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

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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

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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.

(NaturalNews) Organic foods can be considered to be better and healthier not only for the consumer but also for the environment. Organic foods are considered to be more nutrient dense than their counterparts produced via modern farming practices.

Dr. David Thomas, a physician and researcher, has studied and compared the United States government guidelines and tables for the nutritional content of various foods. These tables have been published by the government first in 1940 and again in 2002. Dr. Thomas has noticed a trend that supports the decline in the nutritional quality of fruits and vegetables produced via modern farming practices in recent decades. Because of his research Dr. Thomas has posed the following question, “Why is it that you have to eat four carrots to get the same amount of magnesium as you would have done in 1940?”

A study published in the Journal of Applied Nutrition lists many nutrients that appear to be altered based on how they are farmed. The study looked at organic apples, pear, potatoes, wheat, and sweet corn and compared the levels of certain nutrients in relation to the commercially available counterparts produced via modern farming practices. The study lists the macronutrient chromium as being found at levels 78% higher in organic foods. The study also showed that Calcium is found at a level 63% higher in organic foods and Magnesium is found at a level 138% higher in organic foods. Other studies have shown that the use of pesticides can also alter the levels of certain vitamins including B vitamins, vitamin C, and beta-carotene in fruits and vegetables.

In 2003 a study was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry which found that organic corn had 52% more vitamin C than the commercially available counterpart which was grown utilizing modern farming practices. This study also found that polyphenol levels were significantly higher in the organic corn.

While many studies have been done looking into the benefits of organic produce there still is much to be learned. Dr. Marion Nestle the chair of New York University’s department of nutrition, food studies and public health has said, “I don’t think there is any question that as more research is done, it is going to become increasingly apparent that organic food is healthier.”

Many studies including a study recently published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have done much to reinforce the perception of many American consumers that organic foods are both better for the consumer and the environment.

http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Study-supports-benefits-of-organic-food
http://lookwayup.com/free/organic.htm
http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/organic_nutrition.cfm

Reprinted from Natural News.

(NaturalNews) The evidence is in. Eating a plant based diet is the key to health and longevity. The only question left is how to get the best value for each dollar you have to spend on fruits and vegetables. The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit organization devoted to human and environmental health, has come up with some guidelines that may help you decide. In a recently published listing, they pointed out those fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of pesticides that should be avoided unless they are available from known local growers, grown at home, or labeled as organic. They also identified which conventionally grown fruits and vegetables have low levels of pesticides and can be bought without too much compromise.

EWG, as the group is often known, analyzed results from 87,000 tests on 47 fruits and vegetables conducted by the USDA and FDA between 2000 and 2007. Nearly all the studies used to create their list tested produce after it had been rinsed or peeled. Contamination was measured in six different ways and crops were ranked based on a composite score from all categories.

Their Dirty Dozen showed the highest levels of contamination. Fruits topped this list, taking 7 of the 12 top slots in this dubious distinction. Nectarines had the highest percentage of samples testing positively for pesticides (97.3 percent), followed by peaches (96.7 percent) and apples (94.1 percent).

Peaches had the highest likelihood of multiple pesticides on a single sample, with 87.0 percent tested having two or more pesticide residues. They were followed by nectarines (85.3 percent) and apples (82.3 percent). Peaches and apples had the most pesticides detected on a single sample, with nine residues, followed by strawberries and imported grapes in which eight pesticides were found on a single sample of each. Peaches had the most pesticides overall, with some combination of up to 53 pesticides found on the samples tested, followed by apples with 50 pesticides and strawberries with 38.

Among the dishonored vegetables, sweet bell peppers, celery, kale, lettuce, and carrots topped the list for exposing consumers to pesticides. Celery had the highest percentage of samples test positively for pesticides (94.1 percent), followed by sweet bell peppers (81.5 percent) and carrots (82.3 percent). Celery was also the most likely to have multiple pesticides on a single sample (79.8 percent), followed by sweet bell peppers (62.2 percent) and kale (53.1 percent).

Sweet bell peppers had the most pesticides detected on a single sample (11 detected), followed by kale (10 detected), and lettuce and celery which both had nine detected. Sweet bell peppers had the most pesticides overall (a jaw dropping 64), followed by lettuce (57) and carrots (40).

Although they escaped classification in the Dirty Dozen, note should also be given to spinach, potatoes, and domestic grapes because of their popularity in certain segments of the population. Spinach, which ranked number 14 in highest pesticide load, is thought of as a healthy food. Health minded shoppers have loaded their carts and salad bar servings with spinach thinking they were getting a vegetable that would support their health. Yet spinach was found to have a pesticide load of 58 (with 100 being the worst). Potatoes, one of the favorites of men and children, had a pesticide load of 56 and was ranked right behind spinach at number 15. Children love to eat their way through the summer with a fist full of grapes. But domestic grapes had a pesticide load of 44. By comparison, the pesticide loads for onion, avocado and sweet corn were numbered 2 or less.

EWG also identified the Clean 15, a list of produce least likely to have pesticide residues. Vegetables on this list were onions, sweet corn, asparagus, sweet peas, cabbage, eggplant, broccoli, tomatoes and sweet potatoes.

Over half of the tomatoes (53.1 percent), broccoli (65.2 percent), eggplant (75.4 percent), sweet pea (77.1 percent), and cabbage (82.1 percent) had no detectable pesticides in the samples. Among onions, sweet corn and asparagus, there were no detectable residues on 90 percent or more of the samples.

Multiple pesticide residues were extremely rare on any of these Clean 15 vegetables. Tomatoes had the highest likelihood of having multiple pesticide residues, with a 13.5 percent chance of having more than one pesticide. None of the samples of onions or sweet corn contained more than one pesticide.

