When deciding what’s healthy and what’s not, it pays to take note of what the actual experts are saying, as opposed to just listening to industry propaganda regurgitated by talking heads in the mass media and government health agencies.
Wake Up World has assembled a list of foods that are avoided by people who know the facts.
Here are a few examples:
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by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post
Americans are overfed and undernourished. That's right, the most obese children and adults in the country are also the most nutritionally deficient!
The mistake is to think that if you eat an abundance of calories, your diet automatically delivers all the nutrients your body needs. But the opposite is true. The more processed food you eat, the more vitamins you need. That's because vitamins and minerals lubricate the wheels of our metabolism, helping the chemical reactions in our bodies run properly. Among those biochemical processes greased by nutrients is the regulation of sugar and burning of fat.
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by David Katz, MD, via The Huffington Post
I don't think Mary Poppins had this in mind at all.
Kids these days—and adults, for that matter—are consuming far too many spoons full of sugar. This sugar excess contributes importantly to the epidemic of obesity, and all of its consequences—diabetes in particular. Diabetes and other complications of obesity require pharmacotherapy much of the time. And there we have it: spoons full of sugar, helping medicine go down.
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by Casey Lazonick, via AlterNet.org
Over the last few decades the way we eat and prepare our food has changed drastically. The majority of the food we consume is either restaurant-made or store-bought, and we have become completely dependent on easily accessible food to accommodate our fast-paced lifestyles.
But what happens when you find out you can no longer eat most of these easily accessible foods because they are making you sick? That is what happened to me. Like growing numbers of people, I have come to recognize that I have food intolerances.
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by Maura Stephens, via Yes! Magazine
In New York State, some 82 towns and counties have passed ordinances outlawing fracking, a natural gas drilling method known for causing severe water pollution. Another 35 have ordinances in the works. But until last week [February, 2012], no one knew quite what would happen when those ordinances were—inevitably—challenged by drilling companies.
Now, in a resounding win for activists, two different state Supreme Court justices have upheld fracking bans in two different New York towns.
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by David Katz, MD, via The Huffington Post
The nearly unanimous recommendation of a 22-member FDA expert panel to rescind a prior decision and approve the weight loss drug Qnexa says something about the FDA, something about Qnexa, something about obesity, something about those suffering from obesity and most of all, something rather profound and quite ominous about our society.
About the FDA: No doubt, some will applaud and some will vilify the FDA if if it follows the advice of its expert panel, as it should, and approves Qnexa. Some will see the heavy hand of big pharma at work—and, indeed, Vivus, the maker of Qnexa, had by all accounts lobbied pretty hard for this outcome.
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by Michele Simon, JD, MPH, Food Policy Consultant with the Center for Food Safety
You’ve probably never heard of the Microbiological Data Program (MDP) but if you eat fresh produce, you should, because it’s currently on President Obama’s budgetary chopping block. The MDP is a small ($5 million annually) pathogen monitoring program tucked away in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It tests fruits and vegetables for deadly bugs like E. coli, salmonella, and listeria.
While the testing program may be inexpensive, it’s critical because no other federal mechanism currently exists to conduct regular testing of fresh produce. (The Food and Drug Administration—which technically has jurisdiction over produce safety—conducts only limited inspections.)
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via Norwegian Institute for Public Health
The levels of the environmental pollutant perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that mothers had in their blood during pregnancy increased the risk of obesity in their daughters at 20 years of age. The findings come from a recent study of Danish women in which the Norwegian Institute of Public Health participated.
In recent decades, there has been a sharp increase in the number of overweight children and adults in both Norway and worldwide. It is suspected that diet and exercise alone cannot explain this large weight increase.
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There have been several articles talking about opposition to GMO foods as being "anti-science" and raising the issue of the precautionary principle1, but in fairness, we have to consider what the role of the precautionary principle is, before we just blow it off as an alarmist parlor trick.
Let's be clear. ALL questions have scientific legitimacy and some may be well-thought out, while others may be totally off the mark. This doesn't make them unscientific, it just makes them uninformed. If a particular view persists after the proper information has been provided, then the individual could be accused of being unscientific, or at least obstinate.
