--> Biotechnology companies claim they're coming to the rescue with a new breed of genetically engineered crops that can produce more food, with greater farming efficiency, than ever before. What they don't tell you is that these GM foods contain pesticides and their use encourages the massive dumping of herbicides on croplands by farmers. Those synthetic chemicals wash right off the farms and into the aquatic ecosystems (rivers, wetlands, oceans) where they are creating "dead zones" that can't even support aquatic life.
It's all being done for the sake of the almighty dollar. |
 To do this, it's helpful to recall that farming allowed our forbears to grow and store calorie-dense foods in the form of grains, meat, and cheese. While agriculture stimulated population density and led to geographical dispersion, there's no evidence that humankind thrived. And, quite frankly, that's the situation for most of us who eat a diet characterized by "healthy" whole grains and skinned chicken breasts. After studying the effects of a number of foods on my patient volunteers and myself, I believe that the main ingredient missing from our more recent ancestors' diet was green leaves. |
 The first night after departing for their big Montana trip— fourteen hours in the car after they'd left behind the rural farming village where they lived near New Mexico's Rio Grande—the couple had stopped at their Idaho motel just shy of the Montana border. Once settled in their room Jan and David had turned on the air-conditioning to help filter out the polluted soot from the smoking Montana fires that had drifted in behind them and hoped for a good night's rest. It was a few hours later that Jan's chest pain suddenly and inexplicably set in. |
 However, outdoor work, like farming, has been found to be protective against breast cancer. [Epidemiology 11:523-31, 2000] Obviously, vitamin D offers protection here, and the worry about pesticides may be overblown.
Vitamin D can be successfully combined with cancer treatment:
Researchers have concluded that vitamin D, by itself or in conjunction with chemotherapy, "may be beneficial for the treatment of estrogen independent (negative) breast cancer. |
 Even worse, our government still pays vatious and sundry subsidies, actually $345 million in the year 2000, to support tobacco farming.36 One cannot escape the conclusion that our government fights lung cancer with one fist, just as it promotes that dread disease with the other.
We might focus on the public health establishment. Most of their effort is in controlling some problem that is a manifest threat, say, the spread of infectious disease. This is all for the good, though the effort is tiny by comparison to other branches of institutional medicine. |
 All small farmers have to give up their farming businesses
3. Creation of Frankenstein foods that our bodies won't know how to handle
4. Super weeds resistant to all herbicides
5. Plants resistant to pesticides
6. New viruses and diseases for which there won't be a cure
Already, 60 percent of processed foods now contain at least one genetically modified food item. Millions of people now consume chips with the firefly gene, potato chips with a chicken gene, or salsa with tomato containing a flounder gene. |
 Salmon farming is popular in Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Canada, and Chile; this type of salmon is most commonly consumed in the United
States and Europe. Most canned salmon in the United States is wild Pacific salmon; Alaskan salmon is always wild.
Why Should I Eat Salmon?
Salmon is a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are necessary for proper brain functioning as well as a healthy cardiovascular system. Salmon is rich in protein and vitamin A. The flesh is usually orange or red due to the carotenoids found there. |
 On the other hand, organic farming is much less harmful to the environment than conventional farming methods, reducing both the pesticide residues in food and the land, as well as reducing the contamination of our water supplies. Conventional farming pollutes water with pesticide runoff, degrades topsoil, and uses nonrenewable energy resources. In contrast, organic farming releases few chemicals into the environment, enhances soil quality, and encourages biodiversity of crops, thus protecting our natural resources. |
| Benjamin Franklin sent seeds from London to a botanist friend in North America in 1770 and ever since, the United States has been a leader in soybean farming.
Where Are Soybeans Grown?
The main producer of soybeans is the United States, followed by Brazil and Argentina.
Why Should I Eat Soybeans?
Soy is the richest source of protein of any legume. In whole bean form, soy is very rich in fiber but many processed soy foods are not. Soy can be an excellent source of calcium, ranging anywhere between 80 and 750 mg per serving, depending on the type of soy food. |
 Imagine some huge eye going blind to what modern farming and food processing has been doing to the nutritional values of food. It means that no attention has been paid to the slowly increasing levels of malnutrition, and chronic illness in populations. In the first world we now find the majority of obese people are actually malnourished in essential minerals and vitamins.