The greatest number of pesticides detected on a single sample of any of the Clean 15 was five, compared to 11 found on sweet bell peppers, the vegetable with the most residues on a single sample.

Fruits making the Clean 15 list were avocados, pineapples, mangoes, kiwi, papayas, watermelon and grapefruit. Fewer than 10 percent of pineapple, mango, and avocado samples had detectable pesticides, and fewer than one percent of samples had more than one pesticide residue. Although 54.5 percent of grapefruit had detectable pesticides, multiple residues were less common, with only 17.5 percent of samples containing more than one residue. Watermelon had residues on 28.1 percent of samples, and just 9.6 percent had multiple residues.

Pesticides are designed to kill

There is an endless parade of research demonstrating the toxicity of pesticides to human health and to the environment, even at doses considered “safe” by the industry and government. This research has linked pesticides to many toxic effects including nervous system disorders, cancer, hormone disruption, liver and thyroid dysfunction, and skin, eye and lung irritation.

According to EWG, “Even in the face of a growing body of evidence, pesticide manufacturers continue to defend their products, claiming that the amounts of pesticides on produce are not sufficient to elicit safety concerns. Yet, such statements are often made in the absence of actual data, since most safety tests done for regulatory agencies are not designed to discover whether low dose exposures to mixtures of pesticides and other toxic chemicals are safe, particularly during critical periods of development.” Most studies are done using high doses and are designed to find only the gross, obvious toxic effects. In the absence of low dose studies, pesticide and chemical manufacturers claim safety where none has been demonstrated or proven.

Children bear the highest risk

Pesticides pose a risk to vital organ systems from conception to maturity. Exposure to pesticides during critical periods of development often has lasting negative effects that manifest throughout the lifetime. Because the metabolism, physiology and biochemistry of a child differ from those of adults, a child is often less able to metabolize and inactivate toxic chemicals and can be particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects. Pesticides that may have no harmful effect on the mother can damage the nervous system, brain, reproductive organs, and endocrine system of a fetus.

Without public outcry, the government will continue to cave to big agribusiness

The fact that the government is allowing the use of pesticides on produce does not mean it is safe to eat that produce. A look back in history shows that the government once approved the use of such damaging and deadly pesticides as DDT, chordane, dursban and others. Without public outcry these chemicals might still be in use. Despite this threat to the population, the government moves very slowly, and only when the mountain of evidence against a pesticide can no longer be ignored. Pesticide manufacturers and agribusiness groups are some of the most powerful people. They have fought the government every step of the way to overrule the pesticide laws now in place.

However, the U.S. has stringent governance of pesticides and their use compared to many other countries likely to export produce. Produce from other countries often contains higher levels of pesticides, and these pesticides are more deadly. The EWG study tested only grapes from both domestic and foreign sources. Yet, the results of that testing revealed the glaring difference in magnitude. Grapes from foreign countries carried a pesticide load of 66, compared with grapes grown in the U.S. with a pesticide load of 44. This difference exists across the range of fruits and vegetables grown in foreign countries compared to those grown domestically. Included in this difference is produce that is canned and frozen as well as produce sold fresh. It also includes produce used in processed or prepared foods from foreign countries.

Pesticide is systemic

Many people are still operating under the myth that pesticide can be washed off. It is a myth that even health oriented grocers like to exploit by selling special vegetable washes for the uninformed. This research is a clear revelation that is not the case, as the studies were done after the produce was washed and in many cases peeled.

Pesticide is taken into the plant as it photosynthesizes, and it becomes contained in every cell of the plant. No amount of soaking, scrubbing, or washing with special compounds can get it out. Once pesticide is applied, the plant and the pesticide become one.

Corporate farming methods have increased the need for pesticides

Pesticide is expensive. Growers only use pesticide when they absolutely must. The need for pesticide is so great because crops produced by the large corporate farms are grown with very little regard for soil conditions, although it is the quality of the soil that determines the quality of the plant. Poor quality plants are weak and unable to fend off pests. When one pest has attacked a crop, it is weakened even further and is less able to fight off the next pest assault. This snowball effect is why some crops have so many different pesticides used on them.

A weakened plant riddled with pests is only able to produce a poor quality fruit or vegetable. This is why most conventionally grown produce is so lacking in taste and appeal compared to organically grown produce. The hidden factor is that most conventionally grown produce is lacking in nutritional quality as well.

The best choice: Say “no” to conventionally grown produce

There is much value in this research. People on budgets can look at it and tell instantly what conventional produce can be bought without taking a big chance with their health, and they can also see which produce should be bought only when it has been grown organically, by a local grower who can be trusted or grown in one’s own garden. It also underscores the need to buy only domestically grown produce or to grow your own. And it is a reminder that the consumer is ultimately king, because produce will only be grown conventionally as long as people are willing to buy it.

Yet this research is also a sad commentary on the state of the food supply. All that conventionally grown produce sitting in the stores will be eaten by someone. Out of all the produce tested, only onions and avocado showed to be truly safe. Buying any of the others when grown conventionally involves some kind of trade off between money and health, a trade off that should not have to be made.

For more information and complete list of pesticides on produce:
http://www.foodnews.org/
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/349263_pesticide30.html
http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/pesticides.htm

Reprinted from Natural News.

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”

CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help-not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias-now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort-began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources-the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce-which often reached 100 percent-to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price-about two-thirds of the market price-of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.

“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners-grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

“We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.”

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”
The result of these and other related innovations?

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate-widely used as evidence of hunger-by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”-the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or education-quality food for all is a public good.”

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution-except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years-Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach-food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.

Reposted from yesmagazine.org.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

(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.

