• caramel color E150d, which contains carcinogens;
• caffeine, which is fine in limited amounts but in higher amounts can increase blood pressure, reduce control of fine motor movements, increase cortisol secretion, cause anxiety, and accelerate bone loss in postmenopausal women;
• phosphoric acid, which inhibits the body’s ability to use calcium, leading to osteoporosis; and
• The artificial sweeteners aspartame and acesulfame-K; as noted in our article on artificial sweeteners, aspartame can turn to formaldehyde at high temperatures.

A study presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology found that women who drink diet sodas are much more likely develop heart disease and even die than other women. Women who consumed two or more diet drinks a day were 30% more likely to have a heart attack or other cardiovascular “event,” and were 50% more likely to die than women who rarely drink diet sodas.
Peter R. Orszag—former director of the Office of Management and Budget, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and diet coke drinker—dismissed the study because the women who drank diet soda were more likely to be obese and smokers than other women. Orszag acknowledges, however, that the researchers used a statistical model to adjust for the adverse health of these variables and still found a correlation! (Such statistical modeling to adjust for other factors is a common practice used in many studies.)
Orszag claims that the study merely shows correlation and not causality and recommends that a double blind placebo study be conducted to establish causality. Such a suggestion is patently ridiculous! Who would do such a study? Who would supply the millions of dollars to fund it? Coca-Cola? They have no interest in funding a study that could possibly show their product in a negative light.
In addition, Orszag is wrong about there not being enough hard evidence:

• A joint study from the University of Miami and Columbia University found that individuals who drank diet soft drinks were 43% more likely to suffer vascular events than those who drank none—and this is accounting for preexisting conditions such as metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
• A University of Texas study found that drinking two or more diet sodas a day made the drinkers’ waists grow 70% more than non-drinkers—five belt sizes, on average. The study, presented at a American Diabetes Association meeting, found that artificial sweeteners trigger appetite, but unlike regular sugars, they don’t deliver something to squelch the appetite. Both diet and regular sodas also either don’t send or interfere with signals to your brain that tell you you’re full.
• A Harvard Medical School study found that women who drank two or more diet sodas per day demonstrated more palpable loss of kidney function. Another study tested on 10,000 adults given just one diet soda per day had a 34% increase in metabolic disturbances.

It may contain fewer calories, but diet soda is anything but a “healthy alternative” to regular soda. And regular soda is one of the worst things you can consume. If you need a pick-me-up, the best plan is to bottle your own weak, unsweetened green tea. You will also save a lot of money.

The post Diet Coke’s Advertising Embarrassment: “You’re On!” first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The post What Are They Putting into School Lunches Now? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• Sugar dumbs you down. A 2012 UCLA study showed that rats fed a sugary diet had a decrease in brain energy metabolism and synaptic activity.
• Oreos are as addictive as cocaine. One study found that high-fat, high-sugar foods light up the same parts of the brain as highly-addictive drugs.
• Sugar damages your heart. Recent research has found a direct, independent link between sugar overconsumption and heart disease.
• Healthy blood sugar levels = graceful aging. A 2013 study showed that higher blood sugar levels were associated with a decrease in memory recall and learning ability. It also suggested that maintaining healthy blood sugar levels—whether or not you’re diabetic—“could prevent age-related cognitive decline.”

But HFCS Is Even Worse

• Some brands of HFCS may contain mercury.
• It can make you eat more. Research on HFCS has indicated that it suppresses the sensation of being full, causing people to eat more of it (read: more calories, more weight gain).
• It makes a beeline for your liver. During the creation of HFCS, glucose and fructose molecules are separated. According to Dr. Mark Hyman, this allows fructose to “mainline” directly into your liver. Too much can contribute to fatty liver, which also contributes to obesity and diabetes.
• HFCS causes heart disease, too, even in children and adolescents.
• HFCS causes high blood pressure, according to the American Society of Nephrology.
• Rats fed HFCS developed fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes, while those on a fructose-free diet did not.
• Studies suggest that HFCS directly causes obesity.

What About Artificial Sweeteners?

