, more manageable portions. (The USDA estimates that Americans throw out 14% of the food we buy, which means that much of our record-breaking harvests ends up in the garbage.) And Bon Appétit supports a low-carbon diet, one that uses less meat and dairy, since both have a greater carbon footprint than fruit, vegetables and grain. The success of the overall operation demonstrates that sustainable food can work at an institutional scale bigger than an élite restaurant, a small market or a gourmet’s kitchen – provided customers support it. “Ultimately it’s going to be consumer demand that will cause change, not Washington,” says Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appétit’s co-founder. (See pictures of two farms in Nebraska.)

How willing are consumers to rethink the way they shop for – and eat – food? For most people, price will remain the biggest obstacle. Organic food continues to cost on average several times more than its conventional counterparts, and no one goes to farmers’ markets for bargains. But not all costs can be measured by a price tag. Once you factor in crop subsidies, ecological damage and what we pay in health-care bills after our fatty, sugary diet makes us sick, conventionally produced food looks a lot pricier.

What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that’s to quit thinking big. We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there’s not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24‑oz. steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive. “The idea is that healthy and good-tasting food should be available to everyone,” says Hahn Niman. “The food system should be geared toward that.”

Whether that happens will ultimately come down to all of us, since we have the chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we’re particularly hungry). It’s true that most of us would prefer not to think too much about where our food comes from or what it’s doing to the planet – after all, as Chipotle’s Ells points out, eating is not exactly a “heady intellectual event.” But if there’s one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it’s that very thing: consciousness. Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty – it’s based on selective forgetting. But what we eat – how it’s raised and how it gets to us – has consequences that can’t be ignored any longer.

- With reporting by Rebecca Kaplan / New York

The original version of this article mistakenly referred to the Bon Appétit Management Company as the Bon Appétit Food Management Company

See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

The Tale of Two Cattle
How did your hamburger get to your plate – and what did it eat along the way? The journey of beef illustrates the great American food chain

ORGANIC (1% of all cattle)
This is the way all beef used to be raised – and how some people still imagine it is. Bill Niman tends a small herd with one of the lightest hands in the business and produces what Bay Area chefs swear is unparalleled beef

Diet: Grass
Niman’s cows eat only grass, along with a smattering of hay. That’s the normal diet for cattle. Their rumen, a digestive organ, can break down grasses we’d find inedible

Supplements: None
Niman gives no supplements whatsoever to his cattle – no drugs, no hormones, no additives. That’s not ironclad for organic beef – some companies might use antimicrobials – but generally the animals are supplement-free

Environmental Impact: Living with the Land
To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn’t need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There’s no need to clean up manure – with Niman’s low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land

Human Impact: The Omega Effect
Beef has a bad rep among nutritionists, but that might be partly unfair for grass-fed steaks. According to research from the University of California, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids than conventional beef

CONVENTIONAL (99% of all cattle)
The vast majority of all American cattle start off on open ranges, but that’s where the similarity to their organic cousins ends. They’re shifted after a few months to the tight quarters of an industrial feedlot, to be fattened up as fast as possible

Diet: Grass and corn
Conventional cattle feed off grass pasture for the first several months, but at the feedlot, they’re switched to a heavily corn-based diet, which makes them gain weight faster but also makes them get sick more easily

Supplements: Chemicals
In part to help them survive the crowded conditions of feedlots, where infections can spread fast, conventional cattle are given antibiotics in their feed, and sometimes growth hormones, bloods and fats

Environmental Impact: Waste
A 1,000-head feedlot produces up to 280 tons of manure a week, and the smell can be powerful. All that feed corn requires millions of tons of fertilizer and, ultimately, a lot of petroleum

Human Impact: Fat Attack
Feeding corn to cattle for the last several months of their lives doesn’t just get them fatter faster; it also changes the quality of the beef. Corn helps produce that marbled taste many of us love, but it can result in beef that is higher in fat – helping to fuel the obesity epidemic

Reprinted from TIME.

Every chef is said to have a secret junk food craving. For Thomas Keller, chef-owner of Per Se and The French Laundry, two of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, it’s Krispy Kreme Donuts and In-N-Out cheeseburgers. For David Bouley, New York’s reigning chef in the ’90s, it’s “high-quality potato chips.”

“Father of American cuisine” James Beard “loved McDonald’s fries,” while Paul Bocuse, an originator of nouvelle cuisine, once declared McDonald’s “are the best French fries I have ever eaten.” Masaharu Morimoto is partial to “Philly cheese steaks,” and Jean-Georges Vongerichten confesses a weakness for Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich. Other accomplished but less-famous chefs admit to craving everything from Peanut M&Ms, Pringles and Combos to Kettle Chips and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Having attended culinary school and cooked professionally, I can wax rhapsodic about epicurean delights such as squab, Beluga caviar, black truffles, porcini mushrooms, Iberico Ham, langoustines, and acres of exceptional vegetables and fruits. But I also have an unabashed junk food craving: Nacho Cheese Doritos. Sure, there are plenty of other junk foods I enjoy, whether it’s Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream or Entenmann’s baked goods, but Doritos are the one thing I desire and seek out regularly. (Not that I ever have to look that hard; I’ve encountered them everywhere from rural villages in Guatemala to tiny towns in the Canadian Arctic.)

For years I wondered why I craved Doritos. I knew the Nacho Cheese powder, which coats your fingers in day-glo orange deliciousness, was one component, as were the fatty, salty chips that crackle and melt into a pleasing mass as you crunch them. I figured there was a dollop of nostalgia in the mix, but an ingredient was still missing in my understanding. Then I read a spate of articles about “umami,” designated the fifth taste, along with sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, means “deliciousness” in Japanese and is described as “a meaty, savory, satisfying taste.”

I knew some foods — parmesan cheese, seaweed, shellfish, tomatoes, mushrooms and meats — were high in umami-rich compounds such as glutamate, inosinate and guanylate. (Most people know umami from the much-maligned MSG, or mono sodium glutamate.) And I knew combining various sources of umami — such as the bonito-flake and kombu-seaweed broth known as dashi, the foundational stock of Japanese cuisine — magnified the effect and delivered a uniquely satisfying wallop of flavor. 

What I didn’t know was that “Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan,” according to a New York Times article from last year.

Mystery solved. Now I knew that whenever the Doritos bug bit me, I was jonesing for umami. I had to admit it: I am a junk food junkie and Frito-Lay is my pusher-man.

I am hardly alone. Frito-Lay is the snack-food peddler to the world, with over $43 billion in revenue in 2008. The 43-year-old cheesy chip is a “category killer,” dominating the tortilla chip market with a 32 percent share in 2006, and number two in the entire U.S. “sweet and savory snacks category,” just behind Lay’s potato chips. 

