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Archive for the ‘food supply’ Category
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
In the first days of 2010, the U.S. media has swamped us with predictions and prophecies of the world to come in this new decade. Specifically, all attention is on post-2012.
The first time I heard of the Mayan calendar, and its ending date of 2012, was at the Kitt Peak Observatory about 90 miles from Tucson, in winter 2004. Several American universities have their telescopes aimed at the stars on the top of Kitt Peak in this isolated Sonoran desert location, but the park guide was telling us what was happening on earth with the Mayan calendar in stone on the ground before us. He smiled and claimed, “We don’t know why it ends in 2012.”
Not many were paying attention in 2004, but it turns out several ancient civilizations marked 2012 as a date of significant change on planet earth. What will be the event that turns the earth into the next phase? Scientists, authors, seers, and prophets predict calamitous events including an asteroid hitting earth, global warming bringing on another ice age (after this week’s weather across the U.S. and Europe, this is altogether plausible), the earth tilting on its axis, etc. Take your pick.
Skills required for survival, useful anytime
Humanity survived the last ice age 10,000 years ago, and if the species is to survive the predicted calamity of 2012, we will have to revert to our agrarian, self-sufficient habits and skills that have been fairly forgotten in just the last 50 years–in the U.S. particularly.
One of the programs in the History Channel’s week of the apocalypse concerned how the individual family would survive. In brief, forget about driving our SUVs (the oil companies are gone) and forget about telecommunications other than ham (amateur) radio. No more internet surfing. Our driving is reduced to driving the horse pulling the plow so we can plant the only food we’ll be eating. And there’s no Novartis or Bayer corporation to manufacture the medicines we’ve become dependent upon. In fact, a lead character in the program dies from infection caused by a small cut on the hand.
In the U.S, unless your “tribe” of survivors includes recent immigrants who know herbal treatments from their homeland, Americans are doomed. The expert quoted on the show was totally unaware of traditional herbal medicine which would be all that’s available in such a scenario. Americans will be more likely than any other nationality to become extinct. If this had been filmed in Europe, Africa, any area of Asia, or any other country in the Western Hemisphere, there is widespread, common knowledge of the medicinal use of botanicals. Canadians will do well (though it might be colder!).
We will be on a path of simpler times. This website was launched with the inspiration of the role of women in carrying the herbal medicine bowl. For thousands of years women’s role has been that of healer, and that meant learning and passing down the generations knowledge of medicinal herbs.
A friend of mine, who immigrated from Hungary in 1937, told the story of her father (in the homeland) cutting a gash in his hand, and “he went into the garden and pulled a leaf off a plant, wrapped the leaf tightly over the wound, and in a few days it was healed.” No rush to the ER, no antibiotics, no stitches. It is possible to take care of ourselves.
We’d better learn what plant that was. Ironically, or by design, many of the medicinal botanicals have been labeled “weeds” by the chemical corporations and the “modern” farmers they have spawned. My mother laughed uproariously when I told her that I used burdock root to help overcome pneumonia. “When I was a kid I earned 25-cents a day to hoe down burdock.” Milk thistle is another “weed” in the American farmland, but in Turkey I saw acres of this beautiful purple bloom grown for the herbal industry; it’s a healing botanical for the liver.
Self-sufficiency has been strong trait of the American character since the earliest settlers began moving West. In the 1830s homeopathic kits and first-aid guidebooks were best-sellers as we migrated West from the Eastern seaboard. Herbal medicine and homeopathic remedies (made from medicinal plants) were our medicines. We need to reconnect with Mother Earth and become reacquainted with our roots–physically and spiritually.
Happy New Year! Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in Uncategorized, economics of medicine, ethics of medicine, food supply, media and health, planetary health, science, spirituality, technology and health | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
The ERs at hospitals across America are reporting overcrowding as panic over H1N1 flu spreads this fall. As I watched the TV news report of the crunch on the hospitals in Tucson—and runs on the ERs are happening everywhere– my first thought was that for the sake of the public’s health, the ER staffs should be handing out packets of Oscillococcinum by Boiron, instructing the patients on how to take homeopathic medicine (dissolve the medicine under the tongue) and sending them home.