• Aspartame (Equal and NutraSweet). Despite FDA officials describing aspartame as “one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved” and its safety as “clear cut,” in March 2006, Environmental Health Perspectives (from the National Institutes of Health) published the first compelling experimental evidence for the carcinogenic effects of aspartame at a dose level within range of human daily intake. So despite FDA assurances, aspartame may in fact cause cancer.
• Neotame, a version of aspartame made by NutraSweet which is between 7,000 and 13,000 times sweeter than table sugar and 30 to 60 times sweeter than aspartame. According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, “Judging by the chemicals used in its manufacturing, it appears even more toxic than aspartame.”
• Saccharin (also marketed as Sweet’N Lo), which is much sweeter than sucrose but has a bitter or metallic aftertaste in high concentrations, became mired in controversy in 1977, when a study indicated that the substance might contribute to bladder cancer in rats. In 2000, the chemical was officially removed from the federal government’s list of suspected carcinogens once scientists learned that rodents have high pH, high calcium, and high protein levels in their urine, and this combines with saccharine to cause tumors. As this does not happen in humans, there is no elevated bladder cancer risk, so it may be one of the safer artificial sweeteners.
• Sucralose (Splenda) alters the microflora in the intestine and “exerts numerous adverse effects,” according to Duke University study, including an increase in body weight, and an elevation of liver enzymes, which negatively affects the bioavailability of nutrients.

Fructose Is Not a Good Substitute
Fruits can have quite a bit of sugar, mostly in the form of fructose. However, this sugar is “delivered” via a whole food with lots of fiber—fiber not only helps you feel full, but slows your liver’s absorption of fructose (this is why fresh fruits are so much better for you than fruit juice).
Even so, you can have too much of a good thing: excess fructose from sugar can overload and damage your liver. For this reason, Dr. Mercola recommends you limit your fructose from fruit to 15 grams or less a day (that’s about an apple and a half, or about two bananas).
“Good” Sugars?
As we told you in 2011, some safer alternatives include stevia, sugar alcohols like xylitol and erythritol, and inulin. Stevia, a South American herb, is estimated to be some 150 to 400 times sweeter than sugar. Xylitol was originally isolated from birch sap, and is a must for dental hygiene (it can be used as mouth rinse since it prevents cavities very effectively; it is especially good for children, particularly those who have not had their teeth treated with a tooth sealant that contains BPA). Xylitol is also for use with colds and sinus infections, but it may not be the best choice for a sweetener as some people find it has a laxative effect in larger quantities. Erythritol occurs naturally in fruits and fermented food. Inulin, which is isolated from Jerusalem artichoke, is available as a powder or as Jerusalem artichoke syrup. Inulin is a long-chain polysaccharide that is mostly too long a sugar to absorb into the blood stream, though too much inulin intake can cause digestive distress in some people.
Don’t forget natural, though not low-calorie, sweeteners. Honey (raw, organic, and wild) is always the natural sweetener of choice. Maple syrup is the only sustainably-harvested, large-scale, forest sweetener in the world. Unsulfured, organic sugarcane molasses is fairly rich in vitamins and minerals and has been purported (like fresh sugar cane) to have “anti-stiffness factors” that break down detrimental calcification. And Lo Han Guo is a non-glycemic sweetener made from a type of wild cucumber used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat cough and laryngitis.
America’s Sugar Addiction Is Costing You
Sugar and HFCS won’t just damage your health—your tax dollars are at stake, t­oo.
Sugar is linked to $1 trillion in healthcare spending, and between 1995 and 2012, the US government spent $84.4 billion dollars on corn—aka HFCS—subsidies (in 2009, 11.7 million metric tons of corn was turned into HFCS).

Meanwhile, the USDA’s sugar program—which consists of government loans, prohibitive tariffs, and artificial price supports—costs consumers over $3 billion a year. In 2013, just the loan portion of the program cost taxpayers $258 million in defaults, and forced the USDA to buy 640,000 tons of excess sugar.
That’s right—even if you’re not consuming sugar, you’re still paying for it.
This year is likely to be just as expensive. Although droughts in Brazil (the world’s biggest exporter of sugar) may spark a sugar shortage and raise global prices, America will still have a glut of sugar. This is because, since the American market pays a few cents more per pound than the international market, foreign farmers will still get the best price by selling to the U.S. This anticipated flood of imports—clearly unchecked by tariffs—could further saturate the American sugar market, driving down prices and encouraging farmers to default or hand their product over to the USDA.
Consider this: the government subsidizes sugar and HFCS (via corn subsidies). Big Food adds these harmful ingredients to their foods, sparking an epidemic of diabetes, then sells products for diabetics. The government—again using your tax dollars—cleans up Big Food’s healthcare mess. In essence, the US government is using your tax dollars to help make Americans sick so that Big Business can profit. A sweet tale of crony capitalism at its finest.
Take the case of the huge multi-national company Nestlé. It is best known for chocolate, but its products also include baby food, bottled water, breakfast cereals, coffee, dairy products, pet foods, and snacks. Among Nestlé’s blockbuster brands are Butterfinger and Kit Kat candy bars, sugary Nesquik “milk,” HotPockets, and a plethora of ice cream products.
Nestlé has around 450 factories, operates in 86 countries, and employs around 328,000 people. So while Nestlé doesn’t have a monopoly on disease-causing processed foods, they certainly have a large share of the market.
Interestingly, Nestlé not only makes the foods that can lead to diabetes—they sell products created to manage it, including Boost Glucose Control and Diabeteshield drinks, Dietsource salad dressings and pancake syrup, Glytrol (“complete nutrition support for patients with hyperglycemia”), Nutrisource frozen egg products, and Resource sugar-free puddings and desserts, mainly for hospitals. So there is no secret here—Nestlé makes no attempt to hide the fact that Big Food first sickens Americans, and then profits from it.
Action Alert! The government subsidizes the sugar industry to the tune of over $3 billion tax dollars per year. It’s time to stop paying for a product that directly contributes to our most grievous health problems. Tell Congress to repeal the sugar program!

