Saturday, June 2, 2012

The Truth about today's food choices.

I came across this the other day and wanted to share it with you! Tim Bittman has some excellent points on what is wrong with "The Standard American Diet."
He hits on the many points from pollution, industrial livestock, the change in food over the last 100 years. 
  • Pollution, global warming briefly: 1/5 of all greenhouse gasses stem from animal production.
  • Dangers of Methane, gasses from manure.
  • 1/2 the antibiotics in America are used for Animals.  
  • diseases being more prevalent here due to Western Diet.  (meat, cheese, and carbs)
  • That whole plants promote health.  "You eat more plants and less other stuff, you live longer"
  • We are not born craving whoppers and skittles.
  •  Fade diets.
  • 10 billion animals are slaughtered for our over-consumption. (United States alone)
  • Just in the 1900- Everyone was a Locavore (eating everything locally).  Everyone cooked their meals, marjoram did not exist yet.  When they did make majoram, they had it dyed pink so you knew you where eating something fake. 
  • No snack and junk foods, frozen (1920), or canned foods.   
  • No marketing, health claims, or vitamins.  You grew food and you ate it, everyone ate locally.
  • 1930 started to move foods cross country.  Started to market canned and frozen foods to help the domesticated individual to cut down on housework. 
  • cattle diets were changed for bulking them up.  
  • Fast-foods started to increase. 
  • Industrial animals makeup 18% of population
  • 30% of land is given to production of slaughter animals.   
This is a very brief and rough cut of topics in this 20 minutes video.  I highly recommend taking the time to watch.  This is a wake-up call for the foods that we eat.  We head to the store buy what they have there already packaged and processed and ready for consumption.  We tend to eat 5 times the amount of animals products increasing disease and obesity.  It is recommend that we eat 1/2 lb of meat a WEEK.  How much does the regular person eat a day?  America over produces junk foods and animal products.  Not to mention that majority of agriculture does not go to our table but to feed the cattle, pigs, and chicken.  This was written in 2007 and I know that the situation had grown.  


"I’ll never stop eating animals, I’m sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly.” (Mark Bittman)

Wonderful article from Eat Real Food on the difference between a happy cow and an industrial cow.   A Tail of Two Cows, Happy Cow vs Nexium Cow.
 "Happy Cow was at a healthy weight and had more omega 3, up to 400% more, 40% fewer calories and less cholesterol, saturated fat and about 90% less fat overall than Nexium Cow.  Since Happy Cow has been raised on pasture, has room to move, and doesn't have to stand in manure every day he is more likely to not need antibiotics and at least 60% less apt to have E.coli 0157 in his belly. Nexium Cow has a constant stream of antibiotics fed to him."


I would love to know your thoughts on this video.  


16 comments:

  1. The treatment of animals just breaks my heart. I went vegan 4 months ago & do my best to make the healthiest choices for my family.

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  2. I was a vegetarian for more than 5 years.. I changed it just for a few months while I did Nutrisystem, but I plan to return to vegetarian, and may even explore veganism once I am done.

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  3. Our food system is so messed up I can't even believe it. The worst part is that people don't even realize. There are things I don't realize until I start investigating. When I was a kid, you only got peaches in the summer. I so looked forward to it. A few years later and I started to notice peaches at other times of the year and thought it was great. Now I realize that it is unnatural. I wonder if others do??? Thanks for posting this. I am going to share.

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  4. It is crazy how our food system had gotten so out of hand.

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  5. Thanks for this post. I took a nutrition class in grad school and it hit on the major things like how nutrition affects your body. I don't remember a lecture on where food came from though. I think they should definitely include that in a lesson plan because it is something to think about that can also affect your body.

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  6. Thanks for sharing! Very interesting points about our food!

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  7. Wow- I had no idea about all of this! Thank you! I can't believe how crazy it has gotten

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  8. Interesting, but I love my beef, although I believe that they do give them too many antibiotics. I grew up in a butcher's family, and ate raw beef right off the butcher's table.

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  9. The food system is pretty crazy but not enough people care to make a change sadly.

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  10. DH and I went vegan in January 2008 mainly because of our ethical views on the inhumane treatment of animals, but also for the health benefits. We began eating eggs and some cheeses again when I was pregnant with my son in an effort to ward off pre-e (didn't happen though, boo). We now have our own free range chickens and eat very few dairy products (some cheeses and sometimes cottage cheese and sour cream). I really believe that knowledge is power - if more people truly knew what was happening to their food, they'd make an effort to make some changes. Unfortunately, the dairy industry and meat industries are so powerful that they can easily stifle the outcriers. It's quite the uphill battle.....

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  11. Not even our fruit and vegetable crops are safe or as nutritious as they were even 50 years ago. I read once that it would take eating nearly 10 apples to get the nutritional benefits of one apple in the 1950's. :(

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  12. Ever heard of pink slime?!?! We don't half of the stuff that goes into our mouths... check out my article here:
    http://sosmom.blogspot.com/2012/04/whats-in-your-burger-pink-slime.html
    S.O.S. Mom

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  13. Thanks for sharing. There's probably so much we don't know about what we eat.

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  14. Thanks for the info...just getting going on the green/crunchy mom train....loving learning as I go....stoppin by from the Green Moms Network

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  15. Great post! It is a shame we have to worry about our food supply and chain- more people should.

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  16. This is a really good post and makes some great points. Thanks for sharing.

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