By Craig Keaton
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, and other chemical combinations, steroids, growth hormone, and antibiotics, additives, preservatives, colorings, emulsifiers and stabilizers, and the list goes on and on…
Do you eat food or fake?
The average American consumes over 20 pounds of food additives every year.
American farmers spray over 2 billion pounds of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and rodenticides every year on our crops.
The cattle we consume ingest 70% of the nation’s antibiotics, and we eat 70 pounds of it per person.
With hidden sugar and straight sugar addicition we are toppling 175 pounds per of it in our diet per person per year.
A teaspoon of sugar helps the medicine go down?
1 teaspoon of sugar can suppress the immune system by 50% for up to 4 hours! And we are eating 175 pounds of it every year!
Outside of the 2 billion pounds of chemicals sprayed on our crops each year, we ingest other chemicals that are illegal to farm with in the US. You see, we are fortunate enough to make it and then sell it to other countries, let them farm with it and get sick in the process, and then is shipped back and into our stores!
All the chemicals that are “studied” in isolation are said to be safe at very low levels, but we don’t consume low levels. Also, they are not on and in food in isolation. They are always found with other chemicals or you are eating different foods grown with different chemical-icides. No one has EVER studied these chemicals in combination. Make your own conclusion on that one!
Animals in the wild of all species have been studied with GMOs – they will NOT eat food that is genetically modified! Sounds like they are a little more in touch with their sensations that we are.
Steroids and growth hormone will and do alter the amino acid profile of the animal that consumes them. This means that your chicken breast and whey protein actually don’t have all the protein parts that GNC and Muscle and Fiction are telling you need and are getting.
Organic food and the future
We are at a critical point with our biochemical future. We are destroying our land and our bodies. We are creating disease in our animals and ourselves. We think we are above nature! No, we are only a part of nature.
Organic is fad? Bullshit! It’s the only way it’s ever been done. Organic can’t feed the world? Bullshit! That’s what I do. We are always in a state of turnover. Consume synthetic isomers and chemically crafted contents and you are DEGENERATING. We have more of it today than ever! Consume the natural elements from their natural environment and you are REGENERATING!
Go get better!
Craig Keaton
About The Author:
For over a decade, The Movement Dallas Founder Craig Keaton has sought, created and implemented cutting-edge fitness and wellness strategies to radically transform his and his clients’ lives. Craig has a varied background: at a university level, he studied for over 8 years in the fields of Biochemistry and Exercise Physiology, and following that, received certification in the fields of Corrective Exercise and Nutrition/Lifestyle Coaching with the world-renowned C.H.E.K. Institute. Most recently, Craig completed a 3-year hands-on education program devoted to pain relief and performance enhancement with Dr. Eric Cobb, the founder of Z-Health Performance Solutions.
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{ 22 comments }
your’re clearly a tree hugging hippy….
Good stuff, thanks
Ha! I’ve been called worse!:)
Thanks Christian…
-ck
Considering GMOs allow for less of all those other things you mentioned (herbicide, pesticide, etc…) I’m not sure why they’re included in the list. Although there are some potential hazards around monocultures, there is no medical reason to think that GMOs are harmful to eat.
They can be designed to use less water than conventional or organic farming, they minimize soil damage, and they allow higher yields which means we need less farmland to feed the same number of people.
I generally agree with the sentiment of the article, but I don’t think organic is the only way (or even the best one).
I will take a picture for you next time i am out driving around in North Dakota of the farmers spraying corrosive poison on the corn to kill the bugs, the barrels have a skull and cross bones. you tell me if you want that shit on your kids dinner plate this evening.
Then i will snag a pic for you of cows standing in 3 feet of their own shit in little boxes, they look pathetic. give me a month to clear my schedule and i will take a road trip.
Thanks for the comment Ianin
Have you ever farmed?
Not on a family garden scale
but for hundreds or thousands of people?
I’ve not farmed, but I work in the food industry and have an interest in quality, healthy foods. I think that care has to be taken with GMOs, but that they can be beneficial. We’ve been doing it naturally since the inception of agriculture by cross-breeding/pollination (corn shouldn’t exist except as rare freak plants- they can’t pollinate naturally), root-stock and cuttings (all food bananas are clones with sterile fruits!), etc.- you are most definitely messing with a plant’s or animal’s genetics when you do this, as well as surrounding ecosystems, and the results aren’t always healthy or good for the environment.
