Monday Moaning

Here we go again!

Sugar, the big enemy.

Headlines today:

Cut back amount of sugar children consume, parents told

Health officials believe children are consuming more sugar than they should

Parents are being encouraged to cut back on the amount of sugar they feed children in a new health campaign.

The Public Health England (PHE) Change4Life campaign offers “sugar swap” tips, including swapping ice cream for yogurt and sugary drinks for sugar-free alternatives.

Health guidelines advise that 10% of a person’s energy or calorie intake should be made up of sugar.

But officials fear children between four and 10 are consuming far more.

‘Health impact’

Source: BBCNews Read more

Opinion:

While it may be true, sugar is not the BIG enemy. They’re barking up the wrong tree… again. Because the real tree has gremlins.

The real enemies are twofold, sweeteners and HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup); i.e. sugar-free alternatives.

Sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose are far more damaging to the body than sugar.

HFCS, which has replaced natural sugar in nearly all sodas and prepared foods in supermarkets, is a plague.

Natural sugar has 50/50 sucrose/fructose. HFCS has an imbalance, as much as 40/60. The excess fructose cannot be processed by the body and my understanding goes straight to the liver and gets converted to fat.

HFCS is the hidden beast that is responsible for the current explosion of obesity. Check this…

Now look at this…

Check out these figures…

Click the image to enbiggenate if your eyes are like mine

Nearly every drink and preprepared food product in the supermarkets have HFCS…

The governments won’t do anything about HFCS, because they’d be fighting giant corporations who pay millions for the ‘right’ politicians to be elected.

Politicians are basically cowards, they won’t protect your rights over their chances of being reelected.

You and your health simply don’t matter!

Your only guarantee for health is to totally eliminate HFCS from your diet. Forget the sugar problem, compared to HFCS it’s not a problem.

Make you Fink on Friday

This one flies in the face of everything we are taught…

Reblooged from: The Zeit

4 Healthy Reasons You Should Start Smoking or Start Smoking More

Smoking has been getting a bad rap for decades now and for good reason. Smoking is the “Lucifer” of health-hazardous habits. Or is it? I mean have you tried researching the issue yourself? What about the health benefits of smoking that no one is mentioning?

Let’s check out some of the many healthy returns of smoking:

1 Smoking Lowers Risk of Knee and Hip-replacement Surgery

A study conducted by the University of Adelaide in Australia has revealed that “Long-term male smokers are less likely to require hip and knee replacements in their old age”.

Wow! You know how people say that smoking is expensive? Well if you ever had your knee or hip replaced you know how expensive THAT is. So if you haven’t been smoking enough because you are worried about the money you are throwing away, just tell yourself “I am investing in my future for a healthier hip and knees and saving money on surgery.”

2 Smoking Protects You from Parkinson’s disease

Jack: Hmm, do you know how smoking protects you from Parkinson’s disease?

Mike: Duh! It kills you before you get the chance to develop Parkinson’s.

OK that was not the greatest joke. If you laughed let me know in the comments below please. Meanwhile I’m not quitting my day job.

According to a journal published on neurology.com with the title “Smoking duration, intensity, and risk of Parkinson disease”, the longer you smoked in years, the more you are protected from Parkinson’s disease. So the number of years spent smoking rather than the number of cigarettes you smoke daily is what makes the difference.

3 Smoking Fights Obesity

Smoking is an appetite suppressant thanks mostly to the nicotine in tobacco smoke. This may sound like some kind of myth fat smokers may be using to enjoy their cigarrete with less guilt.

You would be dead wrong if you thought so because according to a study published in the July 2011 issue of the journal Physiology & Behavior it is inevitable that smokers who quit will gain weight. This is the second biggest barrier in getting people to quit after addiction.

4 Smoking Lowers the Risk of Death

Smoking can help you live longer; that is if you don’t mind a heart attack or two.

Smokers who have had heart attacks have a lower mortality rate than people like me who don’t smoke.

They also react better to some of the therapies designed to remove plaque from their arteries. Let’s just ignore the fact that it is actually smoking that scars the arteries, allowing fat and plaque to build up in the first place.

Conclusion

I just want to tell my readers that this article demonstrates that there could be benefits to everything we consume out there. However for some things the harm may immensely supersede the benefits. The researches and studies we come across are correct most of the time but the way they are presented or referred to by some sites could be misleading.