The post Big Food’s Sugar Wars first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

In November, we told you about the House and Senate conference committee to reconcile two wildly different Farm Bills and fill a $36 billion gap between them. We’ve received word that the committee is likely to complete its work by the end of the month, immediately after which the final bill would be released.
The House version of the Farm Bill still includes the destructive and possibly unconstitutional King Amendment (a.k.a. the Interstate Commerce Amendment), which could undo state-level GMO labeling and animal rights laws—even those that have already been passed. On a more positive note, it also includes Section 11321, which protects small farmers from burdensome FDA regulations. The Senate version of the bill has neither of these provisions. We need for the final, reconciled bill to have Section 11321, but not the King Amendment.
Even worse, the House bill contains Section 1613, which would prevent any agency from disclosing any “information provided by a producer or owner of agricultural land concerning the agricultural operation.” Forget the absurdly broad language—this would make it illegal to report, for example, where GMO crops are planted, or where cross-contamination has occurred. The public would be kept in the dark about any number of vital issues. What about livestock disease outbreak? Antibiotic abuse in farm animals? The possibilities are endless. Big Ag wants blanket immunity, and this amendment is a big fat gift to them—possibly at the expense of your health and safety.
Once the Farm Bill is released, it’s “game over”—this is our last chance to make our voices heard. When the Farm Bill leaves the conference committee, it will go straight to both chambers for an “up or down” vote. Since no amendments can be added to a conference bill and leaders of both parties will push their caucuses to vote “yea,” it’s certain the conference bill will be passed as is.
Thanks to your activism—the thousands of messages you sent your legislators, and the way you spread the word to friends and fellow activists—the movement to strike the King Amendment has gained considerable momentum. Thank you. In addition, for the past two months, ANH-USA has been active behind the scenes on Capitol Hill (working as part of a coalition led by the Humane Society to strike the King Amendment). We want to make sure the Farm Bill that finally gets passed will be a positive for the natural health community.

It’s vital that we defeat the King Amendment—it’s just the beginning of a deceptive new strategy by Monsanto and Big Food to defeat GMO labeling by appearing to champion national GMO legislation.
It would sound bizarre elsewhere, but it’s par for the course on Capitol Hill. The Grocery Manufacturers Association (yes, the same group that illegally spent $11 million to defeat Washington State’s GMO labeling initiative) recently proposed a federal GMO labeling law. Importantly, GMA’s legislation would only require voluntary labeling—Monsanto and other producers would not have to label GMOs. The point of passing such weak “GMO labeling” legislation isn’t to implement GMO labeling—it’s to prevent state governments from doing so themselves, because state laws would actually require labels! Like the King amendment, the GMA’s bill is intended to preempt every single hard-won state GMO labeling bill, including Maine’s, which was just signed into law last Thursday. ANH-USA provided the draft language for the Maine law and worked with state legislators to fine-tune the bill.
Between the King Amendment and the GMA’s dangerous new legislation, it’s clear that the fight for GMO labeling has just begun: more legislative battles are looming on the horizon. But we can take some comfort from the fact that Big Biotech is only offering voluntary GMO labeling because of the progress we have made to date. Big Biotech is clearly worried about all the money they have had to spend to win referenda, and even more worried that, in the future, they will lose no matter how many millions they dump into the battle. Consumers can win this struggle. All we have to do is persevere and pour on the pressure.
We have a copy of the GMA strategy and there have been discussions about it on the Hill, but the bill has not yet been formally introduced. ANH-USA is meeting with congressional leaders now and together we’re working through the best approach, and we’ll let you know the moment it’s appropriate to take action. For now, we’re asking you to focus on the Farm Bill. Urgent Action Alert! Ask Congress to throw out the King amendment and keep Section 11321! Even if you have already done so, please contact your legislators again—help us stand up for small farmers and GMO labeling activists. Please take action immediately!

