Your government is using your tax dollars to poison you! So put down your cheese burger and fries and read on to see what you can do to stop it...
The United States is under going a huge epidemic. One third of us are affected. That is the largest epidemic in our history.
We are facing an obesity and diabetes epidemic. This epidemic is predicted to cause the next generation of Americans to have a shorter life span than the previous generation. This is another first in our history.
The reason that people are fat? There is just too much food and people are over eating, right? Wrong. We now realize that something in our diet has triggered a hormone cascade that is telling our bodies, at least for some of us, to hang on to every calorie and convert it to fat. That something is also telling our bodies to get depressed, move less, have pain, snore, destroy our blood vessels and our hearts and a host of other serious noxious things. Years of research have gone into figuring out what it is that is causing this change in people and we now think we have some idea about what is happening. Higher sugar intake is causing higher insulin levels which in turn create inflammation and trigger the hormone cascade.
So we are choosing to eat more sugar and should stop. Right? Well not so fast Tex. It might not be a choice. Go to your kitchen cabinet and pick up a box, can or bottle at random. Scan the ingredients. I’ll wait....
Does the box say, "High Fructose Corn Syrup" or "Dehydrogenated", "Partially Dehydrogenated" or "Mono-diglycerides"? You my friend are the victim of government poisoning.
Here is how it works. For decades now the government has used our tax dollars to give to farmers to encourage them to grow what Americans consider staples. Specifically, corn, soy, wheat, rice and cotton. That has made these five crops very inexpensive to grow. Corn is especially cheap to grow (3 cents a lb). Until Willie Nelson started growing corn for ethanol we had a surplus of corn. Nothing was cheaper to buy than corn. What can you do with all that corn? Why you can make High Fructose Corn Syrup out of it and use it as a sweetener. And now HFCS is in almost everything. Even things that you and I do not ordinarily consider sweet. The problem is that HFCS has a very high glycemic index. It goes directly across the stomach lining and into your blood. It is converted to glucose almost immediately and then causes your insulin to rise in a sharp spike. Remember, insulin is connected to the inflammation/obesity cascade.
A secondary problem is that soy and corn oil are also being made too cheaply. These oils are the "bad" oils that are implicated in obesity and heart disease.
These subsidies are contained in something called the Farm Bill. Originally this bill was to help small farmers produce the staples that the US needed in case something bad should happen to our food supply. But over the years it has morphed into a bill that encourages industrial farming of one or two crops that are of poor nutritional value and do not even taste good. These crops are taking over our food supply. Less and less variation in our food supply now exists for several reasons and the Farm Bill is one of them. The Farm Bill is pushing our farmers to grow the exact foods that are making us sick. Meanwhile the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables (the cure for the epidemic) has gone up 38.9% from 1985-2000. The cost of soda over the same period dropped 23.6% and sugar is down 7%. Fats and oils are also down 14%. That is why the obesity epidemic is worse among the poor.
Now you may think that I want the Farm Bill repealed. That was my first instinct but thank God there are people in Washington much smarter than myself. For the last 3 years a group of activists and physicians have been working on a new Farm Bill. This bill subsidizes the things that make Americans healthier. Fresh fruits and vegetables grown on smaller more local farms. (OK...the activists did not get every change they wanted in the bill but it’s a start.) That bill comes before the House on Friday.
SO HERE IS THE ACTION:
I need you to call the Congressional switch board at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative that you want the Healthy Farm Bill (HR962) passed so that the government stops poisoning you with your own money.
For more information on this subject or to sign an on line petition go to Healthy Farm Bill .
My sincere thanks to Dr. Wallinga for his very insightful talk at the 5th Annual Nutrition and Health Conference held this week in Phoenix, put on by Dr Andrew Weil’s Integrative Medicine Center . You can see more of Dr. Wallinga’s work at The Health Observatory .
See Dan Imhoff explain the basics of the Farm Bill at Part 1
Part 2 Part 3
Part 4 Part 5
And while you’re at it check out how the government is poisoning our kids at school lunch, Healthy Eating Research .