Food for Thought

Something has changed in four generations, and I don’t think it’s for the better.  When our grandparents used to eat food, it didn’t come out of bags, boxes, or packages. And they didn’t have the prevalence of allergies, autism, and cancer that we seem to have in our society now. 

Back in the 1990s, there was this uneasy feeling that I got when I heard that Ben & Jerry’s publicly said that they encouraged the farmers that they get their milk products from to not use Bovine Growth Hormone injections on their cows. I asked myself, why would a company not support using milk that came from cows injected with rBGH? What is rBGH? Why is this causing concern?

Then I saw other companies like Stonyfield Farm take a stand against rBGH. More companies were talking about how they were selling organic foods without chemicals and additives and how they were better for you. I read about it. I believed what I read. I didn’t want to ingest a plate or glass full of chemical compounds. That just didn’t seem right to me.

I subscribe to the theory you are what you eat. If you’re injecting an animal with a chemical compound, doesn’t it follow suit that products obtained from this animal would also contain traces of what they were injected with? In this instance, rBGH was a hormone. Did I need any more hormones in my body? And at that, did I need hormones targeted for cows?

The part that bothered me, too, is that the affects of rBGH on humans was not studied before much of the dairy industry embraced the idea to use their cows like pincushions.

I’m Christian, and although all of my readers are not, I believe that God (or you can call it Mother Earth, or Budha, or whatever you believe in), did a pretty good job of creating what we need to live off of. Why do we humans think we can somehow improve upon that? Just to generate more and cheaper food that perpetuates disease?

Cows were coming down with tumors and disease related to the use of this drug.  Not only is this inhumane treatment of animals just to create a larger commercial milk supply; stories like these made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. My antennae were twitching. What were the long term effects of drinking or eating products obtained through hormone and antibiotic injections to humans, too? No one knew for sure. No one could promise 100 percent that this was safe, and they still can’t. That’s scary.

As time went on, I saw supermarkets carrying a larger assortment of organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. They were higher in price, but I bought them. I didn’t know what the companies putting out inorganic produce and proteins were doing to their foods to make them different, and truthfully, I didn’t really want to know. I just knew that there was a difference. To me, organic meant plainer, purer and less altered ... the kinds of foods that I mostly grew up on, and the kinds of foods my grandparents totally grew up on. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I read articles about girls starting to enter puberty at an earlier onset than previous generations. Then it got me thinking, oh boy, maybe these extra hormones in the dairy products could have something to do with that. I didn’t have scientific proof, but I was just thinking. 

When my daughter was born I made the decision that we were going organic whenever we could. I wasn’t about to pump my child full of chemicals and additives that my grandmother’s generation was not exposed to. No way.

Then I started hearing about children in this decade having a higher prevalence of autism (1 in 94 children in New Jersey are diagnosed with autism; NJ has the highest autism rate in the nation). Why is that? There had to be something in the environment that was different and it wasn’t good. Again, I didn’t know what the cause was, but I was going to exercise caution–whatever I could do that was within my control.

When Manda started school, I was stunned to find out that there were so many children with allergies where the schools had instituted new measures since I was a child, such as peanut and nut-free classrooms, and separate lunch tables for kids that were allergic to one or more foods. What was going on here? I don’t remember looking to my left and looking to my right when I was little and getting the feeling that at least one of my friends had a food allergy. My parents never worried about serving snacks on playdates that could potentially put a child in the hospital. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served with a glass of non-soy milk were the norm back in the 1980s.

Then I stumbled upon this 18-minute video of Robyn O’Brien on Facebook. Robyn O’Brien is a concerned mom and an advocate for “real” food. Do me a favor and please set aside some time to watch what she has to say, and then just think about it if nothing else. For me, she connected the dots of all of these thoughts that have been going around in my head for years, in a very logical and systematic way, supported by research.

At the very least she’s made me question what’s going on with our foods. I have not read her book yet, "The Unhealthy Truth," but I will. However, just after viewing her video, I already had new thoughts swirling in my head. For example, why do more people have celiac disease now and/or have made the voluntary choice to go gluten free because of digestive upset? Is there something that has been done to the grain growing in our country? And ironically, as more people have gone gluten free, companies have spent more on advertising promoting the health benefits of whole grains in pasta and breads. Is this to try to make up for lost revenue from those that steer away from gluten now?

What about the increased prevalence of autism? Right now we don’t know why it’s happening, but if the parents of our future children are consuming chemicals that previous generations have not, wouldn’t it follow that those compounds would affect the development of their children? I’m not calling for research that takes years. I think we’ve already done that by experimenting on more than one generation now.  Isn’t it time to read the writing on the wall?

If you watch Robyn O’Brien’s video all the way through, you’ll notice how she mentions that 27 European countries and other nations have refused to buy certain food products from the U.S. which contain genetically altered components or certain additives. Since U.S. is such a big world food supplier, it has catered to overseas consumers and produced products free of these bothersome ingredients. It almost makes me want to change residency just so I can have the ability to buy more unaltered food. Why should I have to buy the cheaper, we’re-not-so-sure-if-it’s-safe-but-we-think-so versions because I’m an American?

To add fuel to my fire, I recently read about how scientists have come up with “fake steak.”  Sorry, but I don’t want my “meat” grown in a lab.  More chemicals is NOT what we need. I’m all for feeding the hungry–but doesn’t anyone question what we feed the hungry? The quality, and safety of it? Just because it hasn’t been shown to be dangerous, doesn’t mean that it isn’t. You wouldn’t pour the contents of a petri dish down someone’s throat would you? Why is this any different? I’d rather go vegan if I couldn’t get real meat. And if it came right down to a food shortage, I’d take to growing and hunting all of my own consumables if I had to, in order to survive. 

I’m disappointed in the FDA, for allowing plans that make financial sense to pass through the cracks so companies can bolster profits at the expense of human health. When you’ve got other countries objecting to methods and products used in agriculture and industry that affect the food supply and feeders, shouldn’t you take the time to stop, look, and listen?

It doesn’t make sense to me to spend more money on healthcare fighting and figuring out disease when perhaps prevention is the cure.

To summarize my feeling, I mostly agree with Suzanne Somers. She says, “… if you can pick it, pluck it, milk it, or shoot it you can eat it."  Last I checked you can’t pick, pluck, milk, or shoot a package of cookies or a box of bars. And, if I can’t pronounce my ingredients, I shouldn’t be ingesting them. But I take what she says one step further. Don’t give me produce that you’ve sprayed, fertilized, grown or injected with chemicals. I don’t need my fruit “enhanced.” I don’t want a new and improved version of my milk, and I’ll order my steak genetically-unaltered, please.