The post Why Is Big Biotech Now Supporting a National GMO “Labeling” Law? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Mass-produced CAFO food is becoming more dangerous than ever, yet US authorities seem obsessed with destroying small farmers and distributors of raw and organic foods.

The USDA has ended a ban on Chinese chicken imports to the US by authorizing four Chinese plants to process chickens that were slaughtered elsewhere. There will be no USDA inspectors on hand at the plants to verify the origin of the slaughtered chickens or to enforce US standards. There is no labeling requirement, so consumers in the US will have no way to know which chicken products were processed (that is, cooked) in China or what their origins were.



China has a terrible track record for food safety. Bloomberg News reports:

China has earned a reputation as one of the world’s worst food-safety offenders. In just the last year, consumers have been confronted with a bird flu outbreak, news of sales of 46-year-old chicken feet, and reports of poisonous fake mutton. These are not isolated incidents, but rather the most spectacular instances of a crisis that has become so severe that some consumers now smuggle quantities of infant milk formula from foreign countries into China.

Introducing unlabeled Chinese cooked chickens will just make a bad situation in the US worse. We reported in July that USDA has proposed new poultry regulations to speed up line speeds and reduce the number of federal inspectors by 40%, relying more on inspectors paid by the poultry producers, and in particular allowing the use of more, stronger, and dangerous chemicals to sanitize the filthy birds that have lived in overcrowded squalor.



The USDA now plans to roll out similar regulations for pork plants nationwide, despite the fact that plants using the new system have failed to stop the production of contaminated meat. Five US pork plants have been using the new USDA program for a decade; three of the five are among the worst offenders in the nation for health and safety violations. Plants in Canada and Australia using the new program have also been plagued with recalls and tainted meat.



Nor can you guarantee a safe meal by getting a steak instead of a pork chop. Large numbers of cattle in the US are fed dangerous fattening drugs that are banned in most other countries: beta-agonists, which can put twenty to thirty-four pounds on cattle just prior to slaughter. Eli Lilly sells Optaflexx and Merck sells Zilmax, which Merck claims is used on 70% of the cattle slaughtered in the US.



Merck announced last month that it is suspending sales of Zilmax while it conducts a new study of the effects on cattle. This may be in response to the largest US meat processor, Tyson Foods, announcing that it will no longer be buying any cattle fed Zilmax, due to health problems. The most common problem is that cattle are rendered unable to walk. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the drugs have taken away one of the feed-lot operators’ key bargaining chips: the ability to time when they send cattle to the packing plant to get the best price. “Now, you only have so many days after an animal has been fed [a beta-agonist] before it’s got to go to slaughter or it becomes so lame it can’t move,” said a cattle producer in Colorado.



Ractopamine, the beta-agonist in Eli Lily’s Optaflexx, is banned in Russia and China, so the US cannot export pork to either country, nor beef to Russia. Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest hog farmer and pork processor, has dedicated half of their slaughter capacity to processing hogs that have never been fed ractopamine so they can meet the demands of exporters.



Americans are eating meat that is increasingly contaminated and full of drugs that have been banned in other countries. Meanwhile, US authorities are more concerned about the so-called “dangers” posed by raw milk and organic produce. A small organic farm in Texas was raided last month by a SWAT team in search of marijuana plants, which they did not find. In an armed raid that lasted ten hours and included aerial surveillance by helicopters, the police seized seventeen organic blackberry bushes, fifteen okra plants, fourteen tomatillo plants, as well as native grasses and sunflowers—after holding residents inside at gunpoint for at least a half-hour! The only person arrested was someone on the property with outstanding traffic violations.



We reported in August 2011 about the armed raid of raw food co-op Rawesome Foods in Venice, California. This was no small-town police action, but a joint raid by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rawesome was charged with selling unpasteurized dairy without a proper license, even though Rawesome does not sell to the public but only acts as a distributor for co-op owners, so no license is necessary. Despite there being no evidence whatsoever of contamination, 800 gallons of raw organic milk were poured down the drain, and $70,000 worth of raw organic food was seized.