$1.7 billion in annual sales in the U.S, is big business. Behind the enigma of Doritos’ dominance, and the lure of junk food to even the most refined palettes in the world, are the wonders of food science. That science, in the service of industrial capitalism, has hooked on us a food system that is destroying our health with obesity-related diseases. And that food system is based on a system of factory farming at one end, which churns out cheap, taxpayer-subsidized commodities like corn, vegetable oil and sweeteners, and the giant food processors at the other, like Frito-Lay, that take these commodities and concoct them into endless forms of addictive junk foods.

Steven Witherly begins his book, Why Humans Like Junk Food, by noting in studying the “psychobiology” of Doritos he consumed the “food intake and chemical senses literature — over five hundred research reports and four thousand abstracts — in order to discern the popularity of Doritos.” Witherly coined the term “Doritos Effect” to explain its popularity and in his book outlines 14 separate ways in which Doritos appeals to us.

There’s the “taste-active components,” sugar, salt and umami; ingredients like buttermilk solids, lactic acid, and citric acid that stimulate saliva, creating a “mouth-watering” sensation; the “high dynamic contrast” of powder-coated thin, hard chips that melt in the mouth; a complex flavor aroma; a high level of fat that activates “fat recognition receptors in the mouth … increases levels of gut hormones linked to reduction in anxiety … activates brains systems for reward, and enhances ingestion for more fat”; toasted, fried corn that triggers our evolutionary predilection for cooked foods; starches that break down quickly, boosting blood levels of insulin and glucose; and so on. 

Witherly explains that some umami sources like MSG don’t have much taste by themselves, but when you add salt,”the hedonic flavors just explode!” And Doritos has plenty of both. The tiny 2-oz. bag of Doritos I’m holding, which in the past would be a warm-up to a Nacho Cheesier dinner, lists MSG near the top, before “buttermilk solids,” along with nearly one-sixth of my recommended daily intake of sodium. 

One aspect of Doritos that whet my curiosity was, how much does Frito-Lay spend on goods like corn, oil and cheese? Not surprisingly, this data was nowhere to be found in the annual report of Pepsico, Frito-Lay’s parent company. But I gleaned a clue from a 1991 New York Times article. In it, a Wall Street analyst stated that Frito-Lay’s profit margin, around 19 percent in those days (which is close to its margin of late), approached that of Kellogg’s. The analyst, an expert on the food industry, said: “Kellogg buys corn for 4 cents a pound and sells it for $2 a box.” That’s a markup of nearly 5,000 percent over the base ingredient. 

I’ll save you the math, but Frito-Lay may do even better than Kellogg’s. If it uses two ounces of cornmeal in my 99 cents bag of Doritos, it apparently costs the snack-food giant less than one measly penny. And here’s a critical point about the food industry. The more they can process basic food commodities, the more profits they can gobble up at the expense of farmers. In The End of Food, Paul Roberts writes that in the 1950s, farmers received about half the retail price for the finished food product. By 2000, “this farm share had fallen below 20 percent.”

This is the result of the global food system constructed by the U.S. and other Western powers under the World Trade Organization. Countries that once strived for food security by supporting their domestic farmers are now forced — in the name of free trade — to open their agricultural sectors to competition from heavily subsidized Western agribusinesses. By the mid-1990s, according to rural sociologist Philip McMichael, 80 percent of farm subsidies in Western countries went to “the largest 20 percent of (corporate) farms, rendering small farmers increasingly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a deregulated (and increasingly privately managed) global market for agricultural products.”

The WTO-enforced system and government subsidies enables food giants — such as Pepsico, Kraft, Mars, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Burger King and Wal-Mart — to source their ingredients globally, giving them the power to force down prices, which drives more and more farmers off the land in the global North and South alike. Then the food companies turn around and manufacture high-profit products that seem like an unbelievable bargain to us. In fact, they make this a selling point, and not just with “Dollar Menus.”

Last year, in the wake of the economic meltdown, KFC launched the “10 Dollar Challenge,” inviting families to try to recreate a meal of seven pieces of fried chicken, four biscuits and a side for less than its asking price of 10 bucks. Of course this is a virtually impossible feat, apart from dumpster diving. But KFC isn’t hawking alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast at that price. Witherly, in Why Humans Like Junk Food, writes that “high energy density food is associated with high food pleasure.” The corporate food’s revenue model is based on designing products oozing with fat, salt, sugar, umami and chemical flavors to turn us into addicts. 

While food companies can trot willing doctors, dieticians and nutritionists who claim that eating their brand of poison in moderation can be part of a balanced diet, the companies are like drug dealers who prey on junkies. As Morgan Spurlock explained about McDonald’s in Supersize Me, the targets are “heavy users,” who visit the Golden Arches at least once a week and “super heavy users,” who visit ten times a month or more. In fact, according to one study, super heavy users “make up approximately 75 percent of McDonald’s sales.”

Fast-food Addiction

Perhaps no company better exemplifies the intersection of factory farming, fast food and food addiction than McDonald’s. It pioneered many of the practices of standardized, industrial food production that made it into a global behemoth. In 1966 McDonald’s switched from about 175 different suppliers for fresh potatoes to J.R. Simplot Company’s frozen French fry. A few years later, McDonald’s switched from a similar number of beef suppliers to just five. Within a decade, notes Eric Schlosser, McDonald’s had gone from 725 outlets nationwide to more than 3,000. 

Tyson did the same with chicken, which was seen as a healthy alternative to red meat. It teamed up with McDonald’s to launch the Chicken McNugget nationwide in 1983. Within one month McDonald’s became the number two chicken buyer in the country, behind KFC. The McNugget also transformed chicken processing. Today, Tyson makes most of its money from processed chicken, selling its products to 90 of the 100 largest restaurant chains. As for the health benefits, Chicken McNuggets have twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.

The entire food industry, perhaps best described as “eatertainment,” has refined the science of taking the cheap commodities pumped out by agribusiness and processing them into foodstuffs that are downright addictive. But food is far more than mere fuel. It is marketed as a salve for our emotional and psychological ills, as a social activity, a cultural outlet and entertainment.

Faced with little time to cook, bland industrial meat and drawn to exciting and addictive processed foods, most Americans gorge on convenience food. In 1900, the typical American woman spent six hours a day in food prep and cleanup. By last year, Americans on average took 31 minutes a day. For many, “cooking time” consists of opening up takeout containers, dumping the contents on a plate and throwing away the trash.

To get us in the door (or to pick up their product at the supermarket), food companies stoke our gustatory senses. The food has to be visually appealing, have the right feel, texture and smell. And most of all, it has to taste good. To that end, writes David Kessler in The End of Overeating, the food industry has honed in on the “three points of the compass” — fat, salt and sugar.

One anonymous food-industry executive told Kessler, “Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more.” The executive admitted food is designed to be “highly hedonic,” and that the food industry is “the manipulator of the consumers’ minds and desires.”