But this message may be too simplistic. Over the past decade, scientists have begun conducting sophisticated comparisons of foods grown in organic and conventional farming systems. They’re finding that not all apples (or tomatoes, kiwis, or milk) are equal, especially when in comes to nutrient and pesticide levels. How farmers grow their crops affects, sometimes dramatically, not only how nutritious food is, but also how safe it is to eat. It may well be that a federal food policy that fails to acknowledge the connection between what happens on the farm and the healthfulness of foods is enough to make a nation sick.

The Results Are In

In the late 1990s, researcher Anne-Marie Mayer looked at data gathered by the British government from the 1930s to the 1980s on the mineral contents of 20 raw fruits and vegetables. She found that levels of calcium, magnesium, copper, and sodium in vegetables, and of magnesium, iron, copper, and potassium in fruit had dropped significantly.

The 50-year period of Mayer’s study coincides with the post World War II escalation of synthetic nitrogen and pesticide use on farms. These agri-chemicals allowed farmers to bypass the methods of maintaining soil fertility by replenishing soil organic matter with cover crops, manure, and compost, and of controlling pests with crop rotation and inter-cropping. Reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides became a defining characteristic of conventional farming, while farmers who eschewed the use of agri-chemicals came to be considered organic.

In 2004, Donald R. Davis, a research associate with the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, published a similar analysis of data collected by the USDA in 1950 and again in 1999 on the levels of 13 nutrients in more than 40 food crops. Davis found that while seven nutrients showed no significant changes, protein declined by six percent; phosphorous, iron, and calcium declined between nine percent and 16 percent; ascorbic acid (a precursor of Vitamin C) declined 15 percent; and riboflavin declined 38 percent. Breeding for characteristics like yield, rapid growth, and storage life at the expense of taste and quality were likely contributing to the decline, Davis hypothesized. The “dilution effect,” whereby fertilization practices cause harvest weight and dry matter to increase more rapidly than nutrient accumulation can occur, probably also played a role, Davis suggested.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania were seeing a trade-off between use of synthetic fertilizers and food nutrient values in the Institute’s Farming System Trial.

“We looked at the major and minor nutrients of oat leaves and seeds, grown after 22 years of differentiation under conventional and organic systems,” says Paul Hepperly, research and training manager at the Institute. “We found a direct correlation between the increase of organic matter and the amount of individual minerals in the oat leaves and seeds. The increase in minerals ranged from about seven percent for potassium, up to 74 percent for boron. On average, it was between 20 and 25 percent for all the elements we looked at, and we looked at nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese, copper, boron, and zinc. The production practices used on these oats was completely the same the year they were planted – the plots varied only by the legacy of what had happened to the soil as a result of the previous farming practices. This showed how dramatic the soil change had been and its effect on the nutrient content of the plant. We’ve done these tests not only on oats but also on wheat, corn, soybeans, tomatoes, peppers, and carrots, and we consistently find that the organic heritage improves soil and improves the mineral content of the food products.”

Probably due in part to a fertilizer effect, and partly because the use of chemical pesticides dampens the mobilization of a plant’s own defenses, conventionally grown whole foods also often have lower levels of antioxidants and other beneficial phytochemicals than the same foods grown organically.

Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center and former executive director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences, maintains a database of all the studies published since 1980 that compare the nutrient levels of organic and conventional foods. His analysis of food comparison studies shows that, on average, conventionally grown fruits and vegetables have 30 percent fewer antioxidants than their organically grown counterparts. This makes enough of a difference, says Benbrook, that “consumption of organic produce will increase average daily antioxidant intake by about as much as an additional serving of most fruits and vegetables.”

The public health implications of farming methods that restore food nutrient density are tantalizing. Several studies released in 2007 suggest that moving US agriculture toward organic practices could help to reduce the incidence of some of our nation’s most debilitating and costly chronic diseases.

At the University of California at Davis, researchers compared organic and conventional tomatoes. They found that 10-year mean levels of quercetin were 79 percent higher in organic tomatoes than in conventional tomatoes, and levels of kaempferol were 97 percent higher. Quercetin and kaempferol are flavonoids, which epidemiological studies suggest offer protection from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other age-related diseases.

A study led by Lukas Rist, head of research at the Paracelsus Hospital in Switzerland, demonstrated how farm practices affect health even several levels up the food chain. Rist analyzed milk samples from 312 breastfeeding mothers. He found that mothers consuming at least 90 percent of their dairy and meat from organic sources have 36 percent higher levels of rumenic acid in their breast milk than mothers eating conventional dairy and meat. Rumenic acid is one of a group of compounds that nutritional research suggests have anti-carcinogenic, anti-diabetic, and immune-modulating effects, and that favorably influence body fat composition.

Hay Belly Nation

Eager as we are to connect the dots between specific nutrients and specific health benefits, we’re still a long way from being able to understand or predict the effect of raising or lowering nutrient levels in one food or another. As Michael Pollan writes in his new book In Defense of Food, “Even the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another.”

Long-term human feeding trials are notoriously difficult to control, and, though epidemiological studies show a correlation between eating fruits and vegetables and decreased incidence of disease, these studies don’t identify which compounds in the food correspond with which health effects.

But even granting the many gaps in our knowledge of nutrient and health interactions, reducing the nutrient density of our whole foods seems a poor public health gamble. Americans already have trouble consuming the recommended daily amounts of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Diminishing the nutrient levels in the servings we do eat would seem to only compound our dietary problems.