The food supply has been steadily becoming magnesium-poor since 1909. |
 The second thing is we will eventually get to a place where we'll be teaching farming: How to grow your own little greenhouse for a family of four. We're going in that direction; probably in another year will get to that place. If you can't do farming, you have two other options. You, for example, can contact a local organic farmer, and he will give you a certain amount of produce each month or each week. You just pay him a fee for the food. You support him; you get the food; you don't even have to go to the stores.
Mike: And it's all seasonal. |
 The risk of farming and working in the fields with these poisons is associated with increased rates of breast cancer, suicide, infertility, and birth defects. Government investigations into the obvious find no conclusive proof of any harm. Such denial of a problem is a cost-saving benefit handed down to the fast-food farming industry at the expense of human health.
Any pregnant mother eating food that contains residues of these chemicals is putting the health of her child at risk. |
 Wise Traditions in Food, farming and the Healing Arts, fall 2001. http://www.westonaprice.org/mother-linda/cornsyrup.html#forristal.
Fuchs, Nan Kathryn. The Nutrition Detective: A Woman's Guide to Treating Your Health Problems through the Foods You Eat. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985.
Galles, Gary A. "The Market for Space in the Market." The Freeman 50, no. 3 (2000). http://www .libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosophicalissues/economics/economicissues/marketspace.shtml (accessed January 10, 2005).
Gittleman, Ann Louise. |
 As in ancient Greece and Italy, the first evidence for extensive soil erosion coincides with pioneer farming.
Slash and burn worked well while the population density remained low and there was enough land for farmers ro move their fields every few years. As the grear Mayan cities rose from the jungle, people kept clearing land as their ancestors had done, but they stopped moving their fields. The tropical soils of the Yucatan Peninsula are thin and easily eroded. Under sustained cultivation, the high productivity obtained right after clearing and burning rapidly declines. |
| The Mental Health Foundation, a London-based research and policy-influencing think tank, and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming, jointly released a landmark 2006 report, "Changing Diets, Changing Minds: How Food Affects Mental Health and Behaviour. |
 USDA is being run lock, stock, and barrel by agribusiness and has abandoned its duty to protect the public and the farming community. This USDA decision, along with FDA's long-standing refusal to label genetically engineered food, and its recent decision to attempt to label irradiated foods as "pasteurized," is a conscious effort by the Administration to leave consumers in the dark about the dangers lurking in their food. |
 The longer our soils are farmed with large-scale commercial farming techniques, the worse the situation is going to get and the lower the mineral content will become. This is why floods, tsunamis and even volcanoes are very good for humans in the long-term, because they recycle the soil and deposit more minerals and new nutrients onto lands that can be used for farming.
Following the late 2004 tsunami in Thailand, the soils there produced outstanding crop yields because ocean water had been deposited onto the land. |
 So, if you take a cow, pig or chicken and you look at the way it's treated in a commercial ranching or farming environment, you'll find that it's a very unhealthy food source, because it has consumed and concentrated all of these toxic chemicals. When a human being consumes that meat, those toxic chemicals are ingested into that human's body, where they function as cancer-causing chemicals, liver-damaging or hormone-disrupting chemicals. |
| Conventional short-rotation, single-crop farming can reduce the diversity, abundance, and activity of beneficial soil fauna, and indirectly encourage proliferation of soilborne viruses, pathogens, and crop-eating insects. Generally, so-called alternative agricultural systems tend to better retain soil-dwelling organisms that enhance soil fertility.
Like soil formation, soil erosion rates depend on soil properties inherited from the parent material (rocks), and the local climate, organisms, and topography. |
| By about 7000 bc small farming villages were scattered throughout the region. Communities became increasingly sedentary as intensive exploitation of small areas discouraged continuing the annual cycle of moving among hunting camps scattered around a large territory. By about 6500 bc large towns of up to several thousand people became common. The seasonal thythm of an annual trek to follow resources was over in the Middle East.
Populations able to wrest more food from their environment could better survive periods of stress—like droughts or extreme cold. |
| A revolutionary merger of farming and animal husbandry began when cattle reached the growing agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia. With the development of the plow, cattle both worked and fertilized the fields. Conscription of animal labor increased agricultural productivity and allowed human populations to grow dramatically. Livestock provided labor that freed part of the agricultural population from fieldwork.