This food is even designed to be pre-digested. Factory-farmed meats are ground up, injected with salt, water, a multitude of flavorings and chemicals, reconstituted and often processed with extra fat (like the McNugget). Speaking to an expert in “sensory stimulation and food,” Kessler explains how food is engineered to deliver pleasing flavors, aromatic and textural sensations and dissolve easily in the mouth. He writes: “in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food 25 times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.” Even the bolus — the wad of chewed food — is designed to be smooth and even. It’s “adult baby food.”

Referencing studies with either humans or lab animals, Kessler shows how varying concentrations and combinations of fat and sugar intensify neurochemicals, much the same way cocaine does. One professor of psychiatry explains that people self-administer food in search of “different stimulating and sedating effects,” just as is done with a “speedball” — which combines cocaine and heroin.

Kessler deconstructs numerous restaurant chain foods to show they are nothing more than layers of fat, salt and sugar. A reoccurring item is “bacon-cheese fries,” a coronary event on a plate that displays dazzling engineering precision. One food consultant calls it “cheap filler” in which “20 cents’ worth of product gets me $5 worth of wow.” The expert in sensory stimulation explains, “Adding more fat gives me more flavor. It gives me more salt. And that bacon gives me a lot more lubricity.” A food scientist for Frito-Lay describes the textural appeal: “You’ve got some pieces that are crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. It’s warm. It’s probably gooey, stringy, so you have to use your fingers a lot to eat it, and you have to lick your fingers. It’s all multisensory.”

Or take the McGriddle, which can be deconstructed along the “three points of the compass.” It starts with a “cake” made of refined wheat flour, essentially a sugar, pumped with vegetable shortening, three kinds of sugar and salt. This cradles an egg, cheese and bacon topped by another cake. Thus, the McGriddle, from the bottom up, is fat, salt, sugar, fat, then fat and salt in the cheese, fat and salt in the bacon, finished off with fat, salt and sugar. And this doesn’t indicate how highly processed the sandwich is. McDonald’s bacon, a presumably simple product, lists 18 separate ingredients, including what appears to be six separate sources of umami.

The success of the McGriddle and sandwiches like Wendy’s Baconator, which mounds six strips of bacon atop a half-pound cheeseburger and sold 25 million in its first eight weeks, has inspired an arms-race-like escalation among chain restaurants. Burger King has a near-identical imitation with the French Toast Sandwich. In 2004 Hardee’s went thermonuclear with its 1,420-calorie, 107-grams-of-fat-laden “Monster Thickburger.” And people are gobbling them up.

Perhaps you feel smug (and nauseated) by all this because you are a vegetarian, a vegan or a locavore, or you only eat organic and artisanal foods. Don’t. Americans are under the thrall of the food industry. More than half the population eats fast food at least once a week; 92 percent eat fast food every month; and “Every month about 90 percent of American children between the ages of three and nine visit a McDonald’s,” states Schlosser.

We know this food is killing us slowly with diabetes, heart disease and cancer. But we can’t stop because we are addicts, and the food industry is the pusher. Even if can completely opt out (which is almost impossible), it’s still our land that is being ravaged, our water and air that is being poisoned, our dollars that are subsidizing the destruction, our public health that is at risk from bacterial and viral plagues.

Changing our perilous food system means making choices — not to shop for a greener planet, but to collectively dismantle the nexus of factory farming, food corporations and the political system that enables them. It’s a tall order, but it’s the only option left on the menu.

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.

Reposted from  AlterNet.

(NaturalNews) What is it that stands between you and vibrant health? People who have spent a fortune on supplements, gotten plenty of exercise and bought high quality food still find themselves unable to answer this question. For many of them, the answer lies in neurotoxins hidden in even the most healthy sounding foods, including many foods labeled as organic. These ingredients often cause serious reactions, including migraines, insomnia, asthma, depression, anxiety, aggression, chronic fatigue, and even ALS. They may be responsible for the swelling numbers of children diagnosed as ADHD.

Almost everything in every kind of grocery store has additives that can cause reactions including asthma attacks, obesity, tinnitus, and restless leg syndrome. While 1 out of every 4 people is sensitive to neurotoxic food additives, only 1 in 250 is aware that these additives are the source of the reactions they are having.

Most neurotoxic food additives contain free glutamic acids processed from proteins. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is probably the best known of the neurotoxins. However, there are many other names for these protein derived additives, including yeast extract, maltodextrin, carrageenan, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, dough conditioners, seasonings, spices, and whey protein concentrate. Even the pleasant sounding term natural flavors can mean the presence of additives toxic to the brain and nervous system.

Food additives are there to trick you into thinking what you are consuming tastes really great. They are an assault on your nerve synapses and a violent attack on the cells of your brain.

“Bet you can’t eat just one”

Remember that old slogan? Food and beverage companies use food additives because they make you crave more of what tastes so good. They cause nerve cells to cry out for repeated stimulation, keep you buying and consuming more of their products. People watch in horror as they pile on pounds and become food junkies without any idea of how they are being manipulated to further corporate interests. In addition to the benign sounding terms natural flavors and spices, manufacturers use other seemingly innocuous names for these additives on their labels, such as seasonings, broth, or gelatin.

Restaurants are another place to find foods laced with neurotoxins. This is why restaurant food tastes so good. Neurotoxins have conditioned people to think restaurant food tastes so great they will stand in line to get a table, when what they are really paying money for is the privilege of having their brain cells destroyed.

Many people think if they avoid Chinese restaurants they can avoid neurotoxins in their food. But these hazardous chemicals are added to virtually all restaurant food from McDonalds to the most exclusive gourmet dining spots. A sign on the widow or on the package that says there is no MSG, simply means that another form of neurotoxin is used instead.

The FDA wouldn’t allow dangerous food additives, would they?

Unfortunately, the food industry is controlled by powerful conglomerates that have great political influence over the FDA and other government regulatory agencies. Naturally it is in the best interests of these corporations to defend their use of the neurotoxic additives that make their products so pleasing to the senses and so habit forming. Just like the tobacco industry, food corporations have no regard for the health of their customers but will stop at nothing to get their money. Until consumers realize what is being done to them and how they are being used, neurotoxins are here to stay. Kicking the addiction promoted by food additives is as difficult as kicking the nicotine habit.

Although the science of food technology has been around since the 1950s, consumers are just now waking up to the link between neurotoxic additives and their loss of vitality. Even when people understand the link intellectually, many are so hooked on the fabulous taste of adulterated food that they just can’t stop eating, no matter what it is doing to them. Others buy into the lame propaganda telling them that neurotoxic additives are safe.

Additives from natural sources can be highly toxic

MSG is natural. It is a sodium salt of glutamic acid, an amino acid. Originally isolated from seaweed, MSG is now made by fermenting corn, potatoes and rice. MSG is naturally present in high levels in tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. But MSG is highly dangerous to health. An early study reported that the inner layer of the retina was destroyed in neonatal rats receiving a single exposure to MSG. This is an amazing finding considering that humans are more than 5 times more sensitive to MSG than rats.

