Monday Moaning

Yes, I know it’s Tuesday again.

But this time I hope I have got rid of my PC bugs, and things like posting can get back to normal.

In this blog we often look at things like food waste, pollution and contamination of crops, etc; but what about the more global aspect of food, in particular diversity.

Crop diversity decline ‘threatens food security’

A growing reliance on crops like wheat help feed a growing population – but at what cost?

Fewer crop species are feeding the world than 50 years ago – raising concerns about the resilience of the global food system, a study has shown.

The authors warned a loss of diversity meant more people were dependent on key crops, leaving them more exposed to harvest failures.

Higher consumption of energy-dense crops could also contribute to a global rise in heart disease and diabetes, they added.

The study appears in the journal PNAS.

“Over the past 50 years, we are seeing that diets around the world are changing and they are becoming more similar – what we call the ‘globalised diet’,” co-author Colin Khoury, a scientist from the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, explained.

Other crops provide the supplementary nutrients to diets that the major staple foods cannot deliver

“This diet is composed of big, major cops such as wheat, rice, potatoes and sugar.

“It also includes crops that were not important 50 years ago but have become very important now, particularly oil crops like soybean,” he told BBC News.

While wheat has long been a staple crop, it is now a key food in more than 97% of countries listed in UN data, the study showed.

And from relative obscurity, soybean had become “significant” in the diets of almost three-quarters of nations.

He added that while these food crops played a major role in tackling global hunger, the decline in crop diversity in the globalised diet limited the ability to supplement the energy-dense part of the diet with nutrient-rich foods.

Amid the crops recording a decline in recent decades were millets, rye, yams, sweet potatoes and cassava.

The study by an international team of scientists also found that the homogenisation of the global diet could be helping accelerate the rise in non-communicable diseases – such as diabetes and heart disease – which are becoming an increasing problem worldwide.

Crop failure fears

Fellow co-author Luigi Guarino, from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, added: “Another danger of a more homogeneous global food basket is that it makes agriculture more vulnerable to major threats like drought, insect pests and diseases, which are likely to become worse in many parts of the world as a result of climate change.

“As the global population rises and the pressure increases on our global food system, so does our dependence on the global crops and production system that feeds us.

“The price of failure of any of these crops will become very high,” he warned.

Read more

 

Make you Fink on Friday

Grant Cornett for The New York Times

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

More in the Magazine »

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”

Grant Cornett for The New York Times; Prop Stylist: Janine Iversen

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the industry’s formulations — from the body’s fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.’s that their companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns.

The discussion took place in Pillsbury’s auditorium. The first speaker was a vice president of Kraft named Michael Mudd. “I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about childhood obesity and the growing challenge it presents for us all,” Mudd began. “Let me say right at the start, this is not an easy subject. There are no easy answers — for what the public health community must do to bring this problem under control or for what the industry should do as others seek to hold it accountable for what has happened. But this much is clear: For those of us who’ve looked hard at this issue, whether they’re public health professionals or staff specialists in your own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn’t do is nothing.”

As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides — 114 in all — projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

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Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to the last thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their products: cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell, who was an especially vocal proponent of the view that the processed-food industry should be seen as a public health menace: “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”

  Source: The New York Times Magazine Read more

Make you Fink on Friday

Insulin therapy for the rest of your life, or two doses of a cheap vaccine

This is basically just a link post to my Tomus Arcanum which reveals a shock about Diabetes Type 1

Here’s something to think about:

Are all these chronic conditions that we suffer from truly incurable?

Check the link, because you just may find part of the answer.

For example; two doses with a cheap vaccine and your pancreas maybe begin working again producing insulin.

Find out who is stopping this vaccine reaching the market and the sufferers.