Doctors don’t see many patients walk into their clinics with obvious deficiency-related illnesses like scurvy, says Dr. Alan Greene, attending physician at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. But doctors are, he says, seeing a lot of suboptimal intake of nutrients. “For instance, a huge percentage of the population doesn’t get its recommended levels of calcium. Pregnant adult women should be getting 1,000 milligrams of calcium. By the time a healthy baby is born, the baby will have about 30,000 milligrams of calcium in its body, and all of that has to come from mom’s diet or mom’s body. The average mom is only getting about 700 milligrams a day during pregnancy, so that gap is mostly coming out of her bones, and is related to the osteoporosis we’re seeing later.”

Greene encourages patients to include fresh produce in their diets and to eat organic as much as possible. “I’ll talk about how fruits and vegetables are really important, and that when you choose organic you’re getting more of the great stuff, less of the bad stuff.”

Unfortunately (or fortunately for those of us who like to eat), we haven’t yet been able to design nutrient supplements that provide the same benefits as eating whole foods. “In all well-designed dietary intervention trials, where a carefully monitored amount of nutrients – vitamin C, vitamin E, antioxidants, etc. – were delivered to the animals or people in the form of fresh whole foods versus the same levels in the form of supplements, the animals or people who ate the whole foods universally responded better and were healthier,” says Benbrook of the Organic Center.

Ironically, less nutrient dense foods may be partly why we’re eating more and more. Phytochemicals contribute to the satisfaction we derive from foods. Some contribute to foods’ flavor profiles, while others, like resveratrol, help trigger satiety. It could even be that the second helping is an instinctive attempt to secure sufficient micronutrients.

“In cattle and animals, this is known as hay belly,” says Hepperly at the Rodale Institute. “If your hay gets rained on, you wind up with very low-quality hay because the water leaches out all the nutrients. You’ll see animals eating more of this hay than they normally would. They get these big bellies, and they’re unhealthy, but they’re just trying to get their nutrients. Ranchers know that if they have animals with hay belly, they have poor quality food. What we’ve done with the erosion of nutrient content in our foods – what we’ve done with additives, processing, and artificial production methods – is that we have basically produced a hay belly nation.”

Pesticides for Breakfast

The toxicity of many of the chemical pesticides used by conventional farmers is of little dispute. Indeed, the EPA’s pesticide registration process is based upon identifying a level of exposure that is acutely toxic to lab animals, then working backwards to identify an exposure level that the EPA feels poses an acceptable threat to human and environmental health.

As our understanding of the body’s biochemistry advances, however, EPA-sanctioned levels of pesticide exposure are becoming harder to swallow.

Caroline Cox is the research director for the Center for Environmental Health based in Oakland, California. One of her favorite examples of the complex interactions of pesticides comes from a study undertaken by Texas Tech University researchers.

“The researchers were looking at possible hormonal effects of the herbicide Roundup, and they looked at the production of male sex hormones,” Cox says. “Before a sex hormone can be made, cholesterol has to be carried by a special ‘dump-truck’ molecule from the blood vessel to the place in the cell where the hormone is synthesized. What the researchers found was that one of the ingredients in Roundup interferes with the production of that dump-truck carrier molecule. You’d have trouble dreaming up something so complicated. It’s no wonder that it has taken us decades to identify effects like that.”

Cox and other toxicology experts disagree that “the dose makes the poison,” the rationale underlying the EPA approach to regulating pesticides. It may be that there is no safe dose for many of the pesticides we are regularly exposed to.

“If you think of pesticide use starting right around World War II, since that time science has progressed and researchers have gotten more and more sophisticated in the kinds of science that they can do,” she says. “And what they are doing is identifying effects of pesticides at lower and lower exposure levels. For example, there are studies on amphibians that find effects from atrazine [used to control weeds in almost two-thirds of all US corn and sorghum acreage] at the tenth of a part per billion level, which is such a tiny amount that it is almost impossible to grasp just how small an amount that is. … What they found was this condition called intersex in the frogs, meaning that the frogs had both male and female sex organs.”

A glance at the data gathered for the USDA Pesticide Data Program reveals that even at breakfast we consume several servings of pesticides. In 2005, 88 percent of apples, 92 percent of milk samples, 52 percent of orange juice samples, 67 percent of wheat samples, and 75 percent of water samples were contaminated with pesticides ranging from herbicides to post-harvest fungicides. None of these pesticides we eat for breakfast gets a clean bill of health. The EPA lists some as probable carcinogens, and others as affecting reproductive and nervous systems.

Exactly how each of us tolerates daily low doses of pesticides will vary according to our genetic heritage, the other industrial toxins we’re exposed to, our health, and our age. The very youngest and oldest of us will probably suffer the most damage from pesticide exposure. “At particular moments of development, the immune and neurological systems of infants are profoundly vulnerable to exposure to chemicals,” says Benbrook at the Organic Center. “And in the case of the elderly, their livers don’t work as well at detoxifying chemicals as they did in the middle part of their lives.”

Logically, the more often we can eat food grown without pesticides, the fewer pesticides we’ll consume. The connection between food choices and pesticide consumption was demonstrated in a 2006 study led by Chensheng Lu of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Lu measured the metabolites of organophosphorus pesticides in children’s urine as the children alternated between eating conventional and organic diets for five days at a stretch. Results of the study showed that metabolites of two organophosphorus pesticides commonly used in agriculture decreased to nondetectable levels when the children’s diets were switched to organic and quickly escalated to detectable levels when the children returned to their normal conventional diets.

Daily doses of pesticides are particularly unappetizing given the existence of a highly productive model of farming that doesn’t need these toxic chemicals. “If you could give me a magic wand and I could make any changes that I want, I would have the EPA researching, developing, and helping farmers implement sustainable agricultural processes so they don’t need pesticides,” Cox says. “There are better ways to manage pests. Organic is a great example that it can be done.”