In Wisconsin, raw milk farmer Vernon Hershberger was raided and accused of committing “dairy crimes” for distributing raw organic milk to a small group of people who were members of a private buying club (much like the Rawesome Foods co-op).



And you may recall our article last month about the war on small farmers. Small farms, and especially raw and organic farms, produce the highest-quality food in America. Yet US authorities seem intent on destroying them through regulation, paperwork, fees, and raids while turning a blind eye on poor meat safety inspections and the drugging of livestock with toxic pharmaceuticals.

The post The Topsy-Turvy Logic of America’s Food Cops first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• MSG
• Propylene glycol (it helps stabilize a beer’s head of foam, though in high quantities it can cause health problems)
• High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
• Calcium disodium EDTA
• Caramel coloring
• FD&C blue 1, red 40, and yellow 5
• Insect-based dyes
• Glyceryl monostearate
• Isinglass (see below)

You’re unlikely to see any of these industrial-sounding ingredients on a label, because listing ingredients in beer is voluntary. And when ingredients are listed, it may be a partial list—which is even more deceptive than having no list at all.
Several beers, for example, contain HFCS, most of which is genetically modified (GMO), and isinglass, a clarifying agent made from the swim bladder of fish. But check most beer websites and they’ll tell you their “key ingredients” are “roasted, malted barley, hops, yeast, and water.” Perhaps the HFCS and isinglass were not “key” enough to merit inclusion on this list?
Some brands with less-than-wholesome ingredients:

• Newcastle uses artificial caramel color to simulate the golden brown color that is supposed to come from toasted barley. “Caramel color” sounds innocuous, right? But it’s manufactured by heating ammonia and sulfites under high pressure, which may create carcinogenic compounds.
• Miller Light, Coors, Corona, Fosters, Pabst, and Red Stripe use corn syrup, and Molson-Coors acknowledged that some of their corn is GMO.
• Budweiser, Bud Light, Bush Light, and Michelob Ultra use dextrose (made from corn).
• Anheuser-Bush uses corn.

The labeling regulations are confusing and capricious. Food is regulated by the FDA, and requires a Nutrition Facts panel, but alcohol is regulated by the US Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Unless it’s beer made with something other than malted barley, and then it’s regulated by the FDA and must carry a Nutrition Facts panel. States also have their own regulations, which can supersede those of TTB, but not of the FDA.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, explained on her blog why we still don’t know the ingredients in alcoholic beverages. In short, TTB has been procrastinating since 2007 on completing their rules for labeling of alcoholic beverages.
People with allergies to genetically modified corn are taking a chance when drinking beer, as there is no requirement that GMO ingredients be identified on the label. We told you early this year about the dangers of GMOs, and in 2011 about the dangers of sugar, especially fructose. So genetically modified fructose carries a one–two punch, and may be one of the more toxic foods that can be hiding in your food or drink—with nothing about it on the label.
Unfortunately for those with a sweet tooth, eschewing HFCS for plain old cane sugar may not be that much of an improvement. A recent study of mice fed a mixture of fructose and glucose showed that even moderate amounts of sugar shorten life span (females fed sugar died twice as fast) and hamper reproduction (males were less likely to hold territory and sired fewer offspring).
While it certainly has its health benefits, and studies suggest that people who drink a little live a bit longer, alcohol—even without unsavory additives—has more negatives than plusses. It introduces what is treated as a poison by your body and stresses the entire gastrointestinal system, from mouth to colon, making cancer possibly more likely, especially in the esophagus. It may increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and cirrhosis of the liver.
Not ready to give up the occasional brewski? According to the Food Babe, Sierra Nevada, Heineken, and Amstel Light are good choices, as they use only non-GMO grains and no artificial ingredients, stabilizers, or preservatives. German beers are subject to the “Reinheitsgebot” law mandating that beer be produced using only water, hops, yeast, malted barley, or wheat—you won’t have to guess what’s in them.
An obvious choice is certified organic beer, which cannot include GMOs and other harmful additives by law. And then there are the microbreweries. Many craft beer companies will give you a complete list of ingredients if you ask. Be warned, however: large beer companies are buying up microbreweries one by one, as Molson-Coors did with Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch did with Goose Island Brewery.
The healthiest of all alcoholic beverages is not beer at all, but red wine. It naturally contains resveratrol, which appears to have anti-aging, cancer-preventing, cardio-protective, neuro-protective, and anti-diabetic effects. It’s also an anti-inflammatory and an antiviral to boot. As we noted in a recent article, red wine can also help clear bad bugs from your stomach. Cheers!