That my imagined scenario isn’t being played out during in any U.S. hospitals is a good indicator of much of what is wrong with American health care. People run to the doctor for any and every ailment, and Americans (and their physicians) know of no medical system except pharmaceuticals. Homeopathic flu medicines never, ever fail to cure the flu. It’s takes only a day or two to completely recover, and there’s never been nasty (much less toxic or fatal) side effects with use of homeopathic medicine in 200 years of use. Most other nations of the world know this—except Americans.
Not having to win the votes of Congressional representatives or to fend off the lobbyists of vested interests trying to preserve their profits, my proposed health plan is simpler. Focusing on patient education, the WMB health reform plan reduces dependence on MDs and makes drugs the medicine of last resort (the “alternative”). Surely the results will be a healthier population and at considerably less cost than the nation is spending now.
Consumer/patient education & responsibility
The foundation of the WMB reform is to educate the consumer/patient and hand them responsibility for their well-being. Good health—wellness—requires a wide variety of healing modalities, and few Americans know anything except pharmaceutical drugs. “Ask your doctor if any/every drug is right for you.” That’s what heavy daily television advertising has been telling us since 1998. And we do ask—or demand! In a survey of MDs, 37 percent complained that their patients insisted on prescriptions—and they usually relented whether or not it was advisable.
Ban Drug Advertising to Consumers
If we’re going to improve the population’s health and dramatically lower costs, reliance on pharmaceuticals must be reduced—dramatically. With the exception of New Zealand, the U.S. is the only country that allows direct-to-consumer drug advertising. Being a part of the British Commonwealth, New Zealanders already use homeopathy, herbs, and a wide variety of medical treatments. For the past decade Americans have been told there’s a drug for every twitch, inconvenient menses and—the latest—to improve our eyelashes. Earlier in this decade 40 percent of broadcast advertising revenue was from pharmaceutical advertising. At least two bills have come up in Congress to end it, but to no avail. Perhaps with new cost figures on the nation’s health bill, Congress will see that this advertising folly has to end. But the advertising works! (And higher drug prices pay for it.) We’re four percent of the world’s population using 50 percent of the world’s drugs.
Are we any healthier than others with this reliance on drugs? On the contrary, the latest World Health Organization (WHO) survey of nation’s health outcomes didn’t even consider the U.S. among the 19 industrialized nations. We’re ranked 37th in the world, two notches above Cuba and below such countries as Colombia (22nd), Morocco (29th), and Dominica (35th). Congressmen proclaiming on TV this summer, “We have the greatest healthcare system in the world” are about 25 years behind in their facts.
Public Health Promotion on Natural Medicines
Maybe this is “counter advertising” paid for by Big Pharma if Congress can’t muster the votes to ban drug advertising. The ideal would be to ban drug advertising, and to broadcast public health messages as Public Service Announcements (PSAs) required by the Federal Communication Commission for stations to maintain their licenses. Television advertising of cigarettes was banned decades ago due to the impact on the public’s health. The annual death toll of 100,000 due to pharmaceuticals and 700,000 visits to America’s ERs due to contraindications of drugs should qualify as a public health menace worthy of banning advertising of the substances.
Reform Medical Education
As many other nations do, the government should provide free medical education for primary care physicians (in return for n years of service). Eliminating the quarter million dollar debt for the medical students should influence medical students’ choice of whether to specialize (and make more money to pay off the school debt) and reduce the nation’s shortage of primary care physicians.
Expand medical education to include nutrition (more than the current one course); according to the CDC, 73 percent of deaths are diseases of (nutritional) deficiency. Our doctors need to learn more about nutrition. Introduce homeopathic treatments to medical students; in the European nations 20 to 40 percent of MDs refer patients to homeopathic doctors or recommend homeopathic remedies (prescriptions aren’t necessary for routine treatment).
