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Fresh Brewed: Week 1 Topic - Following the Food, Healthy (or Not So) Eating

Welcome to Fresh Brewed! Each week I will write about a topic that relates to families. Then, at the bottom of the post is a Linky Tool so that you can link up your posts related to the topic for the week. It doesn't have to be a new post from the past week, if you have written about it in a previous post, link it! The topics will be broad enough to encompass many avenues of thought, but do please only post related posts. Opinion posts are welcome, but not bashing ones please. Please keep it respectful. There may be posts with vastly different viewpoints, or addressing points on vastly different areas of the topic. That's fantastic as every family is different and struggles with different circumstances. If you are not a blogger, but you have an interesting article to share, or read something another blogger posted, please feel free to leave a link in the comments and a short description of how it relates to the topic. 

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Thanks so much for joining me for Fresh Brewed!

Week 1 Topic
Following the Food, Healthy (or Not So) Eating

So the other day, Victor sent me this article on corn production.

I was especially appalled, though it's not actually news to me, by this section of the article:

"Our ability to supply the world with vegetables is practically unlimited," Babcock said.
Take corn, and add in other giant crops that basically just feed animals—crops like soybeans, barley, hay, sorghum—and two-thirds of U.S. farmland goes to animal feed.
"Such a small portion of our land goes to grow actual food that people consume," said Babcock, "that if we really wanted to increase that supply, it would be pretty easy."
The trick would be convincing the country—and other countries that import animal feed from the U.S.—to go vegan.
Well, at least corn is good for cows, right?

Not even close. 

In fact, corn is about as healthy for cows as a diet based purely on s'mores is for us. Sure, we might be able to survive on it for a while, but eventually, it's going to give us major health problems.

Cows were designed to eat grass. Plain and simple.

Sure, they like the occasional treat of corn now and then, just as marshmallow and chocolaty goodness occasionally hits the spot for us. But it simply cannot produce healthy cows. It's not possible. Fat cows, yes. But not, by any means, healthy.

This interview with Michael Pollan is one of the most concise synopsis of why this corn/cow marriage is such a terrible pairing, and in fact a dangerous one. There are no citations in the interview, but every fact that he states, are ones that I have read from other well researched sources.

Real Food by Nina Planck is an incredibly well researched, investigative view into the history and controversy of modern food, and why most of it is so so very bad for us. The section on what has been done to milk was one of the most eye opening things I have ever read. We seriously discussed the logistics of owning our own cow after reading this, or at the very least, a goat to get our milk from. But alas, neither is a feasible option for us for the time being. 

There is no doubt in my mind that 70 years of massive commercialization and corruption of food to the point that some items are entirely chemically engineered without a trace of nature in them has a major role in the rise of, not only heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, but of mental disorders, depression, ADHD, autism and many other neurological changes happening in our brains. With each successive generation, our brains are being depleted of essential components that humans used to get from food, but not anymore. A fetus cannot get Omega-3s to grow a healthy brain if his grandmother didn't have enough in her diet to pass them on to her daughter, whose diet likely lacks even more of the essential components of brain building than her mother had. And so on and so forth. At some point, there is going to be some serious neurological wire-crossing. And from the looks of things, we are there.

With all of this knowledge, one would think it shouldn't be difficult to just quit junk food. But no addiction is ever really that easy to break, and billions of dollars have been invested into making sure that real food alternatives are few and far between.

Since most of us cannot uproot and replant ourselves on a farm where we can grow all our own food, and raise our own grass fed beef, then we have to decide which areas, if even only one that our family can most benefit from and do what we reasonably can. Some families may be able to make big changes, others only very small.

For us, it's been a little of both, a few big and some small changes, and we still struggle to keep making adjustments. We will do great at cutting out junk for a while, but then I reach that point, where I am simply too exhausted to cook, and we slowly slip back into bad habits.We are not anywhere as healthy as we would like to be, but we keep on trying. And trying. And trying again. Even though our diet still currently includes boxed mac-n-cheese, as well as corn fattened beef from time to time. Most often with too much salt, between two white buns, with melted cheese made from vegetable oil and extracted  milk proteins. And a side of fries. 

It's my real food Achilles' heel. Well, that and coffee.




Thanks so much for hanging out! Can't wait to check out everyone's links!


Comments

  1. Guess I will stick with coffee. The corn-cow thing is too overwhelmingly unnecessary, wasteful, unhealthy, etc., etc.,...But same with pigs, chickens, turkeys. And processed grains.
    Guess I will go make another cup of coffee.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yup, everything has been so grossly corrupted. I don't even want to know what they do to coffee, I think it would probably make me cry. :'(

      Delete

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