Growing Healthier Food

I would encourage everyone to make a point to see FOOD, Inc.

Millions Against Monsanto

It is enlightening if you are new to learning about the ways Big AG and the corporatocracy controls your food supply. And it isn't just regular foods sold in regular supermarkets, its the organic market as well.

I look back on the food I was provided growing up and cannot imagine the way is grown and or processed today. My mother shopped at the Amish Farmer's Market, we had eggs and butter delivered from the farm, our milk wasn't homogenized, and in the summer we had lots of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, and fresh seafood.

I think real food makes a difference in how healthy you can be. I also don't think it is a terrible thing to eat meat, basically because some people do need to eat meat to insure there metabolic needs are met. (Find out your metabolic standard with our self-test, $40)

The key to the health of the meat you eat is based on what and how it is raised.

Just like the oft-misunderstood insanity of pH in humans, pH in animals makes a difference too. It becomes more important because you are directly impacted by what animals are fed.

We know about hogs that are fed sugar coated corn flakes to fatten them up; cows that are fed corn, soy, ground up cows and chickens; and chickens that are altered to get fat fast. It is that assembly line mentality applied to farming that seems to have lead us down the path to the current level of terribly poor health status.

One thing struck me while re-viewing FOOD,Inc. This one thing is something I have never heard in news reports about E.coli problems with meat.

Its the corn!

First it is most likely to be GMO, and it is raised with an over abundance of toxic chemicals.

Secondly, when ruminant animals that are - by nature - known to rely on grass as their food, feeding them corn and any other add-in you might think of changes their gut pH.

When you change the pH, you foster E. coli.

When you utilize crowded feed lots and faster and faster processing methods, you foster E. coli.

When you over dose animals with antibiotics and hormones aimed at a fast fix for this problem, you haven't considered the real issues.

Not considering the real issues leads to all the problems, and the concept that it is cheaper to pay the fine than correct the cause.

You can make a difference. Healthy food begins with your voice. Tell your grocer you want naturally raised meats and eventually that's all that will be sold.

In the interim, join an "own a cow-pig-poultry-sheep" group that feeds only what comes naturally.

 Stop Factory Farm Production of "Organic" Poultry & Eggs

Food Allergy on the Rise

The increase in food allergy is good to make note of because of several factors.

One of course is the ever increasing level of environmental toxicity in air, water and food.

Food coloring, additives and flavorings also are known to contribute to this health concern. Over processed foods (including cereals and dairy) and the increased use of highly allergenic or GMO soy in formula, pesticide use and other GMO foods must be considered.

One issue that for the most part that is overlooked is the effect of the myriad of vaccines forced on children from birth to the teen years, on GI problems and allergy.

Over and over again I am amazed at just how the gut issues in infants and small children become more prevalent, how troubling acid antagonist drugs are thrown at them (leading to many more serious problems over time), and how the use of simple remedies like real food, enzymes and probiotics are ignored.

Even children's prescription drugs include many colorings, flavorings and artificial sweeteners - all known to impact developing gastrointestinal and immune systems.

I wonder when common sense will return to health care and mainstream medicine.

Food allergies increasing in US kids, study says By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer

ATLANTA – Food allergies in American children seem to be on the rise, now affecting about 3 million kids, according to the first federal study of the problem.

But experts said that might be because parents are more aware and quicker to have their kids checked out by a doctor.

About 1 in 26 children had food allergies last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday. That's up from 1 in 29 kids in 1997.

The 18 percent increase is significant enough to be considered more than a statistical blip, said Amy Branum of the CDC, the study's lead author.

Nobody knows for sure what's driving the increase. A doubling in peanut allergies — noted in earlier studies — is one factor, some experts said. Also, children seems to be taking longer to outgrow milk and egg allergies than they did in decades past.

But also figuring into the equation are parents and doctors who are more likely to consider food as the trigger for symptoms like vomiting, skin rashes and breathing problems.

"A couple of decades ago, it was not uncommon to have kids sick all the time and we just said 'They have a weak stomach' or 'They're sickly,'" said Anne Munoz-Furlong, chief executive of the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, a Virginia-based advocacy organization.

Parents today are quicker to take their kids to specialists to check out the possibility of food allergies, said Munoz-Furlong, who founded the nonprofit in 1991.

The CDC results came from an in-person, door-to-door survey in 2007 of the households of 9,500 U.S. children under age 18.

When asked if a child in the house had any kind of food allergy in the previous 12 months, about 4 percent said yes. The parents were not asked if a doctor had made the diagnosis, and no medical records were checked. Some parents may not know the difference between immune system-based food allergies and digestive disorders like lactose intolerance, so it's possible the study's findings are a bit off, Branum said.

However, the study's results mirror older national estimates that were extrapolated from smaller, more intensive studies, said Dr. Hugh Sampson, a food allergy researcher at the Mount Sinai School of medicine.

"This tells us those earlier extrapolations were fairly close," Sampson said.

The CDC study did not give a breakdown of which foods were to blame for the allergies. Other research suggests that about 1 in 40 Americans will have a milk allergy at some point in their lives, and 1 in 50 percent will be allergic to eggs. Most people outgrow these allergies in childhood.

About 1 in 50 are allergic to shellfish and nearly 1 in 100 react to peanuts, allergies that generally persist for a lifetime, according to Sampson.

Some people have more than one food allergy, he said, explaining why the overall food allergy prevalence is about 4 percent.

Children with food allergies also were more likely to have asthma, eczema and respiratory problems than kids without food allergies, the CDC study found, confirming previous research.

The study also found that the number of children hospitalized for food allergies was up. The number of hospital discharges jumped from about 2,600 a year in the late 1990s to more than 9,500 annually in recent years, the CDC results showed.

Also, Hispanic children had lower rates of food allergies than white or black children — the first such racial/ethnic breakdown in a national study.

The reason for that last finding may not be genetics, said Munoz-Furlong. She is Hispanic and said people in her own family have been unwilling to consider food allergies as the reason for children's illnesses. "It's a question of awareness," she said.