The post What if Beer Companies Told the Truth? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• Speed up poultry inspection lines, increasing their speed to 140 chickens per minute and between 45 and 55 turkeys per minute;
• Reduce the number of federal inspectors by 40%, relying more on inspectors whose salaries are paid by the poultry industry; and
• Allow the increased use of chemicals—whether chickens are contaminated or not—as a catchall for diseased birds that will inevitably escape notice with the increased line speeds. Plants that currently use one or two chemical treatments will now use as many as four.

Typically, poultry is sprayed with water and chemicals inside and out, moved through spray cabinets where they are showered with other chemicals, and are finally chilled and soaked in water containing between 20 and 50 ppm of chlorine. The new proposal would also let chemicals be used on “air-chilled” birds, which currently rely on low temperatures to kill pathogens or at least discourage their spread. The proposal also encourages the use of chemicals along the processing line, not just at the end.
The chemicals used in poultry plants are, of course, poisonous: their job is to kill bacteria, but they are dangerous to humans as well. According to the Washington Post, a federal poultry inspector named Jose Navarro died—his lungs bleeding out—after six years of inspecting plants where these chemicals were used. Another USDA inspector, Sherry Medina, developed a severe respiratory infection one month after the Tyson Foods plant in Alabama where she worked began using peracetic acid. “I would walk into the plant, and I’d start wheezing. It was like I was choking to death. I coughed so hard, I broke two ribs,” said Medina, who now collects disability.
Two dozen USDA inspectors have described reactions such as asthma, severe respiratory problems, burns, rashes, irritated eyes, and sinus problems (including ulcers) to the chemicals being used. Two of the most common chemicals (chlorine and paracetic acid) have been linked to emotional disturbances, damaged internal organs, and even death. We tell USDA workers about the risks to their health from using these chemicals, but we don’t tell the American public a word about the risk of eating chemically treated birds.
The USDA has provided almost zero hard data on what the pilot program has achieved, but according to a private report to the House Appropriations Committee, USDA plants already use accelerated line speeds, and workers are being exposed to larger amounts of “sanitizing” chemicals than ever before. A Freedom of Information request covering the pilot program by Food & Water Watch revealed that employees are failing to catch defects in poultry carcasses. One reason for this is the increased speed of the lines coupled with the reduced number of inspectors. The other is that there is no requirement that non-USDA inspectors receive any training at all.
“The agency claims that the salmonella rates in the pilot project plants are lower than the rates for plants that receive conventional inspection. But given the GAO criticism of the design of the program and the fact that production practices can easily be manipulated during government testing periods, [USDA’s] claims are suspect,” said Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter. Moreover, for many of the chemicals used, the government has not conducted any independent research on their safety for consumers who eat the food. As usual, they instead rely on data provided by chemical manufacturers themselves!
Having fewer inspections and using more chemicals is what you get when your only focus is the “bottom line.” The government will save about $90 million over the next three years though staff reductions, and poultry plants will increase their bottom line by $260 million per year. With less oversight and faster inspection lines, they can process more poultry in a shorter period of time.
The irony is, while USDA wants to save money on poultry plants, they want to spend money on horse plants! Horse slaughter was effectively banned in 2006 when Congress said USDA couldn’t spend any money on horse slaughterhouse inspections, but that prohibition expired in 2011. Last week the USDA gave its approval for a new horse slaughterhouse in New Mexico, with similar plants seeking approval in Missouri and Iowa. Horsemeat cannot be sold as food for humans in the US—but it can be exported. And, as Mike Adams noted, it may well turn up in the US food supply anyway because it can be sold to Mexico for human consumption, then re-labeled and shipped back into the USA for use as a low-cost meat filler.
The government and the poultry industry is once again ignoring what real food safety is: local, sustainable animals fed a natural, organic diet and treated humanely—the fundamental principles of biodynamics—not ever more industrialized, mechanized, and chemicalized! Food from CAFOs is neither safe nor nutritious.
Action Alert! Tell USDA and President Obama not to finalize these new “modernized” and “streamlined” regulations. Explain that it is the overcrowding and inhumane treatment of animals that result in the filth and disease that the chemicals are supposed to treat, and using even more toxic chemicals on our food is not the answer. Tell them the rules should instead emphasize the need for a reconsideration of confined animal feeding operations, slower processing line speeds, cleaner facilities, more inspections, and better-trained employees.

The post USDA Wants Fewer Poultry Inspectors—But More Chemicals first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Isn’t it time the EPA listened to the science and not the insecticide manufacturer?