I touched on the researches being thrown around on some vegan and vegetarian websites in Vegetarians and Vegans Don’t Live Longer. Although the studies themselves were solid, they were taken out of context to promote certain agendas (although for a noble cause).

As we always say here, be aware in order to make your own choice and don’t follow blindly.

Sources:

https://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news46881.html

http://www.neurology.org/content/74/11/878

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00319384/104/1

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00028703/150/2

Monday Moaning

This is about Hawaii.

But it’s also about the rest of the world.

The Ghost in the GMO Machine

While independent research shows that Chlorpyrifos, a Dow Chemical insecticide used in Kaua‘i’s GMO fields, can cause significant harm to children nearby, Dow is intent on convincing the EPA otherwise.

The bodies and minds of children living on the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i are being threatened by exposure to chlorpyrifos, a synthetic insecticide that is heavily sprayed on fields located near their homes and schools.

For decades, researchers have been publishing reports about children who died or were maimed after exposure to chlorpyrifos, either in the womb or after birth. While chlorpyrifos can no longer legally be used around the house or in the garden, it is still legal to use on the farm. But researchers are finding that children aren’t safe when the insecticide is applied to nearby fields.

Like a ghost drifting through a child’s bedroom window, the airborne insecticide can settle on children’s skin, clothes, toys, rugs, and furnishings.

In fact, it’s likely that the only people who needn’t worry about exposure to chlorpyrifos are adults living far from the fields in which it is sprayed. That includes civil servants who work for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which regulates the stuff, and executives with Dow Chemical, the company that manufactures it.

In a regulatory process known as re-registration, the EPA will decide in 2015 whether it still agrees that chlorpyrifos is safe for farming, or whether it will order a complete ban, as Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Pesticide Action Network have demanded in lawsuits filed in 2007 and in 2014.

Dow has long insisted that its chlorpyrifos products are safe, despite tens of thousands of reports of acute poisoning and multiple studies linking low-level exposures to children with lower IQ. The company also has a long history—going back decades—of concealing from the public the many health problems it knew were linked to chlorpyrifos.

In 1995, the EPA found that Dow had violated federal law by covering up its knowledge of these health problems for years. In 2004, then-New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer found that Dow had been lying about the known dangers of the pesticide in its advertising for nearly as long. Together, the EPA and the State of New York have levied fines against the company approaching $3 million.

On Kaua‘i, subsidiaries of four transnational chemical companies—Dow Chemical, DuPont, Syngenta, and BASF—spray chlorpyrifos and several other potent pesticides to protect their experimental genetically engineered crops (GMOs) against a wide variety of bugs and weeds. Because of the heavy pesticide use, Kaua‘i’s GMO testing fields are among the most toxic chemical environments in all of American agriculture. The island, with its precious ecosystems and diverse wildlife, seems particularly ill-suited to be a laboratory for such experiments.

Source: Cascadia Times Read more

Opinion:

Makes me sick that these companies are allowed to continue to manipulate and thwart the regulatory system.

Sure they are censored and fined… But how about some of these decision makers going to bloody jail?

When are the government going to start protecting the people?

Make you Fink on Friday

Why you should ditch the tumble dryer and use your washing line

Times may have changed, but good old fresh air and sunlight will still do your laundry a world of good

‘Our ancestors knew a thing or two about laundry and were keen to get the best results with the least expense or labour.’ Photograph: Julie Habel/Corbis

Washing lines, strung up in back yards or criss-crossing courtyards, have become an image of a domestic past. According to the Energy Saving Trust we are all using our washing lines less and tumble dryers take a bigger share of the load. Washing lines, they argue, should not be a thing of the past but have a vital energy saving role in the future. But is the humble line still a useful tool in modern Britain?

If you take a look at the earliest images of laundry, there is not a washing line in sight. Instead clothes are spread out to dry upon meadows or draped over bushes. An Elizabethan map of London shows Moorfields in the days when it was still an area of open land on the edge of the city; little figures sit on the ground next to pegged-out clothes, the shape of shirts clearly visible. The best published advice on laundry matters, such as Henry Mascell’s Profitable Book of 1597, suggested drying your washing over lavender bushes for an additional bleaching effect.

The washing line is a child of coal fires. Medieval and Tudor laundry relied on wood ash to remove grease, after which the laundry was taken to a local river or stream and beaten to drive out the dirt. But from the 1660s onwards, wood for fires was slowly replaced by coal. Coal ash did not take the grease out of clothes as wood ash did, so people had to turn to soap, and early forms of soap only activated in hot water. The age of the washing copper heater and the washing line had begun.

