“An Operations Manual For Humankind”
Copyright 2011 Paul Patrick Robinson
Smashword Edition
Smashwords License Statement
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover Design By: Spiral Dream Graphics
DISCLAIMER (The Lawyer Stuff)
You should not use the information in this book for the diagnosis or treatment of any health problem, or for prescription of any medication or other treatment, or if you have or suspect you might have a health problem. Consult with a qualified healthcare professional prior to beginning any exercise, diet or supplementation program of any kind. Do not cease the medication prescribed to you by your physician or other healthcare professional without first consulting your doctor or healthcare practitioner. This information should not in any way be used as a substitute for the advice of a physician or other licensed healthcare practitioner.
The statements contained in this book have not been evaluated or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The products mentioned and discussed herein are not intended to diagnose, cure, prevent, or treat any disease or illness.
The author, publisher, and/or seller are not liable or responsible for any of the information and/or the results and interpretation (whether misused or not) of the use of the information. You assume sole responsibility for the use of the information, nationally and internationally. Text, logic, and author’s opinions are copyright protected.
FAIR USE ACT
Fair use is a doctrine in United States of America copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, research, teaching or scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of any copyrighted material in another author’s work.
What To Expect
Recent reviews stated:
“A tour guide to health and longevity, skimming the surface of its topics in an easy, conversational style. From the ageless health practices of our ancestors to cutting-edge longevity science, attaining maximum wellness by properly ‘fueling’ the body is addressed in an easy-to-understand manner.
“The manual doesn’t teach as much as it reminds, helping the reader to remember the cultural truths about nutrition that were handed down by mothers and grandmothers. These ‘forgotten secrets’, particularly the chapter on the energetic Life Force of food, is priceless actionable information.”
“Truth! Nothing but the truth. Among other gems, a ‘pull-back-the-curtain’ exposé of the whole can of worms that is the Genetically Modified Organism Industry, adulterating our food supply and ruining many small farmers.”
INTRODUCTION
A “manual” is defined as a small book of instructions. The value of any manual is that it be useful and simple to understand. The trick is to explain the problem clearly and then offer usable solutions. That is what I have attempted to do here.
I don’t want the subtitle, The Complete Compendium of Natural Health, to over-promise. The subject of health is simply too vast to try to cover completely in one book. What you will find, however, is a concise overview of some of the proven methods of creating and maintaining bodily well being. And guess what? Most of these methods are found freely in nature.
We are still in the process of asking questions and gathering facts about ways in which to think about healthiness. But what we have already discovered is that health is far more complex than the scientific reductionists would have us believe.
What stands out in my research is that while there is almost universal dis-agreement as to what constitutes a state of ‘good health’, there is general agreement that there are certain lifestyle choices that can lead to a generally consistent state of well being. Choices that can add years to our lives and life to our years. And this is precisely what we will be covering within these pages.
One thing that you will quickly note is that I choose to write to you in a conversational manner rather than academic lecturing. I sometimes make up words and create weird sentence structures. MS WORD’s spelling and punctuation tools will hopefully take care of anything that I missed almost eighty years ago in Mrs. Grundy’s English class. However, I fully believe that despite any mistakes in spelling or punctuation, you'll be able to understand the message. For example, try this:
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind in undnatnrding
what yu are reding is amzanig.
See what I mean? I trust that you, the reader, will be quite able to grasp the concepts I’m sharing with you. Whether you agree with them is another matter.
Very little of what you will read here bubbled up new-born from the depths of my mind. It is information, factoids and research gathered and edited from many sources. Like most such writing efforts, I stand upon the shoulders of those pioneers in this field who have shown me the way. And it is they who deserve the credit for much of this information that is shared with you. I’m merely the scribe and the guide.
Let me be perfectly clear. I have been told that I should not talk or write about health ... because I'm NOT a medical doctor. I'm not a PhD nutritionist, either. In fact, I cannot claim to be any kind of so-called ‘expert’ in the field of health. What I CAN do, however, is share some startling facts with you about what I have learned from my research that can help you to help yourself become healthier and live longer.
I don’t claim to have all of the answers or to even imply that what I have discovered should be adopted by other people. There are, in fact, very few shoulds and oughts to be found in this presentation. There are simply no cookie-cutter recipes for healthiness that apply to everyone. And yet there are a few basic similarities in all of humankind in terms of being able to achieve a state of good health.
There are shared lifestyle patterns that lead to optimum health and resistance to disease. Once we know the common qualities that define these, we can apply the strategies and technologies that are known to enhance and enrich our lives and those of our loved ones.
In doing so, some readers will be helped to improve their lives, well-being and level of health. Others will not. It all comes down to making personal healthy lifestyle choices. My goal here is to subtly shift your perspective by sharing certain proven facts and ideas that helped me to change my own.