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by Martha Rosenberg, via The Huffington Post
It used to be joked that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. These days, the opportunist is Big Pharma, which raises your insurance premiums and taxes while providing you "low-priced" drugs that you paid for.
How did Pharma get a good third of the U.S. taking antidepressants, statins and purple pills, albeit at low prices? By selling the diseases of depression, high cholesterol and gastroesophageal reflux disease—or GERD. Supply-driven marketing, also known as "Have Drug; Need Disease and Patients," not only turns the nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs, it distracts from Pharma's drought of real drugs for real medical problems.
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PhD Jes Gitz Holler from the University of Copenhagen discovered in a research project a compound that targets a particular resistance mechanism in yellow staphylococci. The development of resistance in these specific bacteria is extremely rapid. Bacterial strains that do not respond to treatment have already been found in the USA and Greece.
"I have discovered a natural substance in a Chilean avocado plant that is active in combination treatment with traditional antibiotics. Resistant bacteria have an efflux pump in their bacterial membrane that efficiently pumps out antibiotics as soon as they have gained access. The identified natural substance inhibits the pumping action, so that the bacteria’s defence mechanisms are broken down and the antibiotic treatment allowed to work," explains Jes Gitz Holler.
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Guest post by Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit
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When I ask people to name the largest food company in America, most don’t realize the answer is PepsiCo. You may just think soft drinks when you hear the name, but PepsiCo actually owns a dizzying array of food and beverage brands across five massive divisions: Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Tropicana, and Quaker Oats. As I recently told CNBC for their documentary, Pepsi’s Challenge, perhaps the leading maker of sugary drinks and salty snacks should bear some responsibility for America’s bad eating habits.
by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post
Gluten-free is hot these days. There are books and websites, restaurants with gluten free menus, and grocery stores with hundreds of new gluten-free food products on the shelf. Is this a fad, or a reflection of response to a real problem?
Yes, gluten is a real problem. But the problem is not just gluten. In fact, there are three major hidden reasons that wheat products, not just gluten (along with sugar in all its forms) is a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression and so many other modern ills.
This is why there are now 30 percent more obese than undernourished in the world, and why chronic lifestyle and dietary driven disease kills more than twice as many people as infectious disease globally.These non-communicable, chronic diseases will cost our global economy $47 trillion over the next 20 years.
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Guest by Michele Simon, from Appetite for Profit,
This week Congress begins hearings on the 2012 farm bill, the massive piece of legislation that gets updated about every five years and undergirds America’s entire food supply, but that few mortals can even understand. As nutrition professor Marion Nestle recently lamented, “no one has any idea what the farm bill is about. It’s too complicated for any mind to grasp.”
Nestle also called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) “the huge elephant in the farm bill” because its enormity trumps everything else. This entitlement program (the budget expands as more people enroll) provides modest monthly benefits for food purchases and represents a critical lifeline to many people in need.
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by Lynne Peeples, via The Huffington Post
After nearly succumbing to an antibiotic-resistant infection contracted from one of his hogs, Russ Kremer went cold turkey. He exterminated his diseased pigs and swore off the antibiotics he'd long-used to boost his herd's growth and prevent the illnesses so common in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
Now, more than 20 years later, he says his farm is organic, sustainable, humane and still nearly as efficient as the typical industrial CAFO. Plus he's eliminated the $16,000 a year he used to spend on veterinary and drug bills. And he hasn't sacrificed his pigs' health in the process. If anything, the opposite is true for Fred, Barney, Wilma, Pebbles, Bamm-Bamm and the other 500-some pigs that roam his 150-acre farm.
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by Brad Jacobson, via AlterNet.org
When saturated-fat-slinging Food Network star Paula Deen publicly revealed she'd hid her Type 2 diabetes for three years, then simultaneously announced she was endorsing pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug Victoza, public cries of "hypocrite" and "opportunist" expectedly followed.
But lost in all the media glare was the real reason Novo Nordisk chose Deen.
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by Verena Radulovic, via Grist.org
“See that, see that?! … Oooh, something is going on. They are spraying tonight.” A large cylindrical truck whooshed past us.