Another study used rats to determine the effects of exposure to MSG on obesity. Rats given MSG developed obesity, type II diabetes, and metabolic syndrome X. They also developed lesions of the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus. MSG is a powerful disrupter of the endocrine system, creating havoc with meta-thermoregularory modulates like neuropeptide Y and leptin, and their target tissue, brown fat. It reduces the thermogenicity of brown fat while also suppressing food intake. This means that MSG makes a people gain weight even when they decrease caloric intake.

These findings explain how a person can hardly eat at all while still putting on weight. But these effects are not confined to MSG. The other substances classified as neurotoxic food additives produce much the same outcomes.

Natural flavors are isolates from naturally occurring products just like MSG. Many natural products including organic fruits and vegetables contain compounds that in isolation are extremely harmful. Some of these compounds are what make up the defense system of the plants. When the whole plant, fruit or vegetable is consumed as food, other compounds are present that neutralize their harmful effects. When taken from the plant as isolates, the compounds become no different in their effects than those created in a laboratory.

The word spice is another innocuous sounding germ, but in the world of food marketing, it is a word that has been manipulated to sound harmless when it really isn’t. People tend to think that the individual spices are not listed because the creator of the product doesn’t want to give away his secrets. This is not true. When the word “spices” is used, it is the tip off that toxic additives are hidden in the product.

Feeling your best involves learning to read labels

Neurotoxins are added to virtually every packaged food and beverage sold in almost every store. Not just packaged meal type items, but many of the ingredients used to create a meal.

Anyone wanting to avoid neurotoxic additives needs to know that there is a lot more to it than just looking for MSG on the label. MSG may be the most well known of the additives, but all the others are just as hazardous to health and as likely to produce a reaction. Even if products say “No MSG” or call themselves “all natural” or “organic”, it is almost a certainty that neurotoxic additives are in that product. There is no way to know unless you are willing to take the time to read the label.

When there are a hundred different kinds of neurotoxic food additives used being pumped into almost everything on stores shelves, trying to avoid them may seem like navigating a mine field. It helps if you are armed with a listing of what to avoid. The label of any product that is canned, frozen, bagged, bottled, boxed, wrapped, put in a carton, or offered in a take home dish or container needs to be examined because almost all of them contain neurotoxins. Check everything you suspect may have flavoring added to it, even coffee, tea bags, and bottled waters. You will be surprised. Be sure to check chewing gum and candy.

It may seem overwhelming at first to have to drag around a list of toxic food additives and examine every product you buy. But very quickly you will learn where to find the ingredient lists and what to look for. The key words will jump off the label right into your eye. As you become better at identifying products using these additives, you will also begin to notice how much better you feel. Those persistent symptoms that have been around for months or years will begin to disappear along with the unwanted pounds. By the time label reading becomes second nature and can be done in one quick glance, you will well be on the road to vibrant health.

Here is a list of what to look for. Arm yourself against corporate exploitation when you go to the store, and learn how to spend your money so that it benefits you, rather than someone else who has made it clear he doesn’t care whether you are healthy or not.

Neurotoxic Chemical Food Additives

aspartame
autolyzed anything
barley malt
beef base
beef flavoring
beef stock
bouillon
broth of any kind
calcium caseinate
carrageenan
caseinate
chicken base
chicken broth
chicken flavoring
chicken stock
disodium anything
dough conditioner
flavoring
gelatin
gelatinized anything
glutamate
gaur gum
hydrolyzed anything
kombu extract
l-cysteine
malt anything
malted anything
milk solids
monosodium glutamate
natural flavor
nutrasweet
pork base
pork flavoring
protein concentrate
protein extract
seasoned salt
seasoning
smoke flavoring
sodium caseinate
solids of any kind
soup base
soy extract
soy protein anything
soy sauce
spice
stock
textured protein
textured vegetable protein
umami
vegetable gum
whey anything
yeast extract

For more information see:

http://www.rtnc411.org/rtnc-list.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4676616/

http://www.answers.com/topic/flavoring-extract-and-flavoring-syrups-not-elsewhere-classified

About the author

Barbara is a school psychologist, a published author in the area of personal finance, a breast cancer survivor using “alternative” treatments, a born existentialist, and a student of nature and all things natural.

Reposted from NaturalNews.

T. Colin Campbell,Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr.

As scientific researchers who have spent our careers establishing the link between diet and disease, we find President Obama’s directive on “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making” very welcome news.

We hope this will lead to health care policy that is informed by America’s most ignored scientific fact on health: That a whole-foods plant-based diet can prevent and in many cases reverse heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases.

Today’s health care debate has very little to do with what makes us sick. It is centered almost entirely on who gets covered and who pays. Extending coverage to more people is a good thing. But Americans who already are covered are suffering rising rates of chronic disease. Lack of coverage is not causing their disease, and expanding coverage won’t cure these diseases in others. We have to do more than increase coverage.

The No. 1 cause and cure of America’s health care crisis is right under your nose – it’s what you put in your mouth.

Unfortunately, the scientific findings on diet and disease are marginalized by the political power of huge, mutually reinforcing commercial interests – meat, dairy, sugar, drugs and surgery.

These industries are desperate to sell a solution that obscures their part in the problem. If they can convince people that the cause of our health crisis has nothing to do with eating unhealthy food, and everything to do with increasing access to drugs and surgery, Americans will spend trillions more on health care without improving their health. That’s what happens when you leave science out of public policy.

If President Obama wants Americans to get the full benefit of scientific research on health, then he should add three measures to his health reforms.

One: Change the way government develops its dietary guidelines. Right now, the U.S. government’s most widely publicized dietary recommendations are deadly. The Food and Nutrition Board’s 2002 report says that to reduce degenerative diseases like heart disease and cancer, we can consume up to 35 percent of our calories as fat, up to 35 percent of our calories as protein and up to 25 percent of calories as added sugars.

Here is a daily diet that meets those nutrition guidelines: Breakfast: 1 cup Fruit Loops; 1 cup skim milk; 1 package M&M milk chocolate candies; fiber and vitamin supplements. Lunch: Grilled cheddar cheeseburger. Dinner: 3 slices pepperoni pizza, with a 16-ounce soda and 1 serving Archway sugar cookies.

This helps explain why 12-year-old schoolchildren develop thickening of their carotid arteries to the brain, and 80 percent of 20-year-old soldiers, dying in combat, are found to have coronary artery heart disease.

How could the government distribute this information and call it science? Members of the committee had financial ties to industries that benefit from higher protein and sugar allowances, and the panel was partly funded by corporate money.

The Obama administration should establish a rule: No scientist with financial ties to the food and drug industries should chair – or choose the members of – panels that set dietary guidelines.

Two: President Obama should establish a new institute at the National Institutes of Health dedicated exclusively to exploring the link between diet, health and disease. Today, there are 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health, but none devoted to nutrition, despite the great public interest in the subject. For the sake of the people who pay the bills, it’s time for NIH to dedicate an institute to studying the effect of nutrition on health.