Much of what we will be talking about has to do with the nutrition that we get from our food. The problem, dear reader, is that it has become increasingly difficult to find the kind of nutrition our bodies need in this modern age of factory farming and industrial food processing. Add to this the toxicity of our environment and the stress in our lives and we can easily see why the body needs all the help it can get to “do its thing”.
It is my hope that we can provide you with an easily understandable, state-of-the-art guide that can help you to restore the natural harmony of your body through the proper use of a toxin-free diet and its nutritional components. Diet, by the way, refers to our intake of nourishing foods rather than a way of controlling weight. It is the total sum of food consumed by a person or organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or a culture makes when choosing what foods to eat.
This is not, however, another diet plan book. There are certainly enough of those already. Instead, what I intend to do is present enough nutritional background information to enable you to make informed choices that will best suit your individual needs in achieving the maximum level of health of which you are capable. Sometimes, it is as simple as deciding what not to take into your body.
It is the proper quality (and quantity) of our nutrition that we must seek if we are to attain a higher level of healthiness, not the latest fad diet being merchandised by commercial interests. You will find no fancy recipes here.
This is an invitation to you to explore the possibilities of making better, healthier lifestyle choices. These choices come not so much from scientific research as from common sense, tradition and the innate wisdom of our women-folk. The research tells us why. Our mothers and grandmothers tell us how. We merely need to remember their teachings.
CHAPTER ONE
The Medical/Pharmaceutical World of Health
Let us begin by revealing one of the medical profession’s most closely guarded secrets. It is one that your personal physician will probably never admit. It is this:
The incredibly complex biological ‘machine’ that we call our body keeps itself operating and functioning just fine on its own …. IF properly fueled and left alone to do so.
The body is self-healing and self-rejuvenating if given the proper fuel and environment in which to thrive. This life-fuel comes from raw materials such as air, water, minerals, water, vitamins, and various chemicals, which it largely gets through nutrition. Add to this Prana or Chi, as other cultures call the vital Life Force which animates our bodies.
The body’s own inherent intelligence operates in continuous mode 24 hours a day to insure that it runs at an optimum level. This means keeping in perfect balance the thousands upon thousands of biochemical reactions that take place every single second from the cellular level to the major organs of the body.
This is a process of continual creation, which your body does all by itself so long as it can ingest and assimilate the various chemicals, minerals, vitamins, and enzymes it requires to keep itself going.
In other words, if the fuel requirements of the body are properly met, this alone will keep the body in a state of balance or what modern medical science calls homeostasis.
OK, let me ask you a question:
Is this something that you have ever been told by your personal medical doctor? Didn’t think so.
What we think of as Newtonian physics has led us to a mechanistic/reductionist view of nature, and led to Western medical science to viewing the body as a complex ‘machine’. Individual body parts, instead of whole persons.
Another way of putting it is to say that Allopathic (Western) Medicine tends to treat the perceived symptom and not the cause. In fact, the meaning of the word “allopathic” is considered to be that of treating symptoms with drugs, not alleviating the cause of disease. In a sense almost all of modern medicine is ‘palliative’ and not curative.
Allopathic medicine maintains, for the most part, a mechanistic view of the human being; that if you patch a little here and insert a new part there, you are treating the patient. However, human beings are much more complicated and complex than that. Many doctors think that giving patients a pill or prescribing some kind of high-tech electronic scan is dealing with their illness issues adequately, but it isn't.
There is a spiritual side, there's a mental and an emotional side to the person. There is also another aspect, the environment in which we find ourselves. All these things, as the ancients knew, have to be considered if you are going to get a proper healing. Healing, like the word ‘health’, comes, from the root word meaning whole.
The practitioners of what we call Modern Medicine have practically nothing whatsoever to do with creating health. They are, instead, focused on warfare; eradicating symptoms rather than finding the underlying causes. The war on cancer. The war on diabetes. The war on (_______) Ad infinitum.
Symptoms are the voice of the body, telling us that something is not functioning properly. But when pharmaceutical drugs or the surgeon’s scalpel silence this voice, the message cannot be heard and the problem usually continues unabated.
The Greek God of healing was named Aesculapius. One of his children was named Panacea who people still worship to this day, hoping to find in her the magic cure for what ails them. Panacea's temple is now mostly inhabited by Pharmaceutical Priests and their acolytes the FDA who offer us their so-called miracles to the tune of $250 BILLION last year for OVER-THE-COUNTER drugs alone. Add to this the prescription drugs and we are talking close to a TRILLION dollars a year.
And guess what? Those colored plastic containers with the prescription labels almost always cost more than the pills and capsules inside them. The consumer price for 100 tablets of Prozac 20 mg is $247.28, the cost of ingredients and the capsule $0.11, percent markup 224,801%. Hm-mm!