Regarding them being medically healthy or not- it’s all about what genes are expressed, isn’t it? Does the gene promote production of a necessary vitamin (golden rice)? Does it promote production of a protein allergen (I don’t think this has been done, thankfully)? I don’t like it being used to ‘brand’ crops and make the farmer have to buy from an explicit vendor (hello Monsanto), but there are applications that are for the better, such as those Iain mentioned, especially those that promote drought tolerance, or some kind of insect/disease resistance (less water, less chemicals), and these can be arrived at by cross breeding or gene insertion.
We do need to be aware of the genetics, and be beyond thorough in the protocols, whether using traditional methods or gene splicing. But I am not, and will not ever be completely against GMO. I’d have to give up wine (root-stock and splicing), and I can eat me some tortillas…
As for organic, I don’t always trust the certifications – I’ve experienced some local ones that were rackets- hard and expensive as hell to get, and skewed towards large companies with the money to get it (bakeries in this case). Small farms (and even large ones) can be excluded for such things as using iodine to treat injury on an animal, even though the rest of the farm’s protocols are healthy and natural. You can also have an all organic fed cow that still ends its life on an all organic feedlot, where they stand in their own shit, as Adam wrote. You can also organic farms that ruin their soil because they don’t know how to ammend it properly, or rotate crops correctly, or even that they should.
It’s not a panacea, and I’m kind of fed up with the label since it’s over used and I think encourages laziness on the part of the consumer (highly processed “organic” tv dinners, anyone?)
It often seems to me that people now are throwing the baby out with the bath-water- yes, the systems need to be looked at and improved, and yes, we need to talk with our dollars (especially in being willing to pay the higher costs for better food), but you can use antibiotics, pesticides, GM, etc, judiciously and as a betterment.
That being written, probably the best description I found of truly healthy farming was in The Omnivore’s Dilema- the small (and hopefully growing) number of small farms that consider themselves ‘grass farmers’ and actually use land and animal management to create ever healthier soil, fodder and food animals. Those of you interested in food sources- I’d highly recommend that book. The people really familiar with Gym Movement might find interesting philosophical parallels in the section on grass farming (the land guides the farmer like your body guides you, if you let it).
Anyway, as people become more aware of and interested in what they eat and how it’s grown (ie, if consumers start really taking responsibility for their overall health choices again, which food is a major component thereof), the practices will change and improve. The big question is if people will be willing to pay the real costs of high quality, minimally treated food- we’re spoiled with cheap food. Or at least, that’s my 2 c’s on the matter.
As a complete non-sequitor, I truly appreciate that everyone here seems to be willing to challenge and be challenged, and use it positively to learn and improve…I just had to throw that in, since it seems such a rare thing to see these days.
to use your quote…
“you are most definitely messing with a plant’s or animal’s genetics when you do this, as well as surrounding ecosystems, and the results aren’t always healthy or good for the environment.”
then you say…
“especially those that promote drought tolerance, or some kind of insect/disease resistance (less water, less chemicals), and these can be arrived at by cross breeding or gene insertion.”
Q: so how might these effects that you claim are beneficial, “alter the surrounding ecosystems”?
Q: Aren’t all organisms intimately connected an influenced by its environment?
Q: Is that biochemically confusing? Does that not force physiology at botanical, zoologic and biologic levels?
Q: what negative consequences might show up?
Q: Why does an insect infect/attack a crop?
Q: Gene insertion – do you believe this is a precise method?
“Regarding them being medically healthy or not- it’s all about what genes are expressed, isn’t it?”
Q: Do you believe that genes act as individual parts with no influence on the expression of other genes?
Q: If i affect the DNA, don’t I affect the RNA, don’t I affect protein synthesis? Wouldn’t this create a completely different organism with a whole network of new expression, not just with an isolated “target” gene?
Q: Is there not a great potential for collateral damage?
“As for organic, I don’t always trust the certifications – I’ve experienced some local ones that were rackets- hard and expensive as hell to get, and skewed towards large companies with the money to get it (bakeries in this case). Small farms (and even large ones) can be excluded for such things as using iodine to treat injury on an animal, even though the rest of the farm’s protocols are healthy and natural. You can also have an all organic fed cow that still ends its life on an all organic feedlot, where they stand in their own shit, as Adam wrote. You can also organic farms that ruin their soil because they don’t know how to ammend it properly, or rotate crops correctly, or even that they should.
It’s not a panacea, and I’m kind of fed up with the label since it’s over used and I think encourages laziness on the part of the consumer (highly processed “organic” tv dinners, anyone?)”
ck: Amen dude! i know you are right on with that!
