FOOD AND HEALTH
I think I can safely say that for most people, if we improve our diet we will also improve our health. And I think this holds true no matter what your age or where your health is at now.
The following is a short piece from a book called "Food - What the Heck Should I Eat?" by Dr. Mark Hyman, who has written quite a few best-sellers. I read a fair bit of this book and I think anyone can learn some interesting facts and figures from it, and he gives a lot of good advice and information. It’s about the United States, but things are pretty much equally bad in Canada, and one of the biggest problems is the huge amount of power and control the food corporations have over our governments and politicians.
We Are What Our Meat Eats
I've edited it a bit, but it's pretty much what he wrote:
You’ve probably heard the old saying that you are what you eat, right? Well, that’s false. You are what your food eats. That’s scary because all of our worst fears about how modern industrialized animals are treated are essentially true. In fact, the truth might be even worse than you imagine.
Factory-farmed animals are fed cheap, mass-produced grains because this fattens them quickly at low cost. That means they’re eating GMOs and pesticides. They are pumped full of hormones and antibiotics because these make them bigger and fatter too.
And it gets scarier. It’s perfectly legal to feed livestock and poultry ground-up feathers; feces from other animals; plastic filler; toxic chemicals such as PCBs and dioxin; and etc. Many farms feed their animals whatever will fatten them up as quickly and cheaply as possible. It’s common for producers to feed their animals all sorts of sugar, candy, Kool-Aid powder, and potato chips.
Factory farming damages the environment, with the widespread use of fossil fuels for fertilizers and agricultural chemicals. There is widespread use of antibiotics in animal feed to promote bigger and fatter animals that are resistant to the diseases that spread in the clustered pens and holding cages these poor animals often live in.
Animals fed a more natural diet of hay and grass are much healthier, and we will be much healthier as well if we eat animals that are raised in this way.
According to Dr. Hyman, organic or grass-fed meat is worth the extra cost because you and your family will end up healthier.
And in my opinion, as in so many other aspects of our society, our food is raised or grown not with us and our health in mind, but instead it is all about the maximization of corporate profit, which is a crazy way to do things and it is a way where we citizens pay a very heavy price for the profits made by the agri-business companies.
Lots of room for positive change here, but our governments are uninterested because they work for the corporations, and the media is uninterested in these stories for exactly the same reason. And we pay the price... Time for change.