Gradually more and more people did their laundry at home, far from the drying fields that had lined the rivers and streams of Britain’s towns and cities. Outdoor drying, however, remained the preferred option. Back yards were too small, and generally too dirty for a family’s wash to be laid out flat, but draped over a line, and pegged in place, sheets and shirts could still benefit from sun and fresh air.

Children sitting under a washing line hanging across a courtyard in a slum area of London in 1889. Photograph: General Photographic Agency/Getty Images

Up and down the country the emergence of a washing line in the back yard on a Monday, the product of a clean change of clothes on Sunday, became a sign of housewifely competence and respectability. The poorest of the Victorian poor were unable to join in this weekly ritual. With one set of clothing in constant wear, they could only achieve clean clothes if they were washed late in the evening when the family could be naked in bed, and dried overnight to be put on, probably still damp, in the morning. The Monday washing line was a public statement to all your neighbours that, while you may not be exactly rich, nonetheless your household was holding its head high and managing to do more than just survive. The washing line could be a badge of pride, its absence a symbol of shame.

So what of today’s laundry needs?

Increasing numbers of us live in flats with little access to outdoor drying space and laundry habits have to adapt. Washing lines over the bath make for damp air and clutter, so a preference for tumble drying clothes is understandable. Even for those who do have access to outdoor space, tumble dryers offer the chance to defy the weather.

But there are still two very good practical reasons for hanging on to your washing line, in addition to the ecological argument about energy use, not to mention that unbeatable feel and scent of line-dried clothes. Sunlight bleaches beautifully, if you would like the whitest of whites then there is nothing so effective as hanging them out in the sun. But the strongest practical argument for a washing line comes from the anti-bacterial effect of sunlight: UV light kills the bacteria that may survive a cool wash, both those that might have a health impact and those that cause clothes to smell.

Our ancestors knew a thing or two about laundry and were keen to get the best results with the least expense or labour. So whether you dry it flat on the lawn, draped over the hedge or hanging from a line, don’t forget that good old fresh air and sunlight still have a lot to offer.

Source: TheGuardian

Opinion:

In these days of energy conservation it is a crime to use a drier, even in an apartment, there are solutions.

Change the World Wednesday – 16th Apr

Oiling Brazil’s internet

The internet needs oiling, had trouble loading this page this morning, kept sticking.

All oiled and running smoothly again.

Now it’s 3:30am (making graphics takes time), do I need coffee or do I need more sleep?

Sleep now, coffee later.

I woke at 6am, still too early.

It’s now 9… Boy, did I sleep. I need more coffee.

Clorinha is not ‘green’. She likes plastic.

Clorinha thinks clear plastic is fun

She also likes boxes and empty bottles, they are so wonderful to roll around the floor.

After admitting on last week’s CTWW that I used a squirt of air freshener, I saw the suggestion of orange peel in vinegar as an alternative air freshener on another blog, Living Simply Free, I am trying that. I have the first orange peels in a small jar of vinegar. I have perforated the lid, hopefully during the process it will allow the smell to spread.

Small jar of orange peel and vinegar in the corner

I will have to buy a small spray bottle to try the full effect of the infused vinegar as suggested.

So another example of how blogs can change habits.

Click the banner for the full post

On with this week’s CTWW.

A health issue this week. One that I didn’t know about.

Small’s CTWWs are often full of surprises.

This week, for at least one full day, go vegan. That means no animal products … no beef, chicken, pork, or fish … not even milk, cheese, eggs, or honey.

.

OR … If you are vegan or find this challenge too easy, please share a recipe with your readers and encourage them to try meatless meals … for their health and for the planet.

 

You’ll have to zip across to Reduce Footprints for the preamble to know that we are specifically talking about kidneys…

Wanting to know more, I googled it, and found a site that confirms Small’s preamble, although I rejected what the site said about saturated animal fats, which more recent studies have debunked. Natural fats are good for you, it’s the trans and hydrogenated fats like margarine and vegetable cooking oils (canola, soya, etc) that are the killers. But that’s another story, already posted on here.

Animal protein does make the kidneys work harder, a lot harder.

So the suggestion is to go for a vegan diet to avoid the risks.

I have in the past written that I am a carnivore, and I still am. Meat is a major part of my diet, although I have reduced my beef intake dramatically not because of my health, but on discovering that beef takes more natural resources to produce than other meats.