“The people really familiar with Gym Movement might find interesting philosophical parallels in the section on grass farming (the land guides the farmer like your body guides you, if you let it).”
ck: I agree – I am currently writing the Biochem version of Gym Movement and Biomechanics
A sincere thank you for your thougts…
-ck
Your questions basically hit on all the ethical and protocol issues surrounding gm of any kind (my low-blood sugar self brought up grafting/root stocks, which isn’t technically GM, but since it forces an ecosystem/physiology could have similar issues).
This is going to be a highly generalized answer, and more part of a thought process, since you basically set out a master’s thesis for a bio-ag engineer (well, maybe two or three).
At it’s base level, agriculture of any type alters its surrounding environment. Look at Iowa, or any of the corn belt. We’ve changed a plethora of ecosystems (the effects are probably felt all the way to the gulf coast). We live, we have to eat, and there are lots of us, so we have a large impact. My point is that using hybridization and other GM, we can find ways to minimize that impact. This is on top of creating better land management systems- you might want to look up till-less grain farming, I think Shepard’s Grain is the company/co-op making a successful go of it- they are actually stabilizing, building and enriching the soil by changing how they plant, and creating more nutritious grains in the process.
Insects, etc, attack crops for a variety of reasons, from environmental stresses to poor land management, to possible mutation wild cards (which I think we might accelerate with overuse of various pesticides). Yes, build the soil back up, learn better systems of rotation- I don’t know if intensely managed farming is viable on a large scale, but some of it’s methodologies or logic could probably be applied. These things need to be done, but without the manipulations we’ve done as a species on our crops, we’d have lost several. The current banana type we all eat is a replacement for one that got wiped out by a blight. We grow the majority of grapes as grafts onto a specific root stock. We have a wide variety of seedless fruit! How many types of how many different vegetable crops have we manipulated to fit our environment/tastes/needs? How many grains? How many animals? Pretty much every single one that we eat (and many we don’t too), since we started farming them. We’ve committed genetic modification on a massive, grand scale, across a wide variety of plant and animal species. That’s something most people don’t think about or don’t even consider.
Do we force physiology? Yes. Can it have negative consequences? Yes. Can it be overall beneficial? Yes. Have we done both good AND bad with it, in the quest to feed more people more efficiently? Yes. Is it something we all need to really think about and be aware of? Most definitely yes.
As for genetics, I had a very long discussion about this with a friend of mine who was a microbiologist (now an infectious disease specialist). He was actually pretty open to it as a technique, especially in use to add nutrients (I believe vitamin A creation in rice was one of the first types used, and used successfully- that might have been a hybridization, but I don’t think so). From our discussions, we arrived at: Does it have risks? Yep. Do we think the potential benefits outweigh the risks enough to keep it a viable technique? Yes. Is it our first choice? Nope.
It goes back to the baby an the bath water. We have to eat, we have to make our farming as efficient and ecologically sound as possible to make it sustainable. We have a wide tool kit, if we choose to delve into it- while I might not pick up a particular hammer very often, I’m not going to just toss it out. If a massive blight was rapidly depleting on our wheat stocks, or our corn, then I’d definitely be looking at gene insertion as a rapid solution. If we were just looking at ways to reduce water usage, I’d look at overall land management.
I think my answer exploded in length…
Great post!
I do my very best to include mostly organic, local foods into my diet on a regular basis. It’s amazing the parallels of good movement with proper eating, or vice versa. It’s amazing the parallels of better movement with listening to what my body needs nutritionally. It’s amazing how much better I feel after eating quality, real foods. Better is what I am after and clearly the newfangled fake foods you mentioned aren’t what test best for me. I agree with the info on GMOs…
“Animals in the wild of all species have been studied with GMOs – they will NOT eat food that is genetically modified!”
I also respect the adage of ‘results first, beliefs second’. Iain, what information do you have that shows GMO foods to be completely safe (medically) to consume? I would be open to reviewing what you may have found.
here’s to better!
Thanks Brian
I, too, am confused
by the statement that
there are no medical concerns
with the consumption of GMOs
I have PLENTY of researched points
that demonstrate the severe medical concern
with GMOS
BUT am always open
AND yes, Results 1st Beliefs 2nd
There is an obvious association
with the advent of GMOs
and rise in disease states
of all organ systems
So for the time being…
-ck
Craig,
What do you see as the “answers” to the predicament our food supply is in? How do we put the consumer back in control of what we put in our bodies? How do we do this on a large enough scale to effect change?
I believe American farmers are doing whatever it takes to make a living and feed the world. Unfortunately, they can’t make it unless they use the undesirable methods. Livestock must reach a certain size in a short period of time or else the producer won’t get paid. Fields must yield 200 bushels of corn an acre or the farmer can’t recoup their costs of planting. What are they to do? How can we help them?
