The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements

By Sandor Ellix Katz

Summarized with permission of Chelsea Green.
All rights reserved.

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Underground Food Economies

Nutrition and Health

Our current medical system instead focuses on immediate care of emergencies, heroic treatment of symptoms, and a general disregard for the underlying symptoms, thereby effectively just being sufficient enough to band-aid larger underlying issues in many chronic cases.

This has led us to a period which, in 1989, Americans spent more on health care than on food:

• 1960 - 17.5 percent of household income was spent on food; just 5 percent was spent on healthcare
• 2003 - Less than 10 percent of household income is spent on food; and a whopping 15 percent went to healthcare.
• In 1995 healthcare costs of six diseases: coronary heart disease, certain cancers, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity exceeded $70 billion
• In 2005, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, obesity alone cost $78.5 billion
• The journal of the medical establishment admits that U.S. medical system causes 225,000 iatrogenic (due to medical care) deaths per year. Another study puts this number around 750,000. Both agree that 106,000 are caused by reactions from prescriptions.
• For the first time in history, our survival rate is on a decline.

Phthalates, common in plastics used for our food and beauty products, are one of the many chemicals found in greater concentrations in children than in adults. The Environmental Working Group, analyzing umbilical cords collected by the Red Cross, found an average of two hundred known toxic chemicals within their tissues, chemicals that have been passed from the mother to the fetus. We are not only destroying ourselves through our ignorance, we are passing this destruction on to our children. As Paracelsus, a scientific monk said in the 16th century - "The dose makes the poison."

We are in serious need of a change. Returning to fresh, natural foods instead of consuming pesticide laden, overly processed products full of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats would bring about a dramatic change in our health. Consider:

• Unpasteurized, fermented foods are full of healthy bacteria, improving our digestion and repopulating our intestinal flora, improve our immune function and help us to absorb nutrients.
• Whole foods are more than the sum of their parts, and you cannot get all your nutrition needs from pills and supplements as many processors lead us to believe.
• High fructose corn syrup, an extremely popular sweetener, is in virtually every product you can think of, from soda to pickles, even breads.
• Consumption of this in the U.S. rose more than 1,000 percent from the 1970s to 2000
• Average consumption per person is more than fifty-five pounds per year.
• Fructose does not metabolize as easy as glucose, and fails to stimulate the chemicals that signal appetite and food regulation intake.
• May be linked to obesity.
• Hydrogenated vegetable oils are chemically manipulated to make their natural liquid state hold a solid form.
• Virtually all processed foods contain them
• Consumption more than tripled from the 1960s to the 1990s
• Oil processors have led us to believe these fats are healthier than animal sourced fats, yet the rise and prevalence of heart disease has paralleled the introduction of hydrogenated fats, while cultures that use animal fats scarcely develop these life threatening conditions.
• These are recognized by the body as toxins, and literally get absorbed into cell membranes instead of being eliminated; cells actually become hydrogenated in the process.
• A third of Americans are currently obese, and obesity causes 235,000 American deaths per year

Prescription drug companies are spending more than $3 billion a year on direct to consumer advertising, and sales have almost tripled from 1980 to 2000. The food we are eating is directly causing the need for this increase. We need to take back our personal responsibility for our own health and healing, and for those around us.

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