These reforms won’t be welcome by Big Pharma. You can bet funds for buildings, programs, departments will be withheld from medical schools if curricula are revised to teach any healing modalities besides pharmaceuticals. Great! To improve the nation’s health, we need the pharmaceutical companies TO GET OUT of medical education. One university is changing its name from Faculty of Medicine to Faculty of Health! Presently, over 90 percent of continuing education seminars/workshops of the nation’s doctors are sponsored by drug companies. They’re not teaching nutrition, herbs or homeopathy!
Limit Medical Malpractice Awards
A significant cost of medical care based upon drugs is liability insurance for all the death and harm the chemical medicines cause. Healthcare practitioners not using drugs (Naturopaths, Homeopaths, Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors) don’t have the legal liability issues of members of the AMA because they’re not using deadly medicines.
Vola! With patients educated on ALL OPTIONS of treatment and physicians trained in healing modalities other than drugs, the patient (and her family) takes more responsibility in making choices.
Since this is a proposal not accountable to political or business interests, I will add a single-payer system as the most efficient mode of health delivery (Office of Budget Management studies have already shown this to be true). Electronic medical records and patient medical diaries (they’re now responsible for their own health) will reduce costs and improve efficiency.
In the end, the WMB mantra, “You’re an Experiment of One and the Only One that Matters” is always true.
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Tags: health care reform, health care reform bill, health reform bill, obama health care plan
Posted in US healthcare system, Uncategorized, advertising and medicine, economics of medicine, ethics of medicine, food supply, media and health, medicial science, nutrition and politics, science, technology and health | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
It was when the banana liquified inside its skin and oozed a pale slime out onto the fruit basket that I decided it was time to look for organic vegetables and fruits. But this banana had traveled from Central America to Dubai where I was living. Standards for what is “organic” aren’t consistently defined in the U.S.–forget about it internationally!
Giving up bananas was my only option, and I always selected produce that had traveled the shortest distances, vegetables and fruits from Jordan, Syria, and Iran were preferable to U.S., European or Australian imports. (This is a desert nation where virtually all food is imported.) The conditions of the soils and use of chemicals in growing food in other nations was unknown, but in the “processed” department the foreign operations were far superior to American. Fruit juice contained–vola! the fruit–only! No high fructose corn syrup to sweeten it up and fatten us up.
High fructose corn syrup–everywhere!
Barbara Kingsolver writes in Animal,Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life that the average American daily diet has an extra 700 calories through the addition of high fructose corn syrup into many processed food products. Is it any wonder that the whole nation has pudged up with the dominance of prepared and processed foods on our plates?
We easily understand the relation between nutrient content of the vegetables and fruits and the soils they’re grown in, but it takes another mental leap to realize that the nutrient content of the animal products we eat is determined by what the chickens and cows are fed and their living conditions! A chicken that’s spent its entire life in a cage has stress hormones that effect the eggs it lays and the meat we roast.
This isn’t the place for a treatise on soils, but I recommend the book Secrets of the Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird . The updated edition in 1998 reports the alarming statistics on the use chemical fertilizers worldwide. In the 1930s, a University of Missouri soil scientist said, “The wealth of a nation is determined by its top six inches of soil.” This is an eternal truth, for the soil grows the nation’s food, which determines our health. An unhealthy nation doesn’t prosper–we have plenty of examples worldwide.
Before chemical fertilizers were manufactured (beginning in the 1950s) the soil on family farms was tended and supported by rotating crops and using the livestock manure. It was the natural cycle of decomposition, renewal, and life. Now with huge corporate farms growing single crops (70 percent of U.S. farmland is in corn and soy beans–as Kingsolver says, “we’re one pathogen away from famine”) and heavy use of synthetic fertilizers the soil can’t support the life of organisms in the soil. The result is nutrient-poor soil.
Nutrients of 1950s produce and today’s
Donald R. Davis, Ph.D., at the Biochemical Institute of University of Texas-Austin, compared the data of nutrients in vegetables and fruits collected by the USDA in 1950 and again in 1999. Six out of 13 nutrients had declined, and seven showed no significant reliable change. As reported in a 2005 issue of Food Technology, the minerals phosphorus, iron and calcium declined between 9-16 percent. Protein was down 6%, riboflavin 38%, and ascorbic acid down 15%.