As one health researcher has pointed out, it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the facts objectively that our current medical/pharmaceutical system of ‘health’ is broken. Why do we put our trust in these corporate strangers when it comes to our precious health? Why are we so easily convinced to put our lives in the hands of a medical system that doesn’t always have our best interests at heart? Many of our so-called medical experts are obviously in bed with the pharmaceutical industry. Why else would they push death sentences like chemo, radiotherapy and certain kinds of so-called immunization shots upon the vulnerable, unsuspecting masses, including little children?
Perhaps we yield to the medical establishment because it’s easier to let other people make these health decisions and then we can always blame something/someone else when things don’t work out as planned.
It is a great pity that doctors of Naturopathy are only licensed in some 15 states in the U.S., for they are the ones who best understand the role that nutrition plays in achieving and maintaining vital energy and optimum health.
Please let me assure you that I’m not against MD’s. As is often said, if you get in an automobile accident and break some bones, you certainly don’t want a Homeopathic health practitioner. You will quickly seek out the most competent medical doctor that you can find, or visit the nearest Emergency Room staffed by licensed physicians. Modern allopathic medicine has its place within the broad spectrum of human health and healing.
My bias comes into play when these allopathic doctors rely on drugs to treat the symptoms of illness, rather than to discover the root cause and then find ways to assist the body to heal itself. Actually, before 1930, if you looked up the word physician in a dictionary, the definition was “one skilled in the art of healing”. Today, it will say, “one legally licensed by the state to dispense drugs”. Hm-mmm, I wonder what happened to the healing part?
Then, too, there’s the problem that medical doctors (even though well-meaning) are NOT who you want to rely upon for recommendations about nutrition. The medical schools devote almost no time to the subject and few doctors have time to learn anything on their own. Hey, these are the folks who tolerate the infamous hospital ‘dietician-delicious’ food, right?
So, what is it that we need to do to help our bodies do their thing°± without the need of Big Pharma’s drugs? Well, we can start with the elimination of those factors that are toxic to human health. One of the most important factors leading to toxicity is food!
It’s certainly no secret that much of the food we ingest is loaded down with chemicals, both to preserve and enhance the flavor of our heavily processed food. Many of these chemicals are not naturally found in these foods, they are introduced by the food corporations to extend shelf life or change the appearance of the product.
This accumulated toxicity is to the body what sludge is to a motor. And just as we faithfully change the oil in our automobiles every so often, we must also eliminate the molecular cellular sludge from our bodies. How we go about that is the focus of the first section of this manual.
We will also be discussing what might be called nutritionism, which is the practice of Western science of thinking in terms of breaking down food to it’s constituent macronutrients; carbohydrates, protein and fats. These are further reduced down to good nutrients and bad nutrients; plant protein versus animal protein, saturated fats versus the polyunsaturated fats, et cetera, et cetera.
When broken down under the scientist’s microscope lens, what is lost is the difference between whole foods and processed foods. It is no longer a case of what is it, but what’s in it. And to make certain that the proper amount of nutrients are present, the food technologists attempt to add back the vitamins and minerals that were lost through the processing itself.
Thus, according to the food scientists who are the High Priests of this Nutritionism, even the fake ‘Frankenfoods’ can be made much more nourishing than the natural whole foods they attempted to imitate by adding some vitamin B here, a little extra vitamin D there, and a bit of antioxidant tossed in for good measure …. mostly industrially synthetic rather than natural, plant-based vitamins.
This is the work of the Food Manufacturers, those who transform the live foods from the farm into pre-packaged, pre-processed consumables for the busy housewives, hard working business worker and singles who are more interested in satisfying their appetites and appeasing their food cravings than nourishing their bodies.
Fast food that can be stuffed into a microwave with little or no preparation is the norm of today. ‘Convenience’ food, and usually far too much of it, is what has taken the place of nourishing, well-prepared meals made from scratch. Fast food has become part of American life style. There is nothing wrong with food served quickly.
The problem is what the fast food contains; substandard ingredients with low nutrition value, high in calories and the wrong kinds of fat. Aiding and abetting this consumerism are countless fad diets that come and go, together with ongoing pronouncements by the ‘experts’ on what to eat and what not to eat.
One day it’s don’t eat butter, substitute margarine instead. Then another ‘authority’ proclaims that the other fellows got it wrong. Margarine is bad for you, switch back to butter …. Just not too much of it.
Yet another scientific study proclaims that all fats are bad. A year later: No, only some fats such as trans fats are unhealthy. Even our much maligned coffee is now said to be beneficial for reducing high blood pressure. And on and on it goes.
So where does this leave us? What, and who, are we to believe in this ‘Nuritionism’ food fight? Let’s take a moment to think about this.
CHAPTER TWO
Trustworthy Advice?
