Raspberries from my home garden. No chemicals. Lots of poop.
Buy local. Buy Organic. Grow your own food.
So this morning on NPR I hear a story about how the FDA is trying to impose major restrictions on organic farmers using manure on their crops because of health dangers.
WTF??????
Manure, something that is natural and has been used since the dawn of agriculture, is a bigger danger than Round Up, chemical fertilizers and all the other shit our food supply and planet is being subjected to???
Just another example of a government agency in the pocket of Big Ag and Pharm that has NONE of our interests at heart. Organic farmers already have safe guidelines for how they use manure...this is just another bullshit regulation aimed at undoing all the progress that is being made in going back to more natural ways of raising food.
Don't let them fool you. Support local farmers and organic farming. Vote with your dollars with every meal you eat. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/11/21/246386290/organic-farmers-bash-fda-restrictions-on-manure-use To your good health, Teal Chimblo Fyrberg Blissful Body Yoga is located deep in the beauty and magick of the Appalachian mountains, in Asheville, North Carolina.
Just a quick post to share something new in my ever widening attempts to make sure everything we use and eat is as low in toxins and cruelty free as possible.
This is the only line I have found so far (that looked good to me, anyway) that rates 1-3 on the cosmetic data base website for low toxicity. SO excited to finally find a make up line that isn’t full of poisons and animal urine. If anyone has found any other good companies, please share! Also, they are out of North Carolina....bonus!
RATING: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/wordsearch.php?query=afterglow+cosmetics
Also, I have been looking at the shampoo/conditioner dilemma for a while and what I really like to use is Dr. Bronner’s lavender liquid castile soap as shampoo and then two of their products (see below) as a conditioner and leave-in product. I buy the Dr. Bronner’s by the gallon and use for hand soap, cleaning, hand-washing clothing, all sorts of stuff. The peppermint is great too!
Use EWG to look up brands and chemicals. Be informed and powerful in your choices! Vote with your dollars and we will all see a healthier planet and people! http://www.ewg.org/
In case you needed another reason to eliminate products containing high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) from your diet (and believe me if you haven't started doing this, you will want to after reading this article) here is one more: mercury. Not exactly something we want to be ingesting.
Mercury is a heavy metal and loves to store itself in the fatty cells of the body. The fattiest cells of all are in our brains, and this is not good news for this delicate organ. Remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? That was actually based on the fact that "hatters" used a glue in the binding of hats that contained mercury. Constant exposure to this substance actually caused brain damage and "madness," in some cases.
When you begin the crusade to eliminate HFCS from your diet, you are going to discover it is in everything; not just things you would expect like sodas. It is in salad dressings, mustards, crackers, etc. Check your labels...buyer beware!
There are lots of healthy alternatives out there for products you commonly use, and the more consumers demand with their dollars that this is what they want, the more manufacturers will eliminate this nasty stuff from their mixtures.
The yogi strives to eat a wholesome Satvic diet that nourishes the body. This is always best accomplished by eating a whole food diet. Basically, if it doesn't come out of the ground or off a tree, try to avoid it. Packaged foods, even the best quality ones, are always going to be less nutritious, have less Prana (vital energy) then a natural food.
Make small changes every day, and it won't be overwhelming, I promise! You will feel and look better, and be on your way to a longer and more blissful life.
Namaste.
The original article (shown below as well), along with a lot more information on HFCS and mercury can be found on the great web site GRIST: Environmental News and Commentary, here.
High-fructose corn syrup rose from obscurity to ubiquity starting in the late 1970s, borne up by an informal public-private partnership between grain-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland and the federal government. For me, HFCS is at best a highly processed, lavishly subsidized, calorie-heavy, nutritional vacuum.
I recently visited a public high school in Boone, N.C. The main hall literally hummed with machines peddling variations on Coca-Cola's formula for success: fizzy water with artificial flavor, artificial color, added caffeine, and a jolt of HFCS. Other machines displayed snack "foods" tarted up with HFCS. Why are we feeding our kids this crap, again?
Now comes news that makes even an HFCS cynic like me do a spit-take over my home-brewed morning coffee. Turns out that HFCS is commonly tainted with mercury -- a highly toxic substance -- according to a peer-reviewed report published by Environmental Health (abstract here; PDF of the must-read full text here.)
The Environmental Health study draws on samples of high-fructose corn syrup taken straight from the factory. But no one drinks the stuff straight. What about, say, cookies sweetened with HFCS? The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy plucked HFCS-containing products from supermarket shelves and tested them for mercury. The result?
Overall, we found detectable mercury in 17 of 55 samples, or around 31 percent
Traces of mercury turned up in name-brand products from makers including Quaker, Hunt's, Manwich, Hershey's, Smucker's, Kraft, Nutri-Grain, and Yoplait.
That a ubiquitous industrial-food ingredient such as HFCS should be tainted by mercury is bad enough. But it gets worse. The FDA has apparently known about this since 2005 -- and done nothing to publicize it or change it.
In 2005, EH study lead author Renee Dufault was an FDA researcher. At that time, she conducted the tests now cited in the EH report. Her results found mercury in 9 of 20 HFCS samples -- 45 percent.
She doesn't comment on why, but the FDA apparently did nothing with her results in the years since they emerged. She retired from the agency in March 2008 -- and evidently decided to go public. She deserves praise for the decision to publish her work -- essentially blowing the whistle on what looks like an egregious attempt to hide key information from the public.
So how does mercury work its way into our the food industry's favorite sweetener? It finds its way into Pop Tarts and the like through the stunning array chemicals required to transform corn into a cane sugar substitute. (As you read the following list, marvel that the FDA recently ruled that manufacturers can label HFCS-sweetened foods "natural.") According the the EH study:
Several chemicals are required to make HFCS, including caustic soda, hydrochloric acid, alpha-amylase, gluco-amylase, isomerase, ilter aid, powdered carbon, calcium chloride, and magnesium sulfate.
Two of those charming-sounding chemicals -- caustic soda and hydrochloric acid -- can contain traces of mercury.
Caustic soda and hydrochloric acid are made through the same processes that produce chlorine. It can be done in one of two ways. The first involves pumping saltwater through a vat of mercury. The stuff produced this way is known as "mercury grade."
The second process involves no mercury. The industry is shifting to the second process, but the mercury style has by no means been phased out. According to IATP, "Today, the chlorine industry remains the largest intentional consumer (end user) of mercury."
So you've got this "mercury grade" caustic soda and hydrochloric acid floating around. Guess who's using it? According to the EH study, "mercury grade caustic soda and hydrochloric acid are primarily used by the high fructose corn syrup industry."
Not only did the FDA fail to inform the public of HFCS's mercury problem; food manufacturers that use HFCS may have been in the dark, IATP reports.
There is one hopeful tidbit from the highly disturbing Environmental Health and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy studies. Several years ago, then-Sen. Barack Obama introduced legislation that would have forced the chlorine industry to phase out mercury.
That bill failed. I hope the new Congress revives it. And I hope the Obama FDA investigates precisely why the agency sat on information that could have saved consumers from mercury exposure. The officials who made that decision -- as well as the HFCS industry, led by Archer Daniels Midland -- must be held to account.