What does this mean to you and me? Well, you’d have to eat half a dozen peaches today to gain the nutrient content of ONE 1950 peach! Revitalizing the soils is the only solution, and family run farms are trying to do this. Growing evidence links organic production with higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2007) reported a 10-year study comparing organic tomatoes with conventional tomatoes. As organic matter accumulated in the plots, the nutrients in the organic produce rose to 79% higher levels of quercetin and 97% higher level of kaempferol, on average, above the conventionally grown crop.
The eggs in my refrigerator now are from hens raised without hormones and free-range (no cages), fed grains with no animal by-products. Their shells are thin, irregular in shape and color, but they have 25% less cholesterol than caged fowl, and they taste better! Organic milk misses the traces of 200 antibiotics found in ordinary milk. Even M.D.s are advising that if you buy only one item ORGANIC, make it milk. Meat and milk from pasture-raised, grass-fed animals cotain greater levels of beneificial fatty acids including omega-3, alpha-linolenic acid, and conjugated linoleic acid. The animals live better, and so do we!
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Tags: fruit nutrition facts, nutrition, nutrition facts, why is nutrition important
Posted in Uncategorized, food supply, nutrition and politics, organic food, planetary health, science, technology and health | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
In Washington’s culture of revolving doors, Michael R. Taylor has rotated between employment at the FDA and Monsanto since beginning his career in 1976. Until President Obama appointed him the new “food safety czar” he was most recently the vice president for public policy at Monsanto.
Maybe the President’s decision on this appointment was effected by eating too many chemically-sprayed vegetables before the crop came up in Michele’s organic garden, which a Monsanto spokesman actually claimed was “dangerous and irresponsible”. Yes, organic gardening and farming, Monsanto claims, is dangerous–those pests and fungi could run rampant, though they already are rampant despite the chemical companies’ efforts for decades.
Revolving doors–FDA to Monsanto and back
Taylor’s major contributions to FDA policies/Monsanto’s interests include getting bovine growth hormone approved for use in the dairy industry. The rBGH hormone is suspected of fostering cancerous tumors but what is certain, is that safety tests haven’t been done, and the nation’s general health is declining. Many organic food activists consider Taylor the FDA administrator most responsible for FDA approval of the genetically modified rBGH–and, incidentally, it’s made by Monsanto.
Then as attorney for Monsanto–the doors revolved again–Taylor advised Monsanto on suing states or companies that wanted to tell the public that their products were free of Monsanto’s drug. He has, however, reversed his earlier stance regarding genetically-modified seeds and foods; Taylor now admits that genetically engineered foods should be labeled and go through safety testing. Now there’s a point for public safety.
In his duties in the new position–now back at the FDA–Taylor will be planning implementation of new food safety legislation. God help us–the fox is in charge of the henhouse.
Imminent threat to food safety
One has to wonder who–really–is drafting the legislation effecting our food supply. Quite possibly staffers from Monsanto, Con Agra, Dow Chemical and similar corporations wrote House bill 2749 and found a “receptive” representative in Congress to sponsor it.
HR2749 gives the FDA tremendous power in dictating every aspect of growing food in American (HR875 reported April 2009 in this blog appears to have stalled in committee, but never mind, HR2749 has similar tyranical coverage of our food supply). The bill doesn’t address underlying causes of food safety problems, but it gives the FDA sweeping powers to tell small farmers how to raise and harvest crops, and diminishes existing judicial restraints on FDA actions.
Threats to Organic Farming
The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 will treat family farms the same as multinational corporations, giving the FDA the power to
- Quarantine and halt all movement of food in a geographic area,
- Regulate how crops are raised and harvested –could this mean requiring use of GMO seeds and requiring chemicals in soils and on plants?