What you see just above is movie fantasy. Ron Howard, who directed Cocoon, never pretended that what he was presenting was anything more than fiction. Neither did Robert A. Heinlein, who spent much of his later writing career creating stories around a man who was 2000 years old, who was never ill and couldn't die even if he wanted to.
These men, and many more like them, use their powers of imagination to provide entertainment. They create entertaining fairy stories for adults. There is another group of people who are in the business of creating fairy stories. These stories are also aimed at adults, but they are not meant to be put aside when the credits roll or when the last page is read.
These people don't market their wares as entertainment or escapism. These dream merchants are deadly serious. They insist that what they are trying to sell us are what we MUST have to be healthy; that their drugs and elixirs and yes, even supplements, will let us regain our lost health and "You will never be sick, you won't get any older and you won't ever die of _________" (you, fill in the blank). And they are wrong. What they offer for the most part is pure fantasy. Sometimes it is dangerous fantasy.
So now comes along another writer, but I have no fairy tales to give you. What I will present to you in this book are FACTS! And the facts are that we will get older, we might even get sick and that we will eventually die. But what I will also share with you is how to live longer, get sick less often and when you pass from this life it will be with grace and dignity on your own terms.
How do I know this? Perhaps even more important, why should you trust me or any other writer to bring you cutting-edge information about this subject?
The question is often raised asking how do those of us who research and write about health find our source material, where do we go to get our answers? Good question!
Well, let me explain.
In the years leading up to the year 2000, we missed a lot of what was going on in nutritional research. There was simply no one place where we could discover who was doing what and where to find their writings. And even if we did know where to go, the published papers and journals were hard to obtain and expensive.
More often than not, after we had purchased the abstracts, had them sent to us by mail and read them, we often found that it was not the kind of information we were looking for at all. In the not-too-distant-past, there were a lot of blind alleys and tortuously winding back roads to navigate in a quest for knowledge about the field of health. But that’s all changed now.
Since 2000, there has been a wonderful depository and archive of scientific literature at U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) called PubMed Central. PMC is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Best of all, it is available online at:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/.
With PubMed Central, one can quickly search the entire body of full-text articles and locate relevant material regardless of its source. It also makes it possible to then integrate the literature with a variety of other information resources, such as sequence databases and other factual databases that are available to scientists, clinicians and everyone else interested in the life sciences. You, the reader, can do this as well.
But let me hasten to add that you must read all such research with a critical eye. It is even perfectly OK to be a bit skeptical about what you read here. You must not take anything for granted. Always question authority!
As an Enlightened Being once said some twenty-five hundred years ago:
“Do not believe in anything because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found in religious writings. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with your own experience, reason and common sense, only then accept it and live up to it”
-The Buddha
THAT means making proper choices in both lifestyle and diet. However, the past thirty years of dietary advice seem to have left us sicker, fatter and even more poorly nourished. Guess what? All that ‘New Nutrition’ hasn’t worked.
But why is that? What is it that went so wrong? To discover the answer to these questions we will need to look at how our food has changed, which is the subject of the next chapter. Some of those answers might shock you.
So sit back, take a deep breath, and let’s get started on a journey of discovery of how food affects the body in its effort to keep us healthy. Remember that our bodies are self-healing and self-rejuvenating if given food and other nutrients that are harmonious with our genetic template.
CHAPTER THREE
Natural Foods vs Frankenstein Foods
To start off with, we must go back to the way the ancients thought about food and medicine.
What does that mean? Well, back in Hippocrates’ day food actually contained medicinal qualities that have been bred out of the plants to accommodate the tastes of modern men and women. What we eat nowadays is, for the most part, devoid of the natural medicine that old Hippocrates was talking about. Unless you happen to hunt and gather the wild plants yourself.
Remember, we aren’t talking about nutrients. It is the medicinal qualities of food that has been lost to us through plant cloning. Take, for instance, lettuce.
If you have ever seen wild lettuce (Lactuca virosa), which most people think of as a weed, it is extremely bitter and prickly. It is also mildly hallucinogenic. Wild lettuce is one of those plants that is steeped in mystery and misinformation.
Historically, the Native North American Indians grew wild lettuce both for their medicinal and potent hallucinogenic qualities. The Hopi smoked the dried resin that they obtained when the flower was cut off of this plant. This resin would then be air-dried and later smoked in ritual. Similar effects could be obtained from smoking dried Wild Lettuce leaves, but never as potent as the resin extracted daily from the flowers.
Wild lettuce was not only used in ritual to help achieve visionary and trace states, it was used to enhance the vividness of dreams when smoked prior to sleep.
Yep, that’s right, all this from lettuce! But sh-hhhh, don’t tell the FDA or it, too, will be made illegal.
The bitterness and thorns of the wild lettuce are the plant’s protections to fend off would-be predators. The bitterness, which in the case of the wild lettuce is a white, alkaloid, opiate-like substance, is also what contains the ‘medicine’.