Animal protein also features high in my diet. I eat half a dozen+ eggs weekly, I drink at least a litre (nearly a quart) of milk daily, my cheese intake would be higher than most people’s, I use butter and I use lard or dripping for cooking.

Now, my health is generally good, albeit that I am a little overweight due to my sedentary life style inflicted on me through a motor accident. Touch wood I have never had kidney stones or any such thing. The only malady that I can attribute to animal products is gout (high uric acid because the kidneys can’t process it all), in my case not serious, manifesting slightly at times and going again.

So, I thankfully consider my lot. For those who don’t know, I am 62 and rapidly (all too rapidly) heading for 63. So health-wise, I haven’t fared too badly.

I would no more think of a vegan diet than fly to the moon. Although, occasionally, unconsciously, I do eat vegan meals. Not because they are vegan, but that’s what I feel like eating. I am more likely to eat a vegetarian meal like yesterday, curried beans on rice.

Some observations: Do vegans use margarine instead of butter, being under the illusion that it is inline with a vegan/healthy diet? Do vegans use vegetable cooking fat or oils (canola, soya, etc) for the same reason? I don’t know, I am asking. If you do then you are far more at risk of heart disease and obesity than using natural fats. These products are amongst the most dangerous in the western world, if the governments weren’t so cowardly (quivering at the feet of the corporations), they’d ban them. Having said that, the US government is taking a close look at new research results.

I don’t consider vegan to be the whole answer.

Nor is it the answer to saving the planet because meat takes too many resources to produce. The problem there is simply too many people, that’s what we have to look at, over population.

We are living on a dirt ball that can support 500 million people, and we are stretching resources to feed 7 billion; we are 13½times over capacity.

Therein lies the problem.

Vegan is not the solution.

 

 

Margarine v butter: are synthetic spreads toast?

Sales of margarine are in decline, due to a combination of reformulated recipes, price, health and taste. Do you defend marge, or is butter simply better?

Margarine: makes wonderfully crisp shortcrust pastry. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Butter v marg: it’s a fight that has gone on for decades. On one side, there’s butter – rich, creamy, defiantly full-fat and made for millennia by churning the milk or cream from cattle. On the other, there’s margarine: the arriviste spread invented in the 1860s. It might not taste delicious, and it doesn’t sink into your toast like butter, but for decades margarine has ridden a wave of success as the “healthy” alternative.

No longer. Sales of margarine have plummeted in the last year, according to Kantar, with “health” spreads dropping 7.4% in sales. Flora has been particularly badly hit, losing £24m in sales, partly due to reformulating its recipe.

Meanwhile, butter is back in vogue. Brits bought 8.7% more blocks of butter last year, and 6% more spreadable tubs. This is partly due to the “narrowing price gap between butter and margarine,” Tim Eales of IRI told The Grocer, but also to the home baking revival led by Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood and co. We’re all sticking unsalted butter in our sponges these days.

A yen for natural, unprocessed produce could also be a factor. “Since all the food scandals of the last 10 years, people are thinking about where their food comes from – butter is perceived as ‘pure’,” says food writer Signe Johansen. But is marg really out for the count? Big brands are owned by powerful multinationals such as Unilever, with huge marketing budgets.

Read more

Opinion:

I use butter, basically, I don’t have margrine in the house. I do sometimes, I use it for garlic bread for BBQs, that’s about it.

I read sometime back that margarine is one molecule away from being plastic…

Think about that.

Would you melt your Tupperware and spread it on your toast?

No, me neither.

 

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

As a parent there is one battle you’ll never win.

Eat your veges!

I had a pet hate when I was a kid, eat a bean, not on your life, but I loved peas. My brother was the opposite; he’d eat beans, but touch a pea, not until Hell froze over.

But now I eat beans, in fact, I had French beans just last night. I don’t know about my brother, if he now eats peas or not.

But for my mother it was pure torment.

Here’s an interesting article:

Don’t make children eat their greens

It’s the age-old family dilemma. And guess what, parents? It isn’t worth the bother

Tim and Ruby Lott. Photograph: Pål Hansen for Observer Food Monthly

One day, when my daughter, Ruby, was about 10 years old, I had a colossal argument with her about a pea. We were in Ikea in Brent Cross, north London. We had ordered lunch in the Ikea restaurant. It involved something and peas.

I had struggled to get Ruby to “eat normally” for as long as I could remember. She refused a wide variety of foods – most fruits, and most particularly any kind of green vegetable. On this day, I’d just had enough.