I often feel so helpless. I choose organic and locally grown as often as I can. I’ve cut out most processed foods, especially the ones with HFCS. I rarely eat fast food. The list goes on. But let me tell you – it’s tough and expensive. And therein lies the problem. Grass-fed beef and broccoli cost more than Big Macs and fries.
Price and convenience. How do we bring that to non-processed food?
“Price and convenience. How do we bring that to non-processed food?”
The price for all natural foods will always be somewhat higher- you just can’t get the density that creates the low prices. If enough consumers demand them, as production increases (more farmland dedicated to it), prices will come down some, but I don’t think they will ever be as low.
As for convience- we’re going to have to have a shift in attitude and approach to food and eating, and how we create convience. So maybe it’s less about bringing that to natural foods, and more about adjusting ourselves and our lifestyles.
I guess I can only be concerned with me and mine, so to speak. I’ve changed the way I and my family eat, and I try to educate others; however, the choice is ultimately up to individuals. Behavior is tough to change. If it weren’t, everyone would exercise, eat healthy, and quit smoking.
I’d highly recommend that everyone purchase the movie Food, Inc. for $10 and the Michael Pollan book Food Rules. The Food, Inc. website is also full of great information and resources.
Craig
thank you very much, this provoked a lot of thought in me as i read it.
I buy organic wherever possible and I’m going to start growing some of my own veg this year. Nobody really knows the long term effects of all these chemicals, they can say they are safe all they like but in reality they don’t know what the effect of consuming them all for a lifetime is, because its just not possible to test that!
As with anything, quality over quantity… I’d rather eat less good food than more food thats got god knows what in it… plus I’ve found organic beef tastes SO much better, regular beef just doesn’t taste right anymore!
I used to drive myself nuts with this stuff, but not anymore. Here’s why. Everyone makes choices with their money. Every dollar is a vote. In the long run, consumers determine what is on the shelves. Things will get better. It’s already happening. Unfortunately, the rich folks will benefit sooner than the poor folks- eating well is indeed expensive. It would help if we stopped corporations from running the government. Good luck with that one. Just keep the faith, everyone. Keep trying to get others to see the truth, but don’t pull your hair out if they don’t. That’s how I roll.
“Every dollar is a vote”
outstanding observation. This morning i observed the line outside McDonalds wrapped around the corner. Most Americans have no concept for quality of food- this website is not built for most people, it is built for those who want to excel.
I need everyone to get on board with this shit- if you want articles telling you everything is ok and the sky is sunny go read yahoo news. Craig is in my opinion one of the foremost experts on biochem and he is giving us damn solid information.
Doubt it? Test it. Go to an organic store and test all the food, than go test oscar meyer hotdogs and corn chips. Report your ROM increases and loss.
To paraphrase Frankie and yourself, more is not better, better is better… same goes for food in my opinion!
As for McDonalds, I think the last time I had one of those was 2 years ago, I never really liked any of that fast food stuff!
I’ve never even thought about actually testing food, I may have to give that a go at some point, I’m intrigued!
Kris
question everything means question everything.
In response to Amy’s question; surely the answer has to be increased awareness. With increased information and education about farming practises, people will be able to make more informed decisions. When demand changes, supply has to follow.
In the UK, the government has been trying to improve healthy eating for many years, with seemingly little success. Why is this? Probably because most of their information is presented in unappealing booklets and leaflets that are then left in doctors waiting rooms.
However, in recent years we have been fortunate enough to have people like Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and other ‘celebrity chefs’ who have showcased their concerns on primetime TV. When people actually get a chance to see what goes into schooldinners, how caged animals are treated etc the chances of them altering their eating habits rise dramatically.
In the last few years, the amount of organic produce, grass-fed meat and other desirable foods have become much more readily available. This is not because supermarkets have developed a better conscience (they exist only for profits), but because they are reacting to a change in demand. Things are most defnitely changing for the better over here and it is down to one thing- Television Exposure. Everyone watches TV. It was hard to watch the way Jamie Oliver was treated on the Letterman show, embarassing almost. America could do with giving Jamie Oliver a primetime slot.
Matthew, you’re certainly right… but a lot of people don’t like things being rubbed in their face, especially when deep down they know the real answer.
A rather overweight woman commented the other day that I am so lucky to be thin, I said it’s not luck I just don’t overeat and I do plenty of exercise.
Deep down surely everyone knows that if you want to be thinner you just eat less? It’s not the hardest thing to work out really.
hi
Mcdonalds , cannot be that bad just read the billboard over a billion served they must be on to something, besides tell me what ocean a square fish comes out for a dollar THEY would not lie to us, would they. lol they suck.