So the modern varieties of lettuce; Romaine, Greenleaf, Red Leaf, Bibb, Boston, Butter and the ubiquitous Iceberg have all been bred to remove the bitterness and make it more palatable. In other words, the genes of the plants have been altered, and in the process the medicinal qualities have also been lost. Do you see where we are heading with this?
Now, the question that we should be asking ourselves is this:
If the genetics of the food we eat have been changed as much as they have, what can this do to our own human DNA?
Whether it is farmers creating hybrids or Monsanto genetically modifying seeds, the results can be similar in terms of the plant’s DNA and DNA of the human being who ingests this material. There is a kind of negative transfer mechanism that takes place, which is species wide and multi-generational.
Genetically Modified Organisms are DANGEROUS to your health, as I hope to prove to you in the next few pages. The tragedy that we will speak of is that such modification requires NO labeling in the US or Canada. None. Nada. Zilch!
How does the US Food & Drug Administration justify this? Here is an example of their legalese:
With respect to transferred genetic material (nucleic acids), generally FDA does not anticipate that transferred genetic material would itself be subject to food additive regulation. Nucleic acids are present in the cells of every living organism, including every living plant and animal used for food by humans or animals, and do not raise a safety concern as a component of food°± - FDA Federal Register Volume 57.
Not being an attorney and not speaking °bureaucratese’, I’m unsure what that means, other than move along now, nothing to see, no one hurt, everything’s OK”. But it’s not OK! And someone is being hurt, that someone being YOU! Now let’s find out how and why.
There are four separate areas where GMO’s can end up in your food:
(Corn, Canola, Cotton and Soy)
(milk, butter, yogurt)
(Animal flesh - mostly from being fed GMO foods)
(Enzymes, food additives and sweeteners)
How much GMO is in these four crops?
93% of all cotton in the US in 2010 was GMO
86% of all corn in the US in 2010 was GMO
93% of soy grown in the US in 2010 was GMO
80% of canola in the US in 2010 was GMO
Now, let’s put that into perspective. The vegetable oil used by 85% of all restaurants for their cooking is a mixture of either corn, soy, canola or cotton seed. The chances of your wearing GMO clothing made in the US is 93%. And yet, cotton is acclaimed as the natural and healthy fabric.
For those of you who are ‘into’ healthy fruit, it might surprise you to know that 50% of all papaya produced in Hawaii are now genetically modified, and irradiated as well.
But there’s more! Genetically modified bacteria and fungi are used in the production of many enzymes, vitamins, food additives, flavorings and processing agents. I hope you caught the part about VITAMINS now being created by using GMO’s. So remember that the next time you pick up a pharmaceutically designed and created vitamin that’s supposed to be good for you.
Does eating genetically engineered foods really pose potential health risks to people? In 2001, the Los Angeles Times published an expose revealing that Monsanto’s own research had raised many questions about the safety of their Roundup Ready soybeans.
Remarkably, the FDA did not call for more testing before allowing these soybeans to flood the marketplace. Since half the soybeans grown in the United States are now Monsanto’s Roundup Ready variety, and because soy is contained in such a wide array of processed foods, tens of millions of people are unknowingly eating these experimental foods daily.
Dr. Philip Bereano has spent the last three decades looking into genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) in foods, crops, animals, and humans, both nationally, here in the United States, and internationally. His work led him to participate in the negotiation of two international treaties under the United Nations that dealt with issues relating to GMOs.
Dr. Bereano states that GMOs have never been proven safe or beneficial.
"First of all, we need to understand what we mean by the word safe," he says. "Actually, in terms of the academic literature, safe refers to ‘an acceptable level of risk.’ It doesn't refer to situations where there is no risk. Most of us drive in cars all the time and consider it to be safe even though we know that people are killed and injured in automobiles frequently. We have to understand that safe equals acceptable risk.
“The problem with calling genetically engineered organisms safe is that there are no valid risk assessments being done on them. There is no research, really, being done into the health or environmental affects of a genetically engineered organism. Certainly no work that is published in the open peer-reviewed literature, or that isn't proprietary. Corporations promoting these things claim that they have done research, but you can't get any information on it because it's all claimed to be proprietary.
“Under what is known now as the precautionary principle - which is what your grandparents used to teach you about ‘looking before you leap’ - the only prudent course of action is to NOT proceed with something which has potential risks but only potential benefits until you know a little bit more about it."
Monsanto and other proponents of agricultural biotechnology continually tell the public that genetic engineering is necessary if the world’s food supply is to keep up with population growth. But even with nearly 100 million acres planted in 2000, and with genetically engineered crops covering one-quarter of all cropland in the United States, their products had yet to do a thing to reverse the spread of hunger. No commercial acreage had been planted in crops which had been engineered to produce greater yields or that had any kind of enhanced nutritional value. There was no more food available for the world’s less fortunate.