I was determined to make Ruby eat just one pea. Just one. It could be smothered in tomato ketchup. It could be dipped in honey. I just wanted her to eat… the… fucking… pea.

We spent half an hour discussing, arguing about and reasoning over that pea. I offered an absurd array of rewards. I don’t remember what they were, but they were princely. Whatever she wanted she could have. If she would just eat that pea. Then I began to threaten punishments. She could see she had made me angry, and it was obvious I was going to get even angrier if she didn’t Eat the Pea.

But she still wouldn’t eat the pea. And she hasn’t eaten one since.

After the Battle of the Pea, I reached a watershed. I became a lot less fussed about what Ruby ate. I don’t know if it made any difference. I don’t recall any marked immediate improvement in her eating behaviour. But I suspect that my defeat was a good thing.

Now she is 20, she has a very healthy attitude to food. She doesn’t worry about it. She loves steak tartare. She craves sushi and sashimi, she eats fruit, she’ll try most things. She has no body issues and no food issues that I can see. She has glowing skin and hair, and is a healthy weight.

She still doesn’t eat peas. Or any other kind of green vegetable, including salad. Her explanation is straightforward: “They don’t taste good.”

They don’t. But then, why do we spend so much time trying to get our children to eat them? And is it really, in the end, worth the candle?

My suspicion is that all the effort, care and concern that many families expend to get their children to “eat healthy”, may have no effect, or a bad effect. We worry too much, and this worry has as much to do with social shame, social display and a need for control as it does with healthy eating.

We don’t want our children to end up living on convenience foods, snacks and chips – partly because it is bad for them, but more pressingly, because it is bad for us. Because it is embarrassing.

Around the time of the Pea Incident, I had taken Ruby and her sister Cissy to a fancy French hotel in Mauritius. One night a week, they offered an amazing buffet. I sent the girls off to graze among the 50 or so amazingly varied and delicious platters of French and Asian food and charcuterie.

They came back with chips, white bread and a bit of chicken. That time I wasn’t even furious. I was just ashamed. What was wrong with these kids that amid all this wonderful plenty, they opted for the crappiest dishes on the menu? I just thought they must be horribly spoilt.

Ruby aged 7 and Cissy Lott aged 5. Photograph: Tim Lott

Perhaps this was unfair of me. But I do think many parents would feel the same. Yet it was just a meal. Why was I so upset? Perhaps the need for our children to eat healthy food is just a mask for a number of other anxieties. We want to fit in with our neighbours. We want to be able to make the correct social signals to our peer group – “I am a good middle-class person, because my children eat a varied diet and healthy food”. We are terrified our children might be overweight, which is now as much a social marker as a predictor of poor health.

Nutritional science, however, is inexact. Why did Ruby grow up with clear skin, shining hair and a healthy attitude to food despite eating very little fruit and no green vegetables and a relatively limited diet through most of her childhood?

The human body is more complex and adaptable than we realise. The Kitava tribe of Papua New Guinea subsist on a diet that mainly consists of sweet potato, coconut and some fish. They are healthy, have good skin, strong teeth and suffer from virtually none of all the “diseases of civilisation”. They don’t eat any green vegetables.

Greens are not a must-have. Nutrients found in green vegetables can easily be found elsewhere. “The human body is very clever and can adapt over generations. It can use what resources it has available,” says Charlotte Stirling-Reed of the Nutrition Society, an independent organisation that promotes and disseminates nutritional science. “If you still eat a wide variety of different foods you will get those nutrients elsewhere.

“Most of the vitamins and nutrients in green vegetables can easily be found from other sources – in meat and fish and lentils and beans, in other fruit and vegetables. As long as you are getting variety and the right amount of food every day you will be OK.

“Everybody is individual and very different. If Ruby is eating well, every day, mainly healthy foods, she will be thriving. The anxieties and concerns and worries of the parents can rub off on their children and cause fussy eating. That’s very common.”

The psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, makes a similar point about adults getting over-anxious about food and sees parental anxiety as a major contributor to disordered eating. I told her that I used to get particularly upset if I spent a lot of time and effort preparing my children’s food and they rejected it.

She sees such anxiety as centring on issues of control and rejection of the offerer of the food rather than the food itself. In other words, you’re not getting upset when your child won’t eat because it’s not healthy. It’s because you perceive the child as rejecting your love. And the whole framing of the issue around health and nutrition – food as “medicine” – is misguided.