200,000 Farmers NeededCox’s wish hints at what official acknowledgement of the interaction between farming practices and the healthfulness of our food could mean. As a country, we’re stuck in the mode of regulating and mitigating the negative effects of conventional farming.We could instead be spending our time and resources expanding and improving upon the organic model of food production and removing the structural barriers that limit regular access to organic food to a geographic and economic elite.

“Organic will be five to eight percent of the US food economy in the next couple of years,” says Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF). “But to go from five percent to 40 is another story. That will involve policy work and institutional change.”

For starters, the nation’s agricultural colleges will need to develop the capacity to train more organic farmers. “Organic systems are more complex and biologically intricate compared to a conventional agri-chemical based production system,” says Hepperly of the Rodale Institute. “Right now, the official number of organic farmers is approaching 20,000 in the United States. If we were going to have 30 percent of US agriculture in organic, we’d have to have 200,000 organic farmers. We’re talking an enormous ramp-up in our education system.”

For that to happen, Congressional action is sorely needed to redirect the Farm Bill away from status quo conventional farming and toward farm and food healthfulness.

“Overall, the USDA has been spending about $2 billion per year on research, extension, education, economics and statistics. Less than one percent is specifically directed at the needs of organic production, processing, and marketing,” Mark Lipson of OFRF testified before the newly formed House Agriculture Subcommittee on Horticulture and Organic Agriculture in April 2007.

The list of structural barriers goes on. Because there isn’t good pricing data for organic crops, organic growers pay a five percent penalty surcharge on crop insurance. When organic growers incur an insured loss, they are repaid at conventional crop prices even though conventional prices are usually far lower than organic prices.

Many regions lack the distribution infrastructure even to supply organic farmers with compost. “Organic is highly geocentric,” says Steve Diver, who worked for 18 years for the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service (ATTRA). “The organic infrastructure sucks to hell for most of the heartland of the country.” In California, Diver says, farmers can pick up the phone and order whatever soil amendments they need, in whatever quantities, from a local dealer who will deliver the goods right to the farm. But in many parts of the South, five to six farmers have to band together, order a 22-ton semi-truck load from out of state, then off-load the product into their own vehicles and truck it home.

Organic meat producers lack access to slaughterhouses. “You can’t sell meat unless it’s been slaughtered by USDA packing houses, and these slaughterhouses are mostly at CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations],” says Scowcroft. CAFO slaughterhouses generally won’t deal with the smaller numbers of animals that most organic meat producers are slaughtering at any one time. Even when they do, the CAFO slaughterhouse has to first be steam-cleaned and sterilized before animals can be slaughtered there for the meat to still qualify as certified organic. “And even then,” says Scowcroft, “there are a lot of chemicals used in the sterilization and the cleaning process, so what you really need are dedicated certified organic slaughter rooms.”

You Can Ask, But They Won’t TellTry to get guidance from the federal government on the potential health benefits of eating organic, and you’ll find your questions quickly and politely deflected. The US Department of Health and Human Services will defer to its Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA spokespeople will say that “organic” is a term used by the USDA, not the FDA, and that the FDA has no policy on organics. The USDA will say that its mandate does not extend to passing judgment on the relative safety and nutritional benefits of organic versus conventional foods, and that the USDA’s task is simply to regulate use of the “certified organic” label.With that passing of the apple, the federal government excuses itself from exploring whether conventional farming practices compromise the nutritional benefits of whole foods, and whether modern organic farming offers a model of food production that conveys significant health benefits. It’s anyone’s guess how many more studies will be needed before the relative merits of foods produced in different farming systems can become a topic of discussion among federal food and health officials. Agri-chemical companies led by Monsanto will certainly use their considerable influence to delay that day as long as possible.

In the meantime, we will keep eating – but we need to ask just how well?

Deborah Rich raises olives and two children in Monterey County, California, and frequently writes about the interaction of human nature and nature for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Reprinted from the Spring 2008 issue of Earth Island Journal available by membership.

(NaturalNews) There’s a new plot underway to sterilize your food and destroy the nutritional value of fresh produce. The players in this plot are the usual suspects: The USDA (which backed the “raw” almond sterilization rules now in effect in California) and the American Chemical Society — a pro-chemical group that represents the interests of industrial chemical manufacturers. The latest push comes from USDA researchers who conducted a study to see which method more effectively killed bacteria on leafy green vegetables like spinach.

To conduct the study, they bathed the spinach in a solution contaminated with bacteria. Then, they tried to remove the bacteria using three methods: Washing, chemical spraying and irradiation. Not surprisingly, only the irradiation killed nearly 100 percent of the bacterial colonies. That’s because radiation sterilizes both the bacteria and the vegetable leaves, effectively killing the plant and destroying much of its nutritional value while it kills the bacteria.

The USDA claims this is a huge success. By using radiation on all fresh produce, they claim, the number of food-borne illness outbreaks that happen each year could be substantially reduced. It all makes sense until you realize that by destroying the nutritional value of all fresh produce sold in the United States, an irradiation policy would greatly increase the number of people killed by infections and chronic diseases that are prevented by the natural medicines found in fresh produce!

Why fresh, living produce helps prevent sickness

The USDA, you see, has zero recognition of the difference between living produce and dead produce. To uneducated government bureaucrats, pasteurized or irradiated vegetable juice is identical to fresh, raw, living vegetable juice. They believe this because they’ve never been taught about the phytonutrients, digestive enzymes and life force properties that are found in fresh foods, but that are destroyed through heat or irradiation. This, the USDA is operating out of extreme ignorance when it comes to food and nutrition.