In fact, the vast majority of the fields were growing transgenic soybeans and corn that were destined for livestock feed, not human consumption.
One of the clearest independent voices in the sometimes raucous debate about genetically modified foods is Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, published by the Environmental Research Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland. Back in 1999, the journal noted:
Neither Monsanto nor any of the other genetic engineering companies appears to be developing genetically engineered crops that might solve global food shortages. In fact, quite the opposite. If the genetically engineered crops were aimed at feeding the hungry, then Monsanto and the others would be developing seeds with certain predictable characteristics: a) ability to grow on substandard or marginal soils; b) plants able to produce more high-quality protein with increased per-acre yield, without the need for expensive machinery, chemicals, fertilizers, or water; c) they would aim to favor small farms over larger farms; d) the seeds would be cheap and freely available without restrictive licensing; and e) they would be for crops that feed people, not meat animals.
None of the genetically engineered crops now available, or in development (to the extent that these have been announced) has any of these desirable characteristics. No! Instead, the new genetically engineered seeds produce crops largely intended as feed for meat animals, not to provide protein for people. The genetic engineering revolution has nothing to do with feeding the world’s hungry.
Well, I think that you get the drift of all this.
But take a look at this Monsanto advertisement copy:
“Biotechnology is one of tomorrow’s tools in our hands today. Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford.”
Oh Yeah? Hey, how about a second opinion on that assertion.
“Genetically engineered crops were created not because they’re productive, but because they are patentable. Their economic value is oriented not toward helping subsistence farmers to feed themselves, but toward feeding more livestock for the already overfed rich.”
-Amory and Hunter Lovins, Founders of Rocky Mountain Institute.
When other researchers compared the performance of Monsanto’s transgenic soybeans (the #1 genetically engineered crop in the world in terms of acreage planted) with those of conventional varieties grown under the same condition, they found nearly a 10 percent yield reduction for the genetically engineered soybean. Research done by the University of Nebraska in 2000 found the yields of genetically engineered soybeans plants to be 6 to 11 percent lower than conventional plants.
Similarly, delegates from 18 African countries at a meeting of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization responded to Monsanto’s advertisements with a clear statement:
“We . . . strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us. We do not believe that such companies or gene technologies will help our farmer to produce the food that is needed. . On the contrary . . . it will undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.” The representative from Ethiopia added,” We strongly resent the abuse of our poverty to sway the interest of the European public”.
One thing is certain. Monsanto and the other biotechnology companies will not soon stop telling us that genetically engineered foods can alleviate world hunger. In 2000, a coalition of biotech companies began a $50 million marketing campaign to keep fears about genetically altered foods from spreading through the United States.
Bankrolling the campaign, which included $32 million in TV and print advertising, were Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Swiss-based Novartis, the British Zeneca, Germany’s BASF, and Aventis of France. The ads, complete with soft-focus fields and smiling children, pitched solutions that could improve our world tomorrow°± and aimed to convince the public that biotech foods could help end world hunger.
As one health lecturer, Daniel Vitalis, has stated: It’s time that we start knowing where our food comes from, where it is grown and by whom. It is time to get local. We need to begin thinking of developing genetically discerning diets.°± In other words, the way in which we live our lives now, the choices we make on a daily basis, encourages selection for traits in the future of our genetic lines.
Genetic line? Does all this make you a tiny bit queasy? Well, at present your one and only defense against unlabeled GMO food is by purchasing Organic. For the moment anyway, no food that contains Genetically Modified Organisms can be labeled as organic. Tomorrow? Who knows?
NaturalNews reports that genetically modified foods have become so ubiquitous in the U.S. that even the grocery store 'Whole Foods' now admits it cannot keep biotech foods off its shelves. A representative for the corporation acknowledged in May of 2011 that the realities of the marketplace have forced a shift in the company's previous no-GMO's policy. It’s like a really bad science fiction movie titled “Conquest By The Damned°.
While the US Food and Drug Administration has seen fit to allow the rampant use of GMO products, Europe and other countries in the world are not as compliant. To cap this whole subject of genetically modified foods off, it seems fitting to point out that even employees at Monsanto’s own headquarters in England, apparently, are less than enamored at the prospect of ingesting their company’s creations.
A statement was posted in the cafeteria of the Monsanto Corporation’s United Kingdom headquarters in High Wycombe, England, that truly gives one pause. It read as follows:
“In response to concern raised by our customers … we have decided to remove, as far as practicable, genetically modified soy and maize (corn) from all food products served in our restaurant. We will continue to work with our suppliers to replace GM (genetically modiefied) soy and maize with non-GM ingredients …. We have taken the above steps to ensure that you, the customer, can feel confident in the food we serve” - The Management”
It would appear that I have been beating that poor GMO horse to death. However, I just cannot emphasize enough how tremendously important this subject is. Riots and rebellions are happening around the world because of hunger and the rising prices of what food there is. The empty promises of the purveyors of GMO seeds to increase production have been proven false. Instead, we have world hunger.