Monday Moaning

Another worm crawls out of a wormhole…

New news is bad news

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2012) – A new study finds that the fungicide tolylfluanid, manufactured by Bayer AG and used on farm crops can induce insulin resistance and provides yet another piece of evidence linking environmental pollutants to diabetes. The results were presented June 23 at The Endocrine Society’s 94th Annual Meeting in Houston. “For the first time, we’ve ascribed a molecular mechanism by which an environmental pollutant can induce insulin resistance, lending credence to the hypothesis that some synthetic chemicals might be contributors to the diabetes epidemic,” said investigator Robert Sargis, M.D., Ph.D., instructor in the endocrinology division at the University of Chicago.

Sargis and co-investigators examined the effects of tolylfluanid on insulin resistance at the cellular level and found that exposure to tolylfluanid induced insulin resistance in fat cells. Sargis says “The fungicide and antifouling agent tolylfluanid may pose a threat to public health through the induction of adipocytic-insulin resistance, an early step in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes… Based on these studies, further efforts should be undertaken to clarify human exposure to tolylfluanid and the possible metabolic consequences of that exposure.”

Rising tide of metabolic disease

Close to 26 million adults and children have some form of diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. Diabetes increases the risk of other medical complications, including heart and blood-vessel diseases. In the last decade, research has increasingly focused on the link between environmental contaminants and the escalating rates of diabetes, obesity and other metabolic diseases. Environmental pollutants like tolylfluanid are potential contributors to the rampant metabolic disease epidemic we see today.

Tolyfluanid is actually a hidden source of fluoride

Tolylfluanid has been banned for use in the US because it causes thyroid tumors in rats (not dose/concentration-related), and kidney damage to renal tubules (because tolyfluanid is actually another hidden source of fluoride). The main source for tolylfluanid entering the US is on imported apples and apple juice, grapes and grape juice, head lettuce, hops, tomatoes and other products to which tolylfluanid is applied a maximum of 15 times per season. Tolylfluanid is classified by the EPA as “Likely to be carcinogenic to humans” based on the following weight-of-the-evidence findings: Tolylfluanid induced follicular cell thyroid tumors in high-dose male and female rats and were reproducible. In vitro and in vivo mutagenicity assays found gene mutations and chromosomal aberrations in mammalian cells.

Under other names and uses, this chemical is widely used in paints, wood preservatives and in marine applications.

Even with growing public awareness of environmental toxins and the diseases they cause, it will take decades of human suffering and misery before any semblance of a solution comes to light. Meanwhile it is in the power of the consumer to influence Big Pharma by refusing to buy their products. This will certainly bring about changes quicker than the Big Money-influenced legislation processes. Where is our public outrage? Where do our loyalties lie?

Support public health and decency, be an informed consumer.

Source: NaturalNews

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Opinion:

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Imported apples sprayed with tolylfluanid

So here we have yet again a product that is damaging to our health that we previously didn’t know about. The snowball rolls and keeps getting bigger.

At least the USA has banned the use, but still allows fruit sprayed up to 15 times to be imported from other countries. So the US is not entirely immune.

Making You Stupid

The Common Food Ingredient That’s Making You Stupid

Lab studies show high-fructose corn syrup can actually sabotage your smarts in just 6 weeks.

Brain-harming high-fructose corn syrup hides out in unexpected places. Be sure to read the label.

Foods that appear to be nutritious could actually be destroying your brainpower. The culprit? A common ingredient slipped into many “healthy” foods, including baby food, applesauce, and oatmeal, a breakfast favorite. Researchers at UCLA found that ingesting foods and drinks containing the ingredient high-fructose corn syrup for just six weeks caused troubling changes in brain function. “Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” says Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, PhD, a professor of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology at UCLA. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information.”

While high-fructose corn syrup is rampant in soda and candy products, it also hides out in some seemingly innocuous items like bread, juices, ketchup, and instant oatmeal. (Previous studies have found high-fructose corn syrup is sometimes contaminated with mercury.) Most often associated with obesity and diabetes, this latest study, appearing in the Journal of Physiology, shows this industrial food ingredient can harm the brain, too.

Source: Rodale Read more