Even a simple leaf of spinach contains hundreds of natural medicines — phytonutrients that help prevent cancer, eye diseases, nervous system disorders, heart disease and much more. Every living vegetable is a powerhouse of disease-fighting medicine: Broccoli prevents cancer, beet greens cleanse the liver, cilantro removes heavy metals, celery prevents cancer, berries prevent heart disease and dark leafy greens help prevent over a dozen serious health conditions while boosting immune function and helping prevent other infections. But when you subject these fruits and vegetables to enough radiation to kill 99.9% of the pathogens that may be hitching a ride, you also destroy many of the phytonutrients responsible for these tremendous health benefits!

This means that while irradiating food may decrease outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, it will have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of people who get sick from other infections (and chronic diseases) due to the fact that their source of natural medicine has been destroyed. For many Americans, you see, salad greens are their one remaining source for phytonutrients. Given their diets of processed foods, junk foods and cooked foods, there are very few opportunities for these consumers to get fresh, phytonutrient-rich foods into their diet. And now the USDA wants to take that away, too, by mandating the irradiation of all fresh produce.

Let me make a rather obvious prediction, on the record: If the irradiation of fresh produce goes into effect in the United States, rates of infection among consumers will sharply increase, not decrease, due to the removal of immune-boosting natural medicine from the food supply. Consumers will also experience higher rates of cancer, heart disease, dementia, eye disorders, diabetes and even obesity. By destroying these thousands of healing phytonutrients, irradiation will leave many consumers defenseless against modern society’s many health challenges.

It is no exaggeration to say that a policy of mass irradiation of fresh produce is as blatantly stupid as the Romans building their aqueducts with lead-lined waterways. As historians have explained, after the aqueducts were built, the water delivered to the Roman population was contaminated with lead — a heavy metal that causes numerous health problems, including insanity. Many historians blame the lead-lined aqueducts as one of the primary reasons why the Roman Empire fell: Its leaders went mad, and the rest is history.

I would argue that America’s leaders are already mad, but that’s beside the point. If we start irradiating our food, thereby destroying its nutritional value, we are going to unleash a cascade of unintended consequences even greater than the Roman’s aqueducts. Absent the protections of phytonutrients found in plants, the health of most consumers will rapidly decline, and we’ll see the U.S. thrust into a quagmire of chronic disease and medical bankruptcy. (It’s already heading there, of course, but killing the food supply will only accelerate the downward spiral of health.)

Let’s sterilize all the food!

The USDA has never met a food sterilization plan it didn’t like. It backed the recent almond sterilization law that went into effect in California last year, forcing all almond growers to sterilize their almonds by subjecting them to toxic chemicals or cooking them at high enough temperatures to kill anything that might have been alive (such as the almond itself). Now, all the raw almonds consumed in America are purchased from overseas growers, where raw still means raw.

Raw milk has also been under attack in California and elsewhere. The USDA supported laws that essentially banned the sales of raw milk, requiring milk to be sterilized, too. If you now irradiate all the fresh produce, you have a food supply that is predominantly sterilized — otherwise known as “dead.” And dead foods lead to dead people.

That a society’s health regulators would want all foods to be dead should be downright shocking to anyone who knows anything about health and nutrition. Live foods keep people alive, but dead foods make people dead. It’s really not a complicated concept. The USDA’s definition of “food safety,” however, is based on the idea that the health of one immune-system-compromised individual who can’t handle a little E. Coli is more important than the ongoing health of the entire population. Thus, all foods must be killed for everyone.

I strongly disagree with this approach. Foods should not be expected to be sterilized. In terms of food safety, emphasis should be placed on boosting the health and immune systems of individuals so they can survive occasional contact with E. Coli rather than trying to create a sterile environment in which nothing is alive. As it turns out, the people susceptible to food-borne illnesses are precisely those individuals who have compromised immune systems due to their intake of vaccines and antibiotics. Thus, it is modern medicine that has made these people vulnerable to food-borne illnesses. Blame the drug companies, not the bacteria.

But the USDA would rather blame the food. Blaming conventional medicine for the harm it has caused to the human immune system is not politically correct. It’s better to blame the food, then use scare tactics to announce yet more outbreaks and hope for a public outcry for widespread food irradiation. And that brings me to the “final solution” on food irradiation.

How the USDA plans to join the FDA in keeping everyone sick

There is a corporate-sponsored plot underway in the U.S. today to keep people sick and deny them access to information about natural cures (such as medicinal foods) that would prevent disease and keep people out of the hospitals. In more than 1,500 articles on this website, I’ve documented the FDA’s criminality, the USDA’s indefensible actions, and the criminal behavior of drug manufacturers who only earn profits if they can find a way to keep the entire population sick and diseased for another generation or two.

Destroying the natural medicine in the food supply sure would be a highly effective way to create more customers for Big Pharma, wouldn’t it? I think it’s all part of the “keep the population sick and diseased” plot being carried out by an evil partnership between drug companies and the U.S. government. We already know that the FDA and USDA work for the corporations, not the People. We already know that they will do practically anything to boost their profits (including conducting medical experiments on infants, drugging schoolchildren, lying to the public, fabricating clinical trials and more). Is it any surprise that they would now attempt a “final solution” on the food supply that kills the food and thereby results in a huge reduction in the population’s intake of the disease-fighting nutrients found in fresh produce?

The social engineering recipe

Pulling this off, of course, requires a bit of social engineering by the USDA in order to force the public into demanding something be done. If you’re the USDA, you can’t just suddenly announce a national food sterilization plan; you have to prime the pump with a bit of dirty work. Here’s the simple plan for accomplishing that, if you’re the USDA:

1) Conduct poor inspections of fresh produce on purpose, in order to cause a large increase in food-borne illness outbreaks. (We’ve seen this increase happen over the last 12 – 24 months.) This can be easily accomplished by reducing the budget of food inspection offices, or removing inspectors from the payroll altogether (which has already happened).