Three: Congress should require that medical schools – as a condition of receiving federal grants – offer residency programs on dietary approaches to preventing and treating disease. Americans don’t understand the disease-fighting power of a good diet because their doctors don’t. Medical schools teach a drug-centered curriculum. They do not learn about the many population-based studies that show the connection between diet and disease. They do not review the biochemical studies on disease formation that support the population-based studies. And they do not study the results found in treating disease with diet in clinical settings. Drugs and surgery can offer miraculous benefits in certain cases. But it’s unconscionable for doctors not to know about – or tell their patients about – the preventive and healing power of food.

These three proposals won’t cost much, and they will pay back our investment a million-fold by making people healthier and reducing health care costs. Moreover, they reflect a commitment – expressed by the White House last week – to finally let the public enjoy the health benefits of scientific research.

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University. He is co-author of “The China Study.” Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., M.D., former president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, is a preventive medicine consultant at the Cleveland Clinic. He is the author of “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease.”

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/17/ED3K16FAI8.DTL

This article appeared on page A – 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle

(NaturalNews) There is no more denying it. Meat contains highly toxic substances that are responsible for many deaths and diseases. Heavy meat consumption increases your risk of dying from all causes, including heart disease and cancer, according to a federal study conducted by the National Cancer Institute and featured in Archives of Internal Medicine on Monday.

The study looked at the records of more than half a million men and women aged 50 to 71, following their diet and other health habits for 10 years. Between 1995 and 2005, 47,976 men and 23,276 women died.

The researchers divided the volunteers into 5 groups or “quintiles.” All other major factors were accounted for — eating fresh fruits and vegetables, smoking, exercise, obesity, etc. People eating the most meat consumed about 160g of red or processed meat per day – approximately a 6oz steak.

Women who ate large amounts of red meat had a 20 percent higher risk of dying of cancer and a 50 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease than women who ate less. Men had a 22 percent higher risk of dying of cancer and a 27 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease. That`s compared to those who ate the least red meat, just 5 ounces per week, or 25g per day — approximately a small rasher of bacon.

The study also included data on white meat and found that a higher intake was associated with a slightly reduced risk of death over the same period. However, high white meat consumption still posed a major risk of dying.

“For overall mortality, 11 percent of deaths in men and 16 percent of deaths in women could be prevented if people decreased their red meat consumption to the level of intake in the first quintile,” Sinha`s team wrote.

Sinha`s team noted that meat contains several cancer-causing chemicals, as well as the unhealthiest forms of fat.

The good news is that the U.S. government now recommends a “plant-based diet” with the emphasis on fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The bad news is that it also hands out massive farm subsidies that keep meat prices very low and encourage meat-based diets. The government`s food-price policies contribute to such risk-filled eating habits as meat consumption.

Another drawback is that the National Cancer Institute study only looked at the increased mortality risk resulting from meat consumption. It should be noted, that if eating meat can kill a large number of people, it can make an even larger number of people seriously ill.

Food that kills or makes people sick should not be considered food at all. However, the meat industry thinks otherwise. It believes that the study is flawed. American Meat Institute executive president, James Hodges, said: “Meat products are part of a healthy, balanced diet and studies show they actually provide a sense of satisfaction and fullness that can help with weight control. Proper body weight contributes to good health overall.”

The question is whether it is worth risking one`s life over having a little sense of satisfaction and fullness, which could easily be experienced by eating a healthful diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.

The new findings support a previous study published earlier this year in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which showed that eating meat boosts risk of prostate cancer by 40 Percent. And just last month, parents learned that their children had a 60% increased risk of developing leukemia if they consumed meat products, such as ham, sausages and hamburgers.

Vegetarians Live Longer and Healthier Lives

More recently, medical research has found that a properly balanced vegetarian diet may, in fact, be the healthiest diet. This was demonstrated by the over 11,000 volunteers who participated in the Oxford Vegetarian Study. For a period of 15 years, researchers analyzed the effects a vegetarian diet had on longevity, heart disease, cancer and various other diseases.

The results of the study stunned the vegetarian community as much as it did the meat-producing industry: “Meat eaters are twice as likely to die from heart disease, have a 60 percent greater risk of dying from cancer and a 30 percent higher risk of death from other causes.”

In addition, the incidence of obesity, which is a major risk factor for many diseases, including gallbladder disease, hypertension and adult onset diabetes, is much lower in those following a vegetarian diet. According to a Johns Hopkins University research report on 20 different published studies and national surveys about weight and eating behavior, Americans across all age groups, genders and races are getting fatter. If the trend continues, 75 percent of U.S. adults will be overweight by the year 2015.

It is now almost considered the norm to be overweight or obese. Already more than 80 percent of African-American women over the age of 40 are overweight, with 50 percent falling into the obese category. This puts them at great risk for heart disease, diabetes and various cancers. A balanced vegetarian diet may be the answer to the current obesity pandemic in the United States and many other countries.

Those who include less meat in their diet also have fewer problems with cholesterol. The American National Institute of Health, in a study of 50,000 vegetarians, found that the vegetarians live longer and also have an impressively lower incidence of heart disease and a significantly lower rate of cancer than meat-eating Americans. And in 1961, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a vegetarian diet could prevent 90-97% of heart diseases.

What we eat is very important for our health. According to the American Cancer Society, up to 35 percent of the 900,000 new cases of cancer each year in the United States could be prevented by following proper dietary recommendation. Researcher Rollo Russell writes in his Notes on the Causation of Cancer: “I have found of twenty-five nations eating flesh largely, nineteen had a high cancer rate and only one had a low rate, and that of thirty-five nations eating little or no flesh, none of these had a high rate.”

Could cancer lose its grip on modern societies if they turned to a balanced vegetarian diet? The answer is “yes,” according to two major reports, one by the World Cancer Research Fund and the other by the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy in the United Kingdom. The reports conclude that a diet rich in plant foods and the maintenance of a healthy body weight could annually prevent four million cases of cancer worldwide. Both reports stress the need for increasing the daily intake of plant fiber, fruits and vegetables and reducing red and processed meat consumption to less than 80-90g.

If you are currently eating meat on a regular basis and wish to change over to a vegetarian diet, unless you suffer from a major cardiovascular illness, do not give up all flesh foods at once! The digestive system cannot adjust to a substantially different diet from one day to the next. Start by reducing the number of meals that include meats such as beef, pork, veal and lamb and substituting poultry and fish during these meals. In time, you will find that you are able to consume less poultry and fish also, without creating strain on the physiology due to too rapid an adjustment.

Note: Although the uric acid content of fish, turkey and chicken is less than in red meat and, therefore, not quite as taxing to the kidneys and tissues of the body, the degree of injury that is sustained to the blood vessels and intestinal tract from eating these coagulated proteins is no less than it is with the consumption of meat.