The post Pesticides Definitively Linked to Bee Colony Collapse first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Five states have introduced seven different “Ag-Gag bills” to silence people who try to expose CAFO practices. State-based Action Alerts!

• There are approximately 15,000 CAFOs in the US, which raise 50% of all animals used for our food.
• The largest food processors hold the greatest share of the market, so they wield more power, both economic and political.
• CAFOs receive a wide array of subsidies, both direct and indirect, such as crop subsidies on the corn and soybean used to feed CAFO animals. This in turn means more money in the pockets of feed producers like Monsanto.
• Because CAFOs are not held accountable for the environmental and health damage they do, they don’t have to worry about those costs, putting more into their pocket. Those costs are absorbed by the public at large.
• There are also the economies of scale: once a farm is automated for a large number of animals, doubling that number does not mean a doubling of costs. Organic costs more to produce—as much as 20% more—than  CAFOs and factory farms because they require more labor (no use of dangerous of chemicals), more costly fertilizer, higher labor costs for crop rotation, more money spent on organic certification, slower growing time, greater post-harvest handling costs to avoid cross-contamination, and more spacious (and thus more expensive) living conditions for livestock. And of course they don’t receive the aforementioned subsidies.

Sponsors of the 2012 Iowa bill, Senators Joe Seng (D) and Annette Sweeney (R), received contributions from special interests including the Iowa Corn Growers Association (who contributed 8% of Seng’s campaign funding and gave a similar amount to Sweeney), the Iowa Farm Bureau Association, Monsanto, and the Iowa Agribusiness Association. Of course we have no idea what lobbying, if any, went on behind closed doors, but the money trail—and the support for legislation that directly benefits these special interests—speak for themselves.

These Ag-Gag laws are inspired by a model bill called the “Animal and Ecological Animal Terrorism Act” from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC has both powerful corporate members and legislators, making the conflict of interest pretty seamless. ALEC’s corporate members are a Who’s Who of the Big Food supply chain, from farmers to retailers: Monsanto, Kraft, Walmart, Walgreens, etc.

The intent of the ALEC-modeled bills is to introduce them in many states, sometimes word-for-word. It becomes a systematized process. As the New York Times reported last year, an ALEC membership brochure “boasted that ALEC lawmakers typically introduced more than 1,000 bills based on model legislation each year and passed about 17 percent of them.” When ALEC runs with a bill, it has the support necessary to go much further by being introduced in many states simultaneously. It’s a sneaky way of legitimizing an idea that benefits only powerful and wealthy companies, not the general public.

Numerous state legislators are members of ALEC; last year, of the sixty legislators who voted in favor of Ag-Gag bills, 23% of them were members of ALEC, as are sponsors of three of the new Ag-Gag bills: Arizona state senator Jeremy Hutchinson and Wyoming state representative Sue Wallis. In 2010 Wallis was the subject of a conflict-of-interest complaint for trying to block legislation that would send stray horses to slaughter when at the same time she was planning to build a horse slaughter plant of her own. Both Wallis and her cosponsor on the Wyoming bill, Ogden Driskill, are both members of Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Driskill accepted contributions from livestock industry as well as Exxon Mobil.

Here’s a run-down of all seven state bills:

Action Alert! CAFOs don’t need further protection, and individuals who bravely expose CAFO conditions should not be penalized. If you’re a resident in one of the five states where these new bills have been offered, please contact your legislators and tell them to honor free speech and oppose these bills. Please send your message today!

Arkansas residents

Take Action

Indiana residents

Take Action

Nebraska residents

Take Action

New Hampshire residents

Take Action

Wyoming residents

Take Action

The post “Big Farma” Still Trying to Hide Their Dirty Secrets first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Science for sale! Researchers with ties to industry are paying big money to ensure that scientific independence is a thing of the past.

• Mars Inc. funded the University of California’s research into the benefits of chocolate.
• Monsanto gave $2.5 million to Texas A&M to endow a chair for plant breeding, and another $500,000 to Iowa State University to endow a soybean breeding faculty chair.
• Pioneer Hi-Bred funds five positions at Iowa State, including a chair in maize breeding.
• Kraft Foods gave $1 million for a professor’s position at the University of Illinois’s school of nutrition.
• The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois in Champaign–Urbana recently accepted a $250,000 grant from Monsanto to create an endowed chair for the “Agricultural Communications Program” it runs with the College of Communications.
• Yale School of Medicine teamed up with PepsiCo to create a “research laboratory” in Science Park, which is adjacent to Yale’s campus. This may be an attempt to neutralize the university’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which has advocated less consumption of sugary sodas like those made by PepsiCo.