2) Wait for the outbreaks to happen. When consumers get sick, run national press releases announcing how dangerous the food supply is.

3) Watch the consumer reaction as people and lawmakers demand “something be done!”

4) Fudge a study with the American Chemical Society to show that washing doesn’t work and that irradiation is the only solution. Time the release of this news to coincide with the public outcry that “something be done!”

5) Once the public is demanding a solution to food-borne illnesses, roll out a national produce irradiation requirement that sterilizes all the food.

Mission accomplished! This, of course, leads to point #6:

6) Watch the population become increasingly sick and diseased (thanks to the lack of phytonutrients that used to be found in the fresh produce), and cash in on your Big Pharma shares as the population is herded into hospitals for lucrative treatments with monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals.

It’s the same old social engineering trick that’s been used to hoodwink the American people hundreds of times. How do you get the public to support a war in the Middle East? Stage an attack on U.S. soil first, and wait for the public outcry. How do you get the People to support the mass sterilization of their own food supply? Lower your inspection standards, let the sickness spread, and then wait for the public outcry. It’s the way governments get things done these days: They manipulate the public into demanding the things they wanted to accomplish in the first place. These are sometimes called “false flag operations” in a military context, and they’ve been conducted by the U.S. government on numerous occasions, just like they were conducted by Hitler in Nazi Germany to justify his invasions of neighboring countries. You can read about False Flag operations on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

What “they” really want: A dead food supply

Let’s be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don’t want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don’t want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole lot more money than any food ever did).

Don’t you find it curious that this attack on the food supply is coming out now, right after all this incredible news about the healing power of foods has been hitting the science journals? Every week, it seems, we find out about another amazing health property in a food. Black raspberries reverse oral cancer. Pomegranates halt prostate cancer. Green tea halts breast cancer. The list goes on. Just on this website alone, we’ve probably published 1,000 stories over the last two years on the disease-fighting properties of foods.

The thing to realize here is that many of the healing properties of these foods are destroyed through pasteurization or irradiation. If you’re a government that wants to “take away the People’s medicine,” the fastest way to accomplish that is to mandate the sterilization of the food supply. Kill the foods and you take away the People’s medicine, and that forces the population to use pharmaceuticals instead.

The FDA, for its part, has for many decades conducted its natural medicine censorship campaign, whose only purpose is to deny the People access to accurate information about the healing properties of natural medicines found in foods and herbs. But apparently that wasn’t enough: The Internet came along and people found a way to educate themselves. So since the FDA couldn’t keep the truth about natural medicine bottled up and censored, the government has now apparently decided to just sterilize all the foods, thereby destroying the natural medicine and transforming Mother Nature’s gifts into dead calories.

The USDA’s decisions here are not based on public safety, folks. They’re based on corporate greed. Just look at how they handled the raw almond controversy in these related articles: http://www.naturalnews.com/almonds.html

The USDA as operated today is a front group for wealthy corporations. It is not interested in helping the People. It’s interested in protecting the profits of corporations… even if that means destroying the food supply and turning the population into “dead eaters” who die from other diseases caused by the lack of phytonutrient protection.

How you can help stop this latest atrocity against our food supply

What can you do to stop this? Be prepared to fight irradiation plans with a massive outcry that demands our food supply be protected from radiation. There are two things that need to be accomplished, and of course the USDA and FDA oppose them both:

1) Require the labeling of all irradiated foods with a large “Irradiated” label or sticker.

2) Block any attempts to mandate the irradiation of fresh produce.

Stay tuned to NaturalNews.com for more on this story. We’ll be joining with other pro-consumer groups (like the Organic Consumers Association) to rally our readers in opposition to this food irradiation effort.

I believe we must keep our food supply fresh and alive. (Sounds kinda obvious, huh?) And if there’s a little extra bacteria on the spinach, it’s nothing that a healthy body can’t handle anyway. Take some probiotics and avoid antibiotics, and you’ll be just fine. E. Coli is really only a threat to the health of individuals who have had their immune systems (or intestinal flora) destroyed by pharmaceuticals in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with some living organisms in your milk, on your almonds or on your spinach. Wash your food, get plenty of sunlight and avoid using antibiotics.

The human body is NOT a sterile environment. To try to make our food supply sterile is insane, and anyone who supports the irradiation of the food supply is, in my opinion, supporting a policy of genocide against the American people. To destroy the vitality of the food supply is a criminal act of such immense evil that it stands alongside the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.

You see, it’s not enough for them to poison our water (fluoride), poison our children (vaccines) and lie to us about the sun (skin cancer scare stories). Now they want to destroy our foods… and thereby take away any natural medicine options that might actually keep people healthy and free. Remember: A diseased population is an enslaved population.

Now go eat your Big Mac, drink your Pepsi and don’t ask too many questions.

Reprinted from Natural News.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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NFL star Tony Gonzalez is out to answer a question: Can a football player live entirely on plants?

By REED ALBERGOTTI
The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2008; Page W1

The protein-rich bounty of the football training table is supposed to grow the biggest and strongest athletes in professional sports. Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Tony Gonzalez was afraid it was going to kill him. “It’s the Catch-22,” says Mr. Gonzalez, 31. “Am I going to be unhealthy and play football? Or be healthy and get out of the league?”

So last year, on the eve of the biggest season of his career, Mr. Gonzalez embarked on a diet resolution that smacked head-on with gridiron gospel as old as the leather helmet. He decided to try going vegan.

Living solely on plant food, a combination of nuts, fruits, vegetables, grains and the like, has long been the fringe diet of young rebels and aging nonconformists. Even the government recommends regular helpings of meat, fish and dairy. Vegans of late have gotten more hip with such best sellers as the brash “Skinny Bitch,” and its more scholarly cousin, “The China Study.” Both books argue vegans can live longer.