Read more

Yes, it’s a dilemma faced by all parents. But don’t stop here, read more of this fascinating story

Are we Slowing Down?

Many children ‘slower runners than their parents were’

Children are advised to do at least an hour of vigorous activity every day

Many children cannot run as fast as their parents could when they were young, a study of global fitness says.

Experts say the work – being presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting – suggests children’s fitness levels may be declining.

Researchers analysed data spanning 46 years and involving more than 25 million children in 28 countries.

On average, children today run a mile 90 seconds slower than did their counterparts 30 years ago, they said.

Obesity

Across nations, cardiovascular endurance – gauged by how far children can run in a set time – has dwindled consistently by about 5% every decade, according to the findings.

The decline is seen in boys and girls and across all ages from nine to 17 years, and is linked to obesity, with some countries faring worse than others.

Lead researcher Dr Grant Tomkinson of the University of South Australia’s School of Health Sciences said: “In fact, about 30% to 60% of the declines in endurance running performance can be explained by increases in fat mass.”

The problem is largely one of Western countries, but some parts of Asia like South Korea, mainland China and Hong Kong are also seeing this phenomenon.

Dr Tomkinson said children needed to be inspired and encouraged to do more vigorous exercise.

If not, the public health consequences could be dire.

Huff and puff

“If a young person is generally unfit now, then they are more likely to develop conditions like heart disease later in life,” said Dr Tomkinson.

To stay healthy, children and young people need to do at least an hour of physical activity – such as walking or cycling to school and running in the playground – every day. It can be done in small chunks rather than one session.

Prof Michael Gwitz of the American Heart Association said: “The type of exercise is really important.”

He says exercise must be something that “makes you sweat” and is “sustained and dynamic” to promote cardiovascular fitness.

Simply going to the gym or belonging to a school sports team might not be enough, unless you are moving around a lot.

Christopher Allen of the British Heart Foundation, said: “It’s well established that being physically inactive in childhood can have serious health implications later in life.

“Keeping active can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and the sooner kids start, the better.

“By encouraging children to get active, we can help protect their hearts as they grow up. Parents, schools and community groups can all help kids on their way to 60 minutes exercise a day.”

Opinion:

Not only exercise, get them off any form of soda, and don’t feed them anything that comes in a packet or a can from the supermarket.

 

Monday Moaning

“I-522 would have required that non-exempt foods and agricultural products offered for retail sale state “clearly and conspicuously” on the front of the package if they were genetically-engineered, contain or might have contained genetically-engineered ingredients.” – Wikipedia

Pepsi, Coke, Nestle top multi-million-dollar campaign against I-522

Pepsico, Coca-Cola and NestleUSA have each put up more than $1 million to defeat Washington’s Initiative 522, money  the food industry giants channeled through a “Defense of Brands Strategic Account,” set up by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) so companies would leave no footprints.

The initiative, which has drawn the ire of the food industry and agribusiness, would require the labeling of genetically modified food products, seeds and seed stocks sold on the shelves of Washington stores.

In yielding to a lawsuit brought by Attorney General Bob Ferguson, GMA agreed to list donors to what has become a $17.1 million campaign to defeat I-522.

The list is a who’s-who of America’s powerful food and agribusiness firms.  It was posted late Friday on the balky website of the state Public Disclosure Commission.

Coca-Cola and Pepsico have been here before.  The American Beverage Association, in 2010, spent $16.9 million on a TV blitz that rolled back a small soda pop-junk food tax enacted by the Washington Legislature in an effort to ease cuts in money to the state’s schools and colleges.

The “No on 522″ donations include: (read the full article for a comprehensive list of donors)

Source: SeattlePI read more.

Opinion:

These companies are fighting for their survival; in other words for their ability to make huge profits.

They know that if GMOs are a required part of labeling, they’ll lose a substantial part of their market because the public are daily becoming more discerning and more concerned with GMOs and their effect on our health.

We are at war, company profits vs the right to choose.

Personally, I have stopped knowingly buying any product that I even suspect contains GMOs, That includes Coca Cola or any soda, but not limited to.

The whole food industry is a minefield of horrors at our expense.

We deserve the right to know the path through this minefield, we deserve the right to protect ourselves from corporate greed.

The amount of money these corporations and companies have spent to defeat this labeling proposal is obscene, and shows how frightened they are of losing their precious profits. It also shows how blatantly ignorant they are of our health.

They don’t care!