Washington State University–Pullman offers an MBA degree—but this one is a Masters in Beef Advocacy, an industry-funded program that trains college students to fight back against critics of big agribusiness. The degree is designed to equip beef producers across the country “to tell their story in presentations to schools and church/civic groups, through local media and in the ‘virtual’ world of the Internet.”
Professors who speak out often face a backlash. In 2009 Michael Pollan, noted author and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, was supposed to lecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but Harris Ranch Beef Co. threatened to pull its $150,000 donation from the school if the lecture went forward. Sponsors of Pollan’s lectures have also faced resistance from farm businesses in Washington and Wisconsin.
Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture was the scene of some dramatic pressure tactics: the Center had been a staunch advocate for alternative and sustainable agriculture. Suddenly its director, Fred Kirschenmann, was forced to step down. What happened? We don’t know for sure. But the Leopold Center operates under the authority of Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture, and the USDA, which is largely controlled by GMO interests, gave the university $56.8 million in 2012. On top of that, the state of Iowa gives the university $216.6 million to support its daily operations, so there is undoubted pressure from the state as well—Iowa received $23.6 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2011, and leads all states in hog production, most of them from CAFOs (confined-animal feeding operations).
The dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis, recently estimated that roughly 20 percent of his college’s annual research budget now comes from industry. And his university is not alone. Here are a few others:

Many, many more are listed in the stunning report released by Food & Water Watch that we cited above.
Earlier this month we reported about Stanford’s sloppy research in its meta-analysis of the nutritional value of organic foods. Now take a look at the study authors’ conflicts of interest. Even though they stated there were no primary funding sources, the Cornucopia Institute noted that there are clear financial ties between Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, which supports the report’s researchers financially, and the chemical and agribusiness industry. Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural business enterprise, has donated millions to the Institute. In addition, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which strongly promotes GMOs in Third World countries, has also provided support.
It’s not just the agriculture industry that has its hand in muddying the university research waters. Dr. Ingram Olkin, co-author of the Stanford organics study, accepted money from the Council for Tobacco Research, which has been described as using science for “perpetrating fraud on the public.” And many research universities are funded in a big way by pharmaceutical companies. We will return to this issue in a future newsletter article.
Research funding from industry has outpaced government funding for universities, and some university budgets are disproportionately dependent on industry funding. The Food & Water Watch report has some extremely illuminating tables showing university funding from agribusiness, the presence of industry on school boards, and the donation of money for buildings and facilities. For example, we learned from this report that Colorado State University now has a “feed facility for research on the environmental benefits of feedlots.” UC Berkeley received $25 million from Novartis (now owned by GMO giant Syngenta) in exchange for this donation; Novartis was reportedly given two of the five seats on the research committee and the ability to influence research projects and delay research findings. It was also awarded licensing options for 30 percent of university projects. The University of Georgia reportedly offers seats on its board of advisors to industry for $20,000 each.
Does all this funding have a direct influence on researchers? Absolutely. According to the report, more than fifteen percent of university researchers acknowledge having “changed the design, methodology, or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.” If fifteen percent readily acknowledge it, how many more have been influenced but are reluctant to admit it?
We’ll conclude with the troubling story of South Dakota State University. According to the report, David Chicoine, president of SDSU, joined Monsanto’s board of directors in 2009. That year he received $390,000 from Monsanto, more than his academic salary. Just a few weeks before Chicoine joined the Monsanto board, the company sponsored a $1 million plant breeding fellowship program at SDSU.
Immediately SDSU started suing farmers for patent infringement because they were engaging in the time-honored practice of “saving seed” (farmers have historically saved the seed from their strongest crops for the next year in order to share and sell in future harvests, instead of purchasing an entirely new batch of seeds). SDSU joined Monsanto in identifying farmers who saved seed by using private investigators and toll-free anonymous hotlines.
Several farmers settled the lawsuits for $175,000, and consented to allow SDSU inspect their farms, facilities, business records, and telephone records for up to five years. Ironically, some of the SDSU seeds were developed with farmers’ and taxpayer dollars through funds from the South Dakota Wheat Commission.
Texas A&M, Kansas State University, and Colorado State University have similarly started suing farmers. Such universities don’t simply have conflicts of interest. They are in danger of becoming puppets of Big Farma. If this is allowed to go on unabated, how can anyone believe that their research is in any way independent and reliable?

The post “Big Food” Trying to Control Universities through Rampant Conflicts of Interest first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.