But could an all-star National Football League player, all 6-foot, 5-inches and 247 pounds of him, live on a vegan diet and still excel in one of the most punishing jobs in sports?

 To read the entire article go here.

Over the years, many studies have suggested that cancer patients who adopt a more healthful diet are more likely to survive. Two new studies prove it.

The Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study (WINS), sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, followed 2,437 women who had previously been treated for breast cancer.¹ Half the women continued their regular diets. The other half cut their fat intake. After five years, 12.4 percent of the women eating their usual diets had a cancer recurrence. But the recurrence rate was cut to 9.8 percent in the low-fat diet group, a 24 percent reduction. For estrogen-receptor-negative tumors, the reduction was 42 percent.

Another study, The Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) Study, focused on vegetable and fruit intake. Based at the University of California, San Diego, the project included 3,109 women previously treated for breast cancer.² Half the participants were asked to consume at least five fruit and vegetable servings per day. The remaining participants were asked to push their diet changes further, up to eight fruit and vegetable servings per day. Specifically, that meant five vegetable servings and three fruit servings, plus 16 ounces of vegetable juice. They were also asked to trim their fat intake to 15 to 20 percent of calories.

The study’s first finding was a confirmation that diet changes can alter the hormones that fuel breast cancer. Estrogen levels were noticeably lower in the eight-a-day group after the first year.³ The reason, apparently, is fiber. It has long been known that the liver filters estrogens from the bloodstream, sending them into the intestinal tract where fiber escorts them out with the wastes. That is important, because excess estrogens fuel cancer growth. When the diet is rich in fiber, this hormone-removal system works efficiently. But if the diet is lower in fiber, some of the waste hormones are reabsorbed from the intestinal tract back into the bloodstream.

In a 2005 article, the WHEL investigators found that participants with the highest carotenoid concentrations in their blood—showing that they really were eating their vegetables and fruits—had a 43 percent lower risk of either cancer recurrence or a new primary breast cancer, compared with women whose carotenoid levels were lower.⁴

In 2007, the Journal of Clinical Oncology published findings from the WHEL research team showing that women in the five-a-day group who followed the five-a-day guideline and were also physically active had nearly a 50 percent reduction in the risk of dying over the next seven years, compared with women who did not meet these healthful guidelines.⁵ A subsequent JAMA report showed that those in the eight-a-day group did not experience additional benefits beyond those achieved by the five-a-day group.⁶

When the JAMA report was released, many newspapers misinterpreted the results. USA Today reported, “A diet high in vegetables and fruits apparently does nothing to prevent breast cancer from returning….” Similarly, ABC News declared, “There are many things a breast cancer survivor can do to keep her cancer at bay—but eating a diet that is high in fruits and vegetables isn’t one of them, new research suggests.”

Both got it exactly wrong. The truth was that high fruit and vegetable intake, plus regular exercise, had a dramatic effect on survival, cutting mortality nearly in half. But a woman already eating five vegetable and fruit servings daily gains no further long-term benefit from eating even more vegetables and fruits.

There were several things the WHEL Study did not test. Because most participants did not trim fat intake beyond the first year, the study could not test the value of a low-fat diet. Nor did it test weight loss, something shown to be of benefit in other studies. The study also did not test a vegan diet, which was previously shown to be dramatically effective for prostate cancer patients.⁷

So, would a diet that combines all these elements yield stronger results than were seen in the WINS and WHEL studies? It may well, and there is certainly reason to make these healthful changes. Taken together, these studies show that women who have been treated for breast cancer can help keep cancer from coming back by reducing fat intake, boosting vegetable and fruit consumption, and remaining physically active.

References
1. Chlebowski RT, Blackburn GL, Thomson CA, et al. Dietary fat reduction and breast cancer outcome: interim efficacy results from the Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2006;98:1767-1776.
2. Pierce JP, Faerber S, Wright FA, et al. A randomized trial of the effect of a plant-based dietary pattern on additional breast cancer events and survival: the Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) Study. Contr Clin Trials. 2002;23:728-756.
3. Rock CL, Flatt SW, Thomson CA, et al. Effects of a high-fiber, low-fat diet intervention on serum concentrations of reproductive steroid hormones in women with a history of breast cancer. J Clin Oncol. 2004;12:2379-2387.
4. Rock CL. Flatt SW, Natarajan L, et al. Plasma carotenoids and recurrence-free survival in women with a history of breast cancer. J Clin Oncol. 2005;23:6631-6638.
5. Pierce JP, Stefanick ML, Flatt SW, et al. Greater survival after breast cancer in physically active women with high vegetable-fruit intake regardless of obesity. J Clin Oncol. 2007;25:2345-2351.
6. Pierce JP, Natarajan L, Caan BJ, et al. Influence of a diet very high in vegetables, fruit, and fiber and low in fat on prognosis following treatment for breast cancer: The Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) randomized trial. JAMA. 2007;298:289-298.
7. Ornish D, Weidner G, Fair WR, et al. Intensive lifestyle changes may affect the progression of prostate cancer. J Urol. 2005;274:1065-1069.

Reprinted from Good Medicine Autumn 2007 – Volume XVI, Number 4

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Just three servings a month of raw broccoli or cabbage can reduce the risk of bladder cancer by as much as 40 percent, researchers reported this week.

Other studies show that dark-colored berries can reduce the risk of cancer too — adding more evidence to a growing body of research that shows fruits and vegetables, especially richly colored varieties, can reduce the risk of cancer.

Researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, surveyed 275 people who had bladder cancer and 825 people without cancer. They asked especially about cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage.

These foods are rich in compounds called isothiocyanates, which are known to lower cancer risk.

To read the entire article go here.