Death in the Meat

Research has shown that all meat eaters have worms and a high incidence of parasites in their intestines. This is hardly surprising given the fact that dead flesh (cadaver) is a favorite target for microorganisms of all sorts. A 1996 study by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) showed that nearly 80 percent of ground beef is contaminated with disease-causing microbes. The primary source of these bugs is feces. A study conducted by the University of Arizona found there are more fecal bacteria in the average kitchen sink than in the average toilet bowl. This would make eating your food on the toilet seat safer than eating it in the kitchen. The source of this biohazard at home is the meat you buy at the typical grocery store.

The germs and parasites found in meat weaken the immune system and are the source of many diseases. In fact, most food poisonings today are related to meat-eating. During a mass outbreak near Glasgow, 16 out of over 200 infected people died from the consequences of eating E. coli contaminated meat. Frequent outbreaks are reported in Scotland and many other parts of the world. More than half a million Americans, most of them children, have been sickened by mutant fecal bacteria (E. coli) in meat. These germs are the leading cause of kidney failure among children in the United States. This fact alone should prompt every responsible parent to prevent their children from eating flesh foods.

Not all parasites act so swiftly as E. coli though. Most of them have long-term effects that are noticed only after many years of eating meat. The government and the food industry are trying to divert attention from the escalating problem of meat contamination by telling the consumer it is his own fault that these incidents happen. It is very obvious that they want to avoid hefty lawsuits, and bad-mouthing of the meat industry. They insist that dangerous bacterial outbreaks occur because the consumer does not cook the family`s meat long enough. It is now considered a crime to serve a rare hamburger. Even if you have not committed this “crime,” any infection will be attributed to not washing your hands every time you touch a raw chicken or to letting the chicken touch your kitchen counter or any other food. The meat itself, they claim, is totally safe and meets the standard safety requirements imposed by the government; of course, this holds true only as long as you keep disinfecting your hands and your kitchen countertop. It evades all good reasoning to propose such a “solution” to the 76 million cases of meat-borne illnesses a year, except to safeguard the vested interests of the government and the meat industry. If a particular imported food produced in China is found to be contaminated, even if it hasn`t actually killed anyone, it is immediately taken off the shelves of grocery stores. Yet, with all the research proving that meat-consumption harms and kills millions of people each year, meat continues to be sold in all grocery stores.

The new mutant bugs found in today`s meat are extremely deadly. For you to come down with Salmonella poisoning, you have to consume at least a million of these germs. But to become infected with one of the new mutant bugs, you need to ingest a measly five of them. In other words, a tiny particle of uncooked hamburger, making it from a kitchen utensil to your plate, is enough to kill you. Scientists have now identified more than a dozen food-borne pathogens with such deadly effects. The Center for Disease Control admits that they don`t even know the bugs behind most food-related illnesses and deaths.

Much of the germ-infestation of meat is caused by feeding farm animals foods that are unnatural to them. Cattle are now fed corn, which they are unable to digest, but it makes them fat very quickly. Cattle feed also contains chicken feces. The millions of pounds of chicken litter (feces, feathers and all) scraped off the floors of chicken houses are recycled as cattle feed. The cattle industry considers this “good protein.” The other ingredients of cattle feed consist of ground-up parts of animals, such as deceased chickens, pigs and horses. According to the industry, giving the cattle natural, healthy feeds would be far too costly and so unnecessary. Who really cares what the meat is made of, as long as it looks like meat?

Combined with hefty doses of growth hormones, a diet of corn and special feeds shortens the duration of fattening up a steer for market from a normal time period of 4-5 years to a mere 16 months. Of course, the unnatural diet makes the cows sick. Like their human consumers, they suffer from heartburn, liver disease, ulcers, diarrhea, pneumonia and other infections. To keep the cattle alive until the deadline for slaughter at the “ripe old age” of 16 months, the cows need to be fed enormous doses of antibiotics. In the meantime, the microbes that respond to the massive biochemical assault of antibiotics, find ways to become immune to these drugs by mutating into resistant new strains.

Those unfortunate cows that don`t drop dead prematurely due to all the poisons fed to them during their short earthly existence, experience an undignified and gruesome end of life in the slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant. From there, the diseased, germ-infested meat ends up in your local grocery store, and a little later, on your dinner plate, if you so dare.

Sources:

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/169/6/543

http://health.yahoo.com/news/reuters/us_red_death.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7959128.stm

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20090324/D9745SJG0.html

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/70/3/525S.pdf (Oxford Vegetarian Study)

http://www.cleanse.net/index.asp?PageAction=Custom&ID=26

http://www.wcrf-uk.org/

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp (American Cancer Society)

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?navtype=SU&navid=FOOD_NUTRITION (USDA)

Excerpts taken from “Timeless Secrets of Health and Rejuvenation”Reprinted from NaturalNews.

Hardly a month passes without a report of another study linking consumption of animal fat and meat with elevated risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other killer diseases that cripple then kill over a million Americans annually. Estimated costs of associated medical care and lost productivity run as high as $300 billion.

We have witnessed alarming developments:

• Obesity is implicated in 300,000 US deaths and costs the nation $117 billion per year.
• American Heart Association has condemned popular high-protein diets.
• A diet rich in fruits and vegetables substantially reduces the risk of high blood pressure.
• Consumption of dairy products increases the risk of prostate cancer.
• Consumption of meat and dairy products increases the risk of type 2 diabetes by 60%.
• USDA is failing to test adequately for ‘Mad Cow’ disease.
• A hundred feed plants may be spreading the Mad Cow disease.
• Deadly Enterococci bacteria have been found in 3% of pork samples.
• Widespread use of antibiotics by the poultry industry threatens their efficacy for humans.

Meatout Can Help

These developments confer special meaning on the annual observance of the Great American Meatout, the world’s oldest and largest annual grassroots diet education campaign.

On and around March 20, caring folks in a 1,000 communities in all 50 states and a host of other countries are welcoming spring with educational events ranging from information tables (‘steakouts’) and exhibits to classroom presentations, receptions, public dinners, cooking demonstrations, homeless feedings, and elaborate ‘lifestivals.’ They ask their friends and neighbors to “kick the meat habit this spring and explore a wholesome, nonviolent plant-based diet.”

The explosive growth of the Great American Meatout has been due in large measure to the support of consumer advocates, educators, health authorities, and the mass media. Radio and TV networks have interviewed entertainers Casey Kasem, Mary Tyler Moore, James Cromwell, Bill Maher, and other members of the Meatout National Council.

Health editors have carried stories on national trends toward meatless eating, provided delicious, healthful meatless recipes, and covered local Meatout events.

To assist you in covering The Great American Meatout, we have provided links to websites dealing with health and nutrition, and a table of selected events.

Please, contact us at info@meatout.org or 1-800-MEATOUT for any additional questions or to arrange interviews with celebrities, authors, physicians, and activists.

Thank you for your interest in The Great American Meatout!

