I recently got my hands on the transcripts of a talk that was delivered at the Annual Conference of Consumer Health of Canada a few years ago. If you read this blog on a regular basis, you already have some sense of how I feel about the food industry. In fact, I often put up a notice on the door of my office that says, "The food industry makes poison taste good. Which poisons are you consuming today?"
Today, I'm going to take the liberty of sharing some excerpts of this talk with you. If you want the complete transcript, I would be happy to fax it to you. Just send me an e-mail at getyourbodyback@hotmail.com with your fax number included.
Now, for a long time, my clients have heard me say, "Don't even get me started on the food industry..." Well, finding this 8-page transcript definitely "got me started!" all over again. I hope it does the same to you and gets you questioning many of the food choices you make for yourself and your family members. Notes from the talk will be italicized.
While traditional food processing enhances or increases the nutrient value of our foods, in modern times we have abandoned those practices in favor of factory and industrial processing, which actually destroys the nutrients in food and makes our food more difficult to digest.
Furthermore, industrial processing depends upon products that have a negative impact on our health, such as white sugar, white flour, processed and hydrogenated oils, additives, and synthetic vitamins.
Let's talk about breakfast cereals. In experiments conducted on commercial extrusion cereals, rats fed on vitamins, water, and all the puffed wheat they wanted died within two weeks. And they didn't die of malnutrition, as you might be thinking. Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver, and kidneys, and degeneration of the nerves of the spine, all signs of insulin shock. In fact, the rats that got nothing but water and vitamins lived longer, at about two months!
In another experiment conducted with corn flakes, rats fed the box only became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. However, rats fed corn flakes and water developed schizophrenic behaviour, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions, and died before the rats that were eating the box! (This experiment was originally designed as a joke but the results, which were never published, were far from funny).
What to do? Go back to old fashioned porridge, not the packaged flavoured kind but the kind you actually have to cook in the morning...
Let's talk about milk. From an article in the LA Times, we will save the part about the treatment of milking cows for another blog.
The pasteurization process deforms and denatures proteins, whose role includes protection against pathogens, enhancement of the immune system, and is the carrier system for nutrients. When we drink pasteurized milk, our body mounts an immune response instead of deriving instant nourishment. Much is written about the benefits of full-fat milk from pasture-fed cows, which is not pastuerized, processed, or homogenized. Do your own research, starting with www.realmilk.com.
Another supposed healthy choice is orange juice. Did you know that new orange juice processing plants are completely automated and can process up to 1800 tonnes of oranges per day? Do you think they do this by cutting oranges in half and carefully squeezing out the juice? Of course not. They process the whole orange. Oranges are a very heavily sprayed crop and these sprays are cholinesterase inhibitors, which are real neurotoxins. When they put the oranges in the vats and squeeze them, all of those pesticides go right into the juice.
Protect yourself from pesticides and juice a few oranges yourself in the morning.
Next, before the advent of processed food, we made our broths for soups, sauces, and gravies from bones and the good drippings from our cooked meat. Processed soup bases and sauces contain artificial meat-like flavours because it's too expensive for the industry to make real broth.
In 1947, General Foods chemists predicted that almost all natural flavours would soon be chemically synthesized in the laboratory. Following the Second World War, food companies discovered MSG, which the Japanese had invented in 1908. When the industry learned how to make the flavor of meat in the lab using inexpensive proteins from grains and legumes, the door was opened to a flood of new products including bullion cubes, dehydrated soup mixes, sauce mixes, TV dinners, and condiments with a meat-flavoured base.
In fact, the food industry as we know it could not exist without MSG and other artificial meat flavours to make secret sauces and spice mixtures that beguile the consumer into eating bland and tasteless foods. The sauces in processed foods are basically MSG, water, thickeners and emulsifiers, and some caramel coloring. Your tongue is tricked into thinking that it's getting something nutritious when it is getting nothing at all except some very toxic substances. Look on your labels for hydrolyzed protein, aspartame, and MSG, the three most toxic additives in our food supply. But beware, the industry avoids putting MSG on labels and they don't have to, if the mix is less than 50% MSG. And the industry has known about health problems associated with MSG since they began studying it closely in 1957.
Well, eight pages is a long transcript and I think you've read enough for one day! Stay tuned when the next blog will reveal truths about fats and oils, including margarine, vegetable oils, trans fats, and artificial bacon.
For now, please get back into the kitchen. A little time invested in natural food preparation is a fantastic investment in the health and longevity of your family.
P.S. I'm currently looking for articles on the pet food processing industry as well. I believe that most of what is put into most pet foods is waste and garbage, unconsumable by humans and foisted upon our innocent, unsuspecting pets (by innocent, unsuspecting pet owners). Shortly after the purchase of my chihuahua, I went looking for research on pet health and decided to feed my little guy ONLY raw, real food for his dinner. Yes, the preparation takes a little more time than opening a bag or a can but it costs only pennies per day and I'm happy to spend about 30 cents and 10 minutes to see him happy and excited, the picture of perfect health!
To your health and longevity, Billie
No comments:
Post a Comment