Forget Asian Flu, HIV and the rest. The real global pandemic is found in the proliferation of GMO Frankenstein foods, which is why I have spent so much time on the subject.
The widespread proliferation of genetically modified seeds with which to grow the world’s food is a VERY serious concern. For small farmers they are indeed Weapons of Mass Destruction, even if they themselves never planted a single GMO seed on their farms. Contamination from the GMO crops planted on a neighboring farm that ‘migrates’ is now taking place on a regular basis. Then to add insult to injury, that farmer is sued by Monsanto or one of the other GMO producers for illegally growing crops with THEIR seeds.
The whole thing is a can of worms. These GMO seeds are bred to self-terminate. They cannot re-germinate. Each year the farmer must purchase new GMO seeds with which to plant his crops.
In other words, they contain a factor of death in their very genetic template. Food is supposed to provide LIFE, not DEATH.
I hope you will explore this crucial subject further on your own. Unless this is brought under control, the food scientists and technicians will ‘invent’ us all into a continuing downward spiral of unhealthiness.
There is at least one good reason to bring this genetic engineering under control that to me is most compelling. That is that if we don't stop it now, we may not be able to go back.
If your field is next to mine and I grow all of my plants from heirloom seeds and do my best to do things the good old fashioned organic way, it may not matter if you plant GMO crops, because your plants will pollinate with mine and before you know it, I am growing GMO crops as well.
And that is the crux of the issue: at what point will we have reached the point of no return - the point when all of the worlds crops have been infected by these modified genes.
Of course, the GMO seed producers would like to have us believe that there are no ill side-affects from eating these crops (which is now beginning to be proven false), but what if their worst side effects are yet to be discovered? Since it is a genetic change that we are worried about, what if the real problems will only become apparent after a couple of generations. Is it possible that by that point, that there will be no way out?
Tell me, is that a gamble worth taking so that a few mega-giant corporations can make a higher profit? Is it?
Let’s take a look at the alternatives. What if a different path is taken? What if the food we choose to eat is natural and grown organically? fact, what is organic? This is what we will be discussing next.
CHAPTER FOUR
Why Organic?
Ever since the National Organic Foods Production Act was added as an amendment to the 1990 Farm Bill and passed by the U.S. Congress, there has been a solid platform for increasing our confidence about organically grown foods in the U.S. By the year 2002, the full impact of the organics law had taken affect, and since that time, we've been able to place a fundamental amount of trust in foods that have been certified as organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its National Organics Program.
Have you ever noticed that organically grown fruits and vegetables are being segregated from conventionally grown foods in your local market? This is because there is a $10,000 fine if food represented as organic is contaminated with non-organic compounds. Separate tubs are used to trim and clean the produce and if organic foods are displayed in an area that previously displayed non-organic produce, the mats on which they are placed must be replaced and the area thoroughly cleaned with a mild bleach solution. If these foods accidentally become contaminated during their handling, they are sold as conventional (non-organic) produce.
Perhaps we should backup a minute and ask ourselves why we even need something called organic food.
Until the 1940s, all farming in the U.S. was organic. Meaning that chemicals were not being applied to the soil to kill weeds and various bugs that would attack the crops. Farmers would usually lose up to one-third of their crops to these pests. Then came the ingenuity of big business. At the end of World War II there was a large stockpile of chemicals, which were no longer needed for warfare. The chemical companies laboratories had discovered that many of these same now-useless chemicals could kill bugs as easily as humans. Thus, a new product market was created, with farmers eager to save the third of their crops being destroyed by pests and noxious weeds. And the spraying began!
The new artificial pesticides and fertilizers proved to be so positive in terms of crop yields that by the 1950s almost all of America’s farmland was being drenched in the chemicals. Both the chemical companies and the farmers were ecstatic, and a new industry had been created.
Now, fast-forward twenty years or so. What seemed like an agricultural miracle had turned into an environmental nightmare. The same bugs that had been attacked by the wonder chemicals were now Super Bugs, resistant to even the strongest of the pesticides. Stronger and stronger pesticides were developed, drenching the soil and the plants themselves with ever more toxic products. The result?
Today, a little over fifty years later and some twenty thousand insect eradicating chemicals later (from DDT to Roundup) totaling something over FOUR BILLION DOLLARS annually, the yields were now back to the farmer losing one-third of their crops. However, the completely disastrous affect on the nutritional composition and safety of our food is incalculable.