(NaturalNews) Many health conscious people have made the decision not to eat meat, viewing the consumption of animal flesh as having negative consequences on the body, the spirit, and even the personality. Animal rights activists have been quite vocal in pointing out the deplorable conditions under which animals destined to become part of the traditional food chain are raised. Tough economic times have given rise to a chorus of budget minded columnists reminding people that giving up animal protein will make their food dollars stretch farther. Today, there is one more aspect to consider about the consumption of animal protein: the connection between industrialized animal farming and human disease.

New infectious diseases are linked to the rise of factory animal farming

Factory farms are breeding grounds for virulent disease and disease resistant strains of antibiotics, according to the 2008 report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, in conjunction with the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The commission’s report highlights the risks to the public resulting from the growth of the industrialization of farm animal production. It is the result of two and one half years of investigation centered in four areas: public health, environmental impact, effects on farm communities, and animal health and welfare.

Fifteen commissioners, each with impressive credentials, concluded that while factory animal farming and production is increasing worldwide at an exponential rate, the rates of new forms of infectious diseases have been concurrently on the increase. There is clearly a link between factory farming and human illness.

Although the number of farms producing animals for food has declined dramatically in the past five decades as small independent farmers have been pushed out of the way by the giant food conglomerates, the number of food animals produced has stayed fairly constant. It is this concentration of farm animals in larger and larger numbers in ever closer proximity to one another, along with some of the feed and animal management methods used in the industrial system that has increased the risks of pathogens and created more opportunities for disease transmission to humans. Of particular concern is the increase in antibiotic use, needed to keep animals alive under such deplorable conditions. Excessive use of antibiotics has given rise to antibiotic-resistant microbes that pose a threat to the health of humans as well as animals.

The risks fall into three categories: prolonged worker contact with animals, increased pathogen transmission within a herd or flock, and the increased opportunities for the generation of antimicrobial resistant bacteria as the result of imprudent use of antibiotics, or new strains of viruses.

Communities near industrial farms animal production facilities are seen as particularly at risk, with children, the elderly, and individuals with chronic health conditions in the greatest danger of the health threats posed by such methods of farming.

Government officials ignore threat of antibiotic-resistant infections

These warnings are nothing new. Several organizations have raised questions about the effects of antibiotic use in factory farming on land and water raised animals. The Infectious Disease Society of American has declared antibiotic-resistant infections to be an epidemic sweeping through the U.S. The Food and Agriculture Organization has recommended that agricultural use of antibiotics be restricted. They claim that the health of the world’s population is threatened by the globalization of industrial animal farms and concentrated animal feeding operations.

Zoonotic pathogens are on the increase

Prior to the 20th century, many humans lived short life spans relative to their potential. Many died at young ages as the result of infections. With the implementation of better hygiene and sanitation systems people began to live longer. But it wasn’t until the discovery of penicillin that the life span increased dramatically. During the golden age of America that began in the early 1950s, penicillin and its derivatives kept most Americans in the picture of health. When polio was finally conquered in the 1960s, everyone believed the threat of infectious disease was history.

That golden age was short lived. New diseases began to show up at a pace previously unknown in history of medicine. A new pathogen has sprung up almost every year for the past three decades. Most of these pathogens are zoonotic, meaning they can jump the gap from animals to infection of humans. Of the documented human pathogens, about 64 percent are zoonotic.

People have turned their backs on nature in the interest of greed

According to reporter Laura Sayre in an article for Mother Earth News, the total U.S. hog population numbered 53 million in 1965. This number was spread over more than 1 million pig farms in the United States, many of which were small family operations. Today, 65 million hogs are raised on just over 65,000 farms across the nation. Many of these factory farms are raising 5,000 hogs at any given time.

Sayer notes that broiler chicken production has risen from 366 million in 1945 to 8,400 million in 2001. Most industrialized chicken raising facilities house tens of thousands of birds together. Fifty-five billion chickens are raised each year on a worldwide basis. The global pig industry is close to 1 billion, half of which are raised in confinement. Some countries house as many as 50,000 animals together.

Raising animals in such a fashion violates the principles of animal husbandry accepted as good practice by people for thousands of years and practiced on family farms. Intensive confinement often severely restricts movement and natural behaviors, such as the ability to walk or lie on natural materials, having enough floor space to move with some freedom, and rooting behaviors in pigs. The most intensive confinement systems, such as restrictive veal crates, hog gestation pens, restrictive furrowing crates, and battery cages for poultry all prevent animals from normal range of movement and are particularly inhumane treatments.

The outcome is animals in severe distress. Animals cannot be cared for by tried and true traditional methods when they are crammed together in factory farms in confined conditions. Animals raised under the industrial model experience no quality of life and live in constant stress as the result of overcrowding. This results in weakened immune systems and susceptibility to infection. Lack of sunlight and fresh air guarantees any disease will spread like wildfire.

Good animal husbandry helps protect the safety of the food supply. Scientists have recognized that food safety is linked to the health of animals that produce meat, dairy and egg products. They know that intensive confinement production systems produce increased pathogen shedding in animals.

To prevent and treat the diseases that arise from such conditions, the lords of factory animal farms have relied on antibiotics to the point of injecting chicken eggs with them. Animal feed is laced with antibiotics and so are the tissues and organs of these animals when they appear in the butcher’s case. Producers of ‘natural’ chickens that are claimed to be free of antibiotics can get by with that claim because the chicken embryos are soaked in antibiotics while they are inside the eggs. Today, the majority of antibiotic use is preventative.

Overuse of antibiotics in people is insignificant compared to that in animals

Some members of the medical establishment and many critics outside of the medical profession have been concerned for many years about the excessive prescribing of antibiotics for diseases that offer inconvenience as their major threat. These warnings have generally fallen on deaf ears within both the medical profession and government regulatory agencies. Antibiotics are now often the first choice treatments for diseases that are not even affected by them, like the common cold.

This excessive use of antibiotics pales in comparison with their use in the industrialized raising of animals for food. According to Sayers, “it’s a simple fact that the more antibiotics are used, especially prolonged use at low doses as in factory farms, the more antibiotic-resistant microbes will become. Bacteria and viruses are also notoriously promiscuous, swapping genes across species and even across genera, creating what the Johns Hopkins researchers call reservoirs of resistance. In some pathogens, selection for resistance also results in increased virulence…In other cases, otherwise harmless microbes can transfer resistance genes to pathogenic species.”

Bio-containment procedures are geared toward protecting livestock from disease outbreaks. There appears to be little concern about preventing human pathogens from escaping into the wider environment through the many routes available that include the food itself, water, and air. A worker in such facilities can carry pathogens home on his body or clothing without being aware of it, allowing microbes to be released in towns or cities miles away from the factory farm where he works. Globalization means that pathogens can be spread anywhere.

Waste systems are inadequate to neutralize pathogens

Human health is further threatened by the likelihood of animals to excrete pathogenic microbes. The tremendous quantities of waste that concentrate on the premises of industrial animal producers may exceed the capacity of the landscape to absorb the nutrients and neutralize the pathogens. The annual production of manure produced by animal confinement facilities exceeds that produced by the human population of the country by at least three times. And unlike human sewage, the majority of waste from factory farms is spread upon the ground untreated.