The contemporaneous development of crop production and animal husbandry reinforced each other; both allowed more food to be produced. |
| They were so successful that by about 5000 bc the human population occupied virtually the entire area of the Middle East suitable for dryland farming. The pressure to produce more food intensified because population growth kept pace with increasing food production. This, in turn, increased pressure to extract more food from the land. Not long after the first communities settled into an agricultural lifestyle, the impact of top-soil erosion and degraded soil fertility—caused by intensive agriculture and goat grazing—began to undermine crop yields. |
 These respectful, earth-friendly farming methods changed drastically when farmers switched from organic to synthetic products. The massive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides changed the whole fabric of agriculture and farming. Yields were tripled . . . but at a devastating cost.2
In addition to the way food is grown, there are many other problems with the quality of our food today. We have chemical additives, irradiated produce, fat substitutes, chemical sweeteners, chemicals leached from packaging, and new "designer" (genetically modified and engineered) foods. |
| The rise of commercial farming not only allowed the population to grow, it meant that they had to be kept occupied. Some even suggest that the Great Pyramids were public works projects intended to combat unemployment.
Egyptian agriculture remained remarkably productive for thousands of years until people adopted new approaches out of tune with the river's natural rhythm. Desire to grow cotton for export to Europe brought aggressive year-round irrigation to the Nile in the early nineteenth century. |
 Is it grown for money, or grown because people love farming?
We also work with people who do ocean-grown food, so some of our food is ocean-grown. And we work with people who are able to package that food in such a way that there's no bacterial contamination and we're getting the food as fresh as possible to the final consumer.
Mike: That's a real challenge with raw foods, because obviously they're not irradiated, and they're not cooked at high temperatures. Do you do nitrogen packaging of some foods, or how do you really handle the shelf life issue?
Wolfe: That's a great question. |
 It is attributed to the fact that a lot of us spent the last 30 years building up an alternative food and farming system in the United States. This alternative system has proved to be much better than industrial agriculture, and so now the latest polls show 75 percent of Americans say they are shopping for healthier food. If you look at the statistics, about 12 cents of every grocery store dollar are going for foods that are labeled as either natural or organic.
Mike: Well, that is a substantial sum. That is growing at, what, about 20 percent a year or something? |
| Organic farming is better for the environment because it protects water resources and the soil.
If you decide to eat a mixture of organic and conventionally grown produce, here are the best vegetables and fruits to buy organic, because otherwise they're found consistently contaminated with pesticides, according to the Environmental Working Group:
¦ Apples ¦ Peaches n Bell peppers » Pears
« Celery s Potatoes
« Cherries ¦ Red raspberries b Imported grapes Spinach
Nectarines > Strawberries
Stop SUGAR SHOCK! |
 Had Laura Krause been farming in Denmark, for example, and not Iowa, the closest GMO field could not have been next door, but no less than two hundred meters, one fifth of a mile away. Had her fields been contaminated, she would have received compensation to make up for the 50 percent drop in price that occurred after discovering the unwanted genetic material in her corn. She also would have been able to identify the source of that contamination because of the "traceability" requirement.
The EU's qualified acceptance of GMOs has created unease even within Europe. |
 They are a component of industrial farming practices and part of a complex ecosystem and food web. This section looks at potential health problems that may arise from these relationships. Topics include the impact of toxic herbicides that are applied to herbicide tolerant crops, bioaccumulation of other toxins within GM crops, concentration of toxins in the milk or meat of animals, and the consequences if virus-resistant GM plants promote new plant viruses. |
| What is clearfrom the starting point, however, is that they are vastly different from the bacterial Bacillus thuringiensis protoxins, used in organic and traditional farming and forestryfor decennia. "**
—Terje Traavik and Jack Heinemann
1. Bt-toxin in GM crops is more harmful than Bt spray due to differences in the concentration and form of the protein.
2. Bt sprays are used intermittently and degrade in the environment.
3. The Bt- toxin in crops is thousands of times more concentrated and is continuously produced in every plant cell.
4. The form of the i? |
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