- Oversee on-farm production activities
- Search business records without a warrant
- Force farmers to use a costly tracing system
- Impose criminal and civil penalties and a $500 annual registration fee
Swept through the House like a tornado
The bill, HR2749, was a stealth bill brought into the House of Representatives just before the August recess and voted by oral call, usually reserved for noncontroversial bills. Three versions of the bill were introduced on Wednesday, July 29 at 12:15 am, 9:36am and 10:50am, and a vote requiring a two-thirds majority didn’t pass on the 29th. But the next day, House Resolution 691 dispensed with reading HR2749, limited debate to one hour, granted an opportunity for one amendment to the bill (was offered by ONE representative who’d actually read the bill, but no action taken). On 30 July by a SIMPLE MAJORITY, the bill passed 283 to 142.
What was the rush? The bill was pushed through like a farmer trying to bring in the crop with a storm on the horizon. The BigAg lobbyists have a stronghold on our Congressional reprentatives, and now their man is leading the FDA’s office of food safety. There is a storm on the horizon. Monsanto intends to rid the White House of Michele’s organic garden.
What you can do
To tell your Senator to READ this bill and to protest this stanglehold on the nation’s food supply, visit the website of Farmer-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, www.ftcldf.org and sign their petition. Buy locally grown foods, which is more nutritious for you and puts seven times the money into your local economy by supporting area farmers instead of international shippers/marketers.
Salud!
Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in CODEX, Uncategorized, food supply, nutrition and politics, planetary health, science, technology and health | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Bills in Congressional committees now (HR 875, S425) are politely packaged as a “Food Safety Modernization Act,” and the giant chemical-agribusiness companies behind the bills are hoping the Congressional reps don’t bother to read the document (which often is the case).
The bills are on the docket in the name of “food safety”, according to the definitions of Monsanto, Tysons, ADM and several other chemical companies that–and this is revealing of the state of our food supply–control agribusiness in the U.S. The sponsors’ goal is to push these two bills through simultaneously and urgently and limit debate. In other words, we won’t know what hit us until they’ve been passed.
Essentially the law would put severe controls on farms and the production of all food–yes, including your backyard garden. All farmers would be dictated what to feed their animals, and farmers would be required to buy chemicals for their crops and drugs for their animals. It will put organic farmers out of business because they wouldn’t comply with these regulations under principle, and the penalty is $500,000. So everyone’s health is harmed, and the corporations make profits.
Read the bills here–they’re not too long:
HR 875 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c1112RD9bb:e11439:
S 425 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:s425:
Phone Your Reps in DC or Get out your Pitchforks
Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of democracy is eternal vigilance,” and as our government seems to be increasingly directed by special interest groups, Jefferson’s adage was never more true. But what has happened to the American spirit to change this?
Last night Jon Stewart (The Daily Show on Comedy Central) commented that while other nations take to the streets in protest, Americans send emails IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Is this as pro-active as we can get anymore? A call for a demonstration against the health insurance companies meetings in Washington, DC, earlier in March brought out to the streets maybe 200 to protest against the prices and practices of the health insurance industry. That’s it? That’s all? When one in six of us have no health insurance at all, often due to the industry itself.
Where’s our Will to Govern Ourselves?
The insurers were meeting in Washington to caucus about health care reform. Yea, right. They want to appear as part of the solution, not the major problem that they are. But the insurors did promise not to charge the uninsured more than everybody else, as has been their practice. There should have been thousands RAGING in the streets, but a very polite 200 were there instead. Are the rest of us too ill or too spiritually defeated to protest?
Here’s a very thoughtful blog on the current CODEX onslaught and what you can do about it. It’s either call your Congressional reps now or arm yourselves with pitchforks and guns (some are already calling for this)–or we can all eat diets of chemical contaminated foods and be too ill to protest.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=12671
Since the net is ever-changing, if this doesn’t open do a search for a blog by Lydia Scott: HR 875, the Food Police, Criminalizing Organic Farming and Violation of the 10th Amendment.
Salud!
Beverly A Jensen, Ph.D.
President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com
Posted in CODEX, Uncategorized, food supply, nutrition and politics, planetary health, science, technology and health | 2 Comments »
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