Such large quantities of manure carry excess nutrients and chemicals including antibiotics, hormones and heavy metals into waterways, lakes, groundwater, soils and airways. Land application of untreated animal waste on cropland contributes to excessive nutrient loading, and ultimately to plant growth so dense around water that aquatic animal life is suffocated.

Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock operations account for 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding emissions from the transportation sector. Air quality degradation is also a problem near industrial farm animal production because of the localized release of toxic gases, and particulates and bioaerosols that contain microorganisms including human pathogens. Livestock emission of ammonia from factory farms adds to the acidification of soil and water, while species diversity is threatened by nutrient overload.

Factory animal farms shown to be linked with food borne illness

“When dioxin-contaminated chicken feed led to the removal from the market of all chicken and eggs in Belgium for several weeks in June of 1999, doctors there noted a 40 percent decline in the number of human Campylobacter infections,” according to Sayer. Most chickens sold in the U.S. are contaminated with this bacterium. Eggs from factory farm chickens contaminated with salmonella caused 2,000 hospitalizations and 60 deaths in the year 2000. A host of infections not thought of as food-related may be the result of overuse of antibiotics at factory farms.

The MRSA bacterium, responsible for difficult or impossible to treat infections in humans, seemed to come out of nowhere when it was first seen in hospitals. Now the Veterinary Microbiology study has showed that industrialized North American pig farms and farmers commonly carry MRSA, including a strain that infects humans. Around nine million Canadian raised hogs are imported into the U.S. every year.

Healthy people are developing MRSA infections. Medical, agricultural, and environmental experts have called for Congress to compel the FDA to study whether use of antibiotics in animal agriculture is contributing to the surge in MRSA deaths in the U.S., which now exceed the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS. Since the government is not systematically testing U.S. livestock for MRSA, it is not known whether farms in the U.S. are also sources.

The excessive use of antibiotics in factory farms can select for resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. A European study has documented that industrial pig farms routinely using antibiotics were more likely to have MRSA than farms with limited antibiotic use.

For more information:

http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=38438

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2008/2008-04-29-01.asp

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Natural-Health/Meat-Poultry-Health-Risk.aspx

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=32320

Reprinted from NaturalNews.

The research, published today in the British Medical Journal, highlighted a 44% increase in risk of cognitive impairment when exposed to high levels of second-hand smoke.

Previous studies identified active smoking as a risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia. However, this is the first large-scale study to conclude that second-hand smoke exposure could lead to dementia and other neurological problems in adults. (Previous findings suggested that second-hand smoke exposure could impair cognitive development in children and adolescents.)

The research, led by Dr Llewellyn, used saliva samples from nearly 5000 non-smoking adults over the age of 50. By measuring levels of cotinine (a by-product of nicotine) in their saliva and taking a detailed smoking history, the researchers were able to assess levels of exposure to second-hand smoke.

A range of neuropsychological tests were then used to assess aspects of brain function such as verbal memory (recalling words immediately and after a delay), numerical calculations, time orientation, and verbal fluency (naming as many animals as possible in one minute). These results were added together to provide a global score for cognitive function, and those whose scores were in the lowest 10 per cent were subsequently identified as suffering from cognitive impairment.

From their results they concluded that exposure to second-hand smoke may be linked to an increased chance of developing cognitive impairment, including dementia. The authors proposed a number of possible explanations for why exposure to second-hand smoke may increase the odds of dementia, including an increased risk of heart disease and stroke which are known to increase the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia.

Dr Llewellyn commented on the research, “We have conducted the first study to examine the association between second-hand smoke exposure and cognitive impairment in elderly non-smokers.

“Our results suggest that inhaling other people’s smoke may damage the brain, impair cognitive functions such as memory, and make dementia more likely. Given that passive smoking is also linked to other serious health problems such as heart disease and stroke, smokers should avoid lighting up near non-smokers. Our findings also support calls to ban smoking in public places.”

Reprinted from University of Cambridge.

COLLEGE STATION – There’s an emerging star in the super-food world.

Plums are rolling down the food fashion runway sporting newly discovered high levels of healthy nutrients, say scientists at Texas AgriLife Research.

Plainly, “blueberries have some stiff competition,” said Dr. Luis Cisneros, AgriLife Research food scientist.”Stone fruits are super fruits with plums as emerging stars.”

Far from fruit snobbery, the plum is being ushered in after Cisneros and Dr. David Byrne, AgriLife Research plant breeder, judged more than 100 varieties of plums, peaches and nectarines and found them to match or exceed the much-touted blueberries in antioxidants and phytonutrients associated with disease prevention.

The duo acknowledge that blueberries remain a good nutritional choice. But Byrne said their findings are plum good news, especially in tight economic times, because one relatively inexpensive plum contains about the same amount of antioxidants as a handful of more expensive blueberries.

“People tend to eat just a few blueberries at a time – a few on the cereal or as an ingredient mixed with lots of sugar,” Cisneros said. “But people will eat a whole plum at once and get the full benefit.”

Discovery of the plum’s benefits – along with that of fellow stone fruits, the peach and the nectarine – came after the researchers measured at least five brands of blueberries on the market. Against those numbers, the team measured the content of more than 100 different types of plums, nectarines and peaches.

The first comparison was for antioxidants, molecules that sweep through a body looking for free radicals to knock out. Free radicals are atoms or molecules that lurk where diseases like cancer and heart disease are found.

“If the radicals aren’t taken care of,” Cisneros said, “they will cause the problems that lead to disease.”

But the scientists didn’t stop at knowing that plums and peaches were flexing their antioxidant muscles.

“Knowing that we had all these varieties with high levels of antioxidants, then the possibility of preventing these diseases would also be high with their consumption, so we went to the next step – how these compounds could actually inhibit chronic diseases,” Cisneros said.

The team examined the full content of plums and peaches, then tested the effect of the compounds they found on breast cancer cells and cholesterol in the lab.

“We screened the varieties again with the biological assays,” Cisneros said. “And that had never been done before, because it is expensive and a lot of work. But that investment is small in terms of the information we got, and how it can be used now for breeding efforts to produce even better fruit.”

Byrne noted, for example, that one benefit the team found was that the phytonutrients in plums inhibited in vitro breast cancer growth without adversely affecting normal cell growth.

He said this type of research needs further study but is an indication that breeders ultimately will be able to produce new crop varieties with the best ratio of various phytochemicals to have an impact on disease prevention and inhibition. And these fruits will be available as fresh produce as well as in extracts for dietary supplements.

“Future work with stone fruits will focus on cardiovascular and cancer using animal models and identification of specific compounds that exert the properties,” Cisneros added.

Bottom line from the researchers: “We suggest that consumers take seriously the recommendation to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables – or even more – every day and to make sure that plums are part of that,” Byrne said.

Funding comes from the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M University and the California Tree Fruit Agreement.

Reprinted from Texas A&M.