I am driving along a state road with Becky, a local activist, who is narrating from behind the wheel. “I once stuck around to see them spray and I had to turn the car around and get out of there, the smell was so overpowering.”
We pull over and I hop out to get a close-up look at the orange groves. I am in California’s Central Valley, America’s fruit basket, where agriculture is king.
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by Anna Lekas Miller, via AlterNet.org
Monsanto, if you will, is the 1 percent of Big Agriculture—the scourge of small farmers everywhere. But now those farmers are fighting back, backed by activists from Occupy Wall Street.
First, some history. In 1982, Monsanto scientists were the first to genetically modify a plant cell. Three years later, the US Patent Office ruled that plants were a patentable subject matter. By 1985, Monsanto had already become a corporate giant by creating RoundUp, the most popular herbicide in the world.
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by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post,
Every day you have to navigate a toxic nutritional landscape. You have to hunt and gather in a food desert. You have to survive the American supermarket and dodge the dangers of industrial food. The good news is that if you follow 10 simple rules you can eat safely for life.
Think of them as shortcuts or tricks to use when shopping or eating. If you just do these things and nothing else, you will automatically be eating real, fresh food that will prevent, treat and even reverse most of the chronic diseases that drain our energy, stress our families and deplete our economy. You don't even have to understand anything about nutrition. Just follow these goof-proof rules for getting healthy, losing weight and feeling great.
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by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post,
Last year my friend Chelsea Clinton recommended I read a book by the former head of the National Health Service in Great Britain, called Turning the World Upside Down -- about what we can learn from poor countries in the developing world about putting patients and communities at the center of health care, not doctors and hospitals.
It inspired me to find ways to build community-based solutions for the epidemic of chronic lifestyle-driven disease -- an epidemic that now kills twice as many around the world every year as infectious disease. Chronic disease is a slow motion disaster, a tsunami of suffering whose global cost will be $47 trillion over the next 20 years.
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by Katherine Czapp, via Weston A. Price Foundation,
Magnesium is an alkaline earth metal, the eighth most abundant mineral found in the earth’s crust. Because of its ready solubility in water, magnesium is the third most abundant mineral in sea water, after sodium and chloride. In the human body, magnesium is the eleventh most plentiful element by mass—measuring about two ounces. Most magnesium contained in the body is found in the skeleton and teeth—at least 60 to 65 percent of the total. Nearly the entire remaining amount resides in muscle tissues and cells, while only one percent is contained in our blood.
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Individuals who drink diet soft drinks on a daily basis may be at increased risk of suffering vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death.
This is according to a new study by Hannah Gardener and her colleagues from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and at Columbia University Medical Center. However, in contrast, they found that regular soft drink consumption and a more moderate intake of diet soft drinks do not appear to be linked to a higher risk of vascular events. The research appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, published by Springer.
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By Robert Lalasz, via Grist.org,
Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?
Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the widespread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species, as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.
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Michele Simon has made it her life’s work to dive in and fully confront the sometimes complex political issues behind the food system—and to make it possible for those attempting to bring about sustainable changes to survive and create a difference in this arena. A public health attorney, she has taught Health Policy at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and is a frequent lecturer on corporate tactics and policy solutions. She has written extensively on the politics of food, and in 2006 published her first book, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back.
Like many of us, Simon didn’t become fully aware of these issues until she researched them herself. “I’m a public health lawyer, which means I have both a master’s in public health and a law degree,” Simon told Organic Connections. “But I didn’t really get interested in food until after I graduated from law school. I made some personal changes in my diet and started reading all about the powerful impacts of our diets, not only on our health, but on the environment, on animals, and on almost every aspect of society.
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by Mark Hyman, MD, via The Huffington Post,
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In a spate of recent media appearances, Paula Deen, the unapologetic queen of culinary excess and indulgence would have us believe that she didn't eat herself into type 2 diabetes -- that it was just Russian Roulette. Genes do matter, but just a little. Sorry Paula, but type 2 diabetes, and in fact over 90 percent of chronic disease, happens because of bad choices, not bad genes. New research proves that type 2 diabetes is nearly 100 percent reversible without medication or gastric bypass.