We will discuss the fifty percent loss of protein in our grains a bit later. But for now let’s talk about how our fruits and vegetables have been affected by the widespread use of these chemicals. In fact, let’s start with the five hundred synthetic chemicals that have been found in the human bloodstream. Research has revealed that the average U.S. consumer ingests trace amounts of chemical residues in their food amounting to two pounds annually.
Scientists are now looking at the correlation between the increased use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers with the increase of cancer during this same period of usage. Want to make a guess as to what they will find?
In the early 1990s, the U.S. Agriculture Department tested some seven thousand apples, broccoli, carrots, celery, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, peaches and bananas. The scientists found over 10,000 pesticide residues on the produce. Apples, one of the most popular of all fruits, contained the highest number of chemical residue.
Now, to be fair the AVERAGE of the pesticide levels found in these foods was at or below what was then considered to be a health risk for adults. This, of course, means that some of the pesticide levels were far above the legal limit. What is most disturbing is that the study does not seem to take into account the damage done to children, who typically eat more fruit than adults.
So if our factory-farmed plants are sprayed with pesticides and the soil drenched in fake fertilizers, how can we make sure our food is fit to eat. You have to eat organically. There are strict requirements for chemical-free growing conditions, fertilization and compost usage in organic farming that gives these foods the quality and safety we need. The act which governs organic food production contains extensive soil requirements, and most of the requirements promote not only immediate soil health but soil sustainability.
The lesson is obvious. If you want to be free of this chemical onslaught you need to eat organically grown fruits and vegetables. And yes it will cost more. The lower price we have traditionally paid for ‘regular’ produce is made possible by the scale of modern factory farm operations. That, and subsidy programs, which haven’t usually been available to organic farmers.
Labor costs are obviously higher for hand-weeding, planting and harvesting these organic crops. Most of the organic farms are small, and thus aren’t able to take advantage of the economy of scale that the giant factory-farms can. Most people who are awake and aware of the problems of chemical farming agree that organic foods are just plain healthier, even though more expensive to purchase. But the price is far less than that of ill health.
And then, of course, there are the chemicals in our water. Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has stated that:
“There are a lot of chemicals being put in food today. And then there's the water. Why do they put fluoride in the water? They tell us it's to help our teeth, but we can't look after our own teeth? Fluoride is the main ingredient for Prozac. So if you are drinking water with fluoride in it, you are drinking Prozac, and we all know what Prozac does.”
We will have much more to say about this subject of water and its affect on our health. Water is, after all, even more important to the proper function of our bodies (and even life itself) than is food.
CHAPTER FIVE
Defining Our Terms
What, precisely, is meant by healthy? It is one of those terms that is bandied about by everyone, but what does it mean? Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Healthiness is usually on a spectrum that extends from Health to Disease, and we all are somewhere on that span. Let’s graph it:
A bare minimum of health means that we are healthy enough to function and keep up with our every day lives. Optimal health, on the other hand, means an ideal functioning; not only physically fit, but with your mental and emotional state in balance .... a kind of optimal synchronization between all of your systems.
Disease is nothing more than our body responding to the wrongs we have inflicted on it. If the body has the ability to produce a disease, then it is capable of reversing the process to a state of health once the cause has been eliminated. The problem is that very few people actually know what they should be doing to eliminate these causes and improve their health.
This is certainly not the fault of a lack of research. If we pour through scientific abstracts and peer-reviewed papers, we will find an enormous amount of information about achieving an ultimate level of health. And an overwhelming amount of this data has to do with nutritional science. in other words, Food!
But most of us never see this research data. What we read on a daily basis is junk science, food industry propaganda and the latest in fad diets. OK, how about we change our point of view on this crucial aspect of health in a way that eliminates all the confusion.
Perhaps we can agree on one thing: Healthy food means different things to different people. To one person it means eating only a plant-based diet, to another it is leaving off the dollop of sour cream on the baked potato and to someone else it’s ordering only a basic Whopper instead of a less healthy Super-duper Whopper. This, too, is on a spectrum of choice.
Healthiness is dependent upon the choices we make in our eating habits, but it is no easy thing to do. Important lifestyle choices are usually made based upon a person’s individual values and belief system as instilled by family and religion. The actual content of these belief systems are arbitrary, and quite often completely erroneous. They also may have been with you for your entire life.
As the psychologist Dr. Mony Vital has said: Beliefs and values are very powerful. What else can possibly account for such noted historic events as Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, or, on a more global level, the submission of thousands upon thousands of young men to follow the orders and commands of leaders who sought world domination?°
“What is it about the nature of beliefs that makes a person surrender his essence and sacrifice his life? And even more profoundly, what is it about beliefs that makes one human being feel so strongly about his or her own values that he or she is willing to take the life of another human being who disagrees with these values?”
Thus, making a choice is no simple thing. We will try to help you understand some of the choices available to you when it comes to nourishment ….. without tinkering with your values or belief systems too much.