Category: Food

Meat Posted on

Why You Really Might Want to Go with Having a Veggie Burger Instead

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs found lurking in 1 in 5 conventional ground beef samples. If that raw hamburger meat you bought to cook for dinner hasn’t given you a stomach ache yet, this might: according to a Consumer Reports investigation, store-bought ground beef is teeming with dangerous bacteria, including “superbugs” resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics, as well as a whole lot of poop. That’s a big problem, the report warns, because of Americans’ penchant for under-cooked meat. But the study, which analyzed 300 packages of meat purchased from grocery, big-box, and natural food stores across 26 U.S. cities, found some important differences dependent on how the beef was raised: either conventionally — in grain and soy feedlots where food is supplemented with antibiotics and other growth-promoting drugs — […] Read More

Food Posted on

Why It’s Getting to Be Damn Near Impossible to Know What Food Is Actually Healthy

Corporate funding is producing oceans of questionable information when it comes to health. You might think an outfit calling itself an academy would be, you know, academic.  But as Jon Stewart put it, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is as much an academy as the “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” called Kraft Singles is cheese. The last time the academy was in the news, it was for taking an undisclosed amount of money from Kraft in exchange for giving Kraft permission to put the academy’s “Kids Eat Right” logo on Kraft Singles.  When nailed for this, the academy denied that this amounted to putting a stamp of approval on Singles.  What it really was, they claimed, was an ad for the academy’s Kids Eat Right […] Read More

Junk Food Posted on

The Dark Side of McDonald’s World-Famous Fries

,he pesticides used on potato farms in rural Minnesota are harming human health and the environment. There’s no doubt that McDonald’s french fries are, as the company regularly trumpets, “world famous.” But like many who are touched by fame, those legendary taters have a dark side that remains largely hidden from public view. And this dark side has nothing to do with the obesity crisis. McDonald’s purchases more than 3.4 billion pounds of potatoes grown in the United States every year. The company’s preferred variety is Russet Burbank. While certainly delicious to the “billions served,” the problem with this 130-year-old variety is its susceptibility to rot and other diseases, which means farmers regularly employ a significant amount of pesticides on their crops. Rural communities in […] Read More

Food Posted on

8 Biggest Food Myths Debunked

Don’t believe the food lies! In the past several decades, nutritional research has revealed the truth behind the health claims of many foods, puncturing holes in some long-held beliefs. Diets have come and gone, elevating the value of some foods and demonizing others, and in the course of this seemingly endless cycle, some myths about foods have achieved, well, mythic status. Repeat something often enough, and it becomes kind of truth-y. But it turns out that many food myths are just plain wrong. Here are eight common food myths that science has debunked. 1. Myth: Low-fat foods are good. For decades now we have been told to choose low-fat options whenever possible. Fat is the enemy; protect your heart. An entire industry has grown up […] Read More

Food Posted on

The Movement To Stop Food From Being Wasted Is Booming

New ways of dealing with the massive amounts of excess food which exacerbates drought and climate change. Ron Clark is no stranger to food waste. After more than 20 years of working to supply fresh produce to California’s food banks, he knows every point along the route from farm to table where produce gets plucked from the human food chain, for cosmetic reasons, and composted, fed to pigs, or buried in a landfill.  Clark was filling 60-80 truckloads per week with recovered food, bringing 125 million pounds of perfectly healthy produce to hungry food bank clients, by the time he left the food bank system. Today he looks on in awe at a new wave of innovators looking to tackle the problem of food waste. […] Read More

GMO Coverup Posted on

Key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup found ‘safe’ despite WHO claims

The key ingredient in Monsanto’s best-selling Roundup weed killer has reportedly been deemed safe – despite the World Health Organization’s claim that it likely causes cancer. The finding could mean the herbicide will be relicensed in Europe. An assessment of glyphosate was conducted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessments (BfR), allegedly based largely on unpublished papers provided by the Glyphosate Task Force – an industry body which lobbies for the herbicide’s relicensing in Europe. The evaluation, reportedly seen by the Guardian, revealed that the Institute drew different conclusions from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The BfR report found “very limited evidence of carcinogenicity” in mice exposed to glyphosate and recommended its re-approval, suggesting the available daily intake […] Read More

Processed Foods Posted on

USDA on board with shipping U.S. chickens to China for processing, then re-entry to States for human consumption

(Livingtraditionally)“Chinese chicken” will soon have a whole new meaning, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently gave the green-light to four chicken processing plants in China, allowing chicken raised and slaughtered in the U.S. to be exported to China for processing, and then shipped back to the U.S. and sold on grocery shelves here. Furthermore, the imported processed poultry will not require a country-of-origin label nor will U.S. inspectors be on site at processing plants in China before it is shipped to the United States for human consumption. Food safety experts worry about the quality of chicken processed in a country notorious for avian influenza and food-borne illnesses. And they predict that China will eventually seek to broaden the export rules to allow chickens born […] Read More

GMO Coverup Posted on

FAA approves unmanned poison-spraying helicopters.

(NaturalNews) The federal government has granted its approval for a new unmanned pesticide drone that reports indicate will soon start dumping chemical herbicides and other crop-related substances from the sky. The helicopters, designed by Yamaha Corp. U.S.A., have an empty weight of only 141 pounds, according to a Federal Aviation Administration document,[PDF] and they don’t require a human pilot. Multinational corporations like Monsanto can just load them up with Roundup and send them on their way. “Yamaha unmanned helicopters are designed for a wide range of industrial and research applications,” reads an official brochure for the new technology,[PDF] which lists “precision agriculture,” “spraying” and “seeding” as potential uses. “Your eye in the sky offers cost effective, accurate and efficient spraying with zero soil compaction,” it […] Read More

Junk Food Posted on

Wait! What – Diet Soda Makes You Fat?

Among those who consumed diet sodas every day, or more often than once a day, waist circumference increased over 3 inches. Those who drink diet soda thinking it will help them shed unwanted belly fat may see their waistlines expand instead. New analyses from an observational study of San Antonio men and women age 65 and older seem to indicate this. The San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging (SALSA), led by Helen P. Hazuda, Ph.D., professor of medicine in the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, gathered data on health status and lifestyles of 749 Mexican-American and European-American elders, then tracked the health outcomes in 466 survivors for more than nine years. The number of sodas they […] Read More

Junk Food Posted on

Huge Number of Nutritional Experts May Be Bought off by the Big Junk Food Companies

Reports paint a scary picture of how food corporations collude to manipulate information in order to increase profits. According to a new report, many scientific studies about nutrition, as well as the trusted experts who disseminate this information to the public, are being funded by the very entities that should be scrutinized. The report, “Nutrition Scientists on the Take from Big Food,” details the ways that the world’s largest food corporations—aka Big Food—exert their influence on nutrition research and the people who conduct it. The report’s author, attorney and food advocate Michele Simon, has previously studied the influence of Big Food on the nation’s largest organization of registered dietitians. Together, these reports paint a scary picture of how food corporations collude to manipulate information in order […] Read More