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Little Bytes
LITTLE BYTES

Essential Reading for the Week

Why Is This Meat So Healthy?

U.S. Right to Know Sues CDC for Documents About Its Ties to Coca-Cola

Kimbal Musk—Elon’s Brother—Predicts a Movement of Millennial Workers Fleeing Desk Jobs for Farms 

Over 70 Percent of Deep-Sea Fish Have Ingested Plastic, Study Finds

Impact of Cleaning Products on Women’s Lungs as Damaging as 20-A-Day Cigarette Habit: Study

French Wine Study Shows Humans Can Taste Pesticides

The ‘Hot’ Benefits of Chili Peppers


20% off Mercola products
ORGANIC STOREFRONT

Discount Days

What’s better than raw honey? Or organic coconut oil?

How about a 20-percent discount on either or both?

Mercola.com is best known for its vitamins and supplements—and its research and education. But it’s also a great source for a wide range of other products, each hand-selected for its quality and purity.

Mercola has always been a strong supporter of OCA’s work. And a strong supporter of organic regenerative food and farming.

Now through midnight February 28, 2018, get 20 percent off a wide range of Mercola products with this promo code: ORGANIC218. Mercola will also donate 20 percent of the product price to OCA.

Get 20% off your Mercola product with this coupon: ORGANIC218 


roulette wheel game at a casino
MILLIONS AGAINST MONSANTO

Fat Chance

Monsanto’s favorite false talking point is that we need millions of acres of GMO corn, soy and beets—and the vile pesticides used to grow them—to “feed the world.”

Not true, of course. As we heard last year from Hilal Elver, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food:

“It is a myth. Using more pesticides is nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), we are able to feed 9 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.”

To answer the question, “Is genetically modified food the sure thing that will feed the world, or is it a risky game of chance?” our friends across the pond at Beyond GM have come up with a fun way to share the real facts about GMOs with your friends and neighbors who may still think there’s a shred of truth to Monsanto’s lies.

Beyond GM’s GMO Wheel of Chance is designed to arm consumers with the truth about genetic modification in food and farming, including this: Genetic engineering of our foods is not the “sure bet” Monsanto and others would have us believe.

Conversations about GMOs can quickly become complex and we wanted to find a way to encourage people who may not know much about GMOs, but who are interested, to dip into the topic and learn a little more. The wheel design is based on a traditional wheel of fortune and topics are divided into four key areas: consumers, farming, the environment and the marketplace and each spin leads to a pop-up of bite-sized information.

Read ‘Beyond GM Launches Interactive GMO Wheel of Chance’

Spin the GMO Wheel of Chance

Make a tax-deductible donation to OCA’s Millions Against Monsanto Campaign


hands holding a syringe filled with red liquid
HEALTH CORNER

Right to Know?

Interested in vaccine choice laws? Want to know if your state has a bill in the works?

The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) is tracking vaccine legislation in 17 states. To find out if your state lawmakers are considering a new vaccine law, go to this article and scroll down to the end. Then click on your state to learn more.

According to ANH, the national vaccine schedule has never been rigorously evaluated for safety. ANH reports:

This was the determination not of some “anti-vaxxer” group, but of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine), which advises the government on issues relating to medicine and health. In a 2013 report, the Academy concluded, “Key elements of the schedule—the number, frequency, timing, order, and age at administration of vaccines—have not been systematically examined in research studies.”

OCA’s position on vaccine safety: Some vaccines may be safe, some may not be safe, at least not for some people. As with any medicine, consumers have the right to know exactly what is in every vaccine, and what the latest, and best research says about the potential risk for each and every recommended vaccine, as well as the cumulative risks associated with aggressive vaccine schedules. We support the rights of parents to make informed decisions about the potential risk to their child of a vaccine or series of vaccines. We reject the false narrative, promoted by Big Pharma, that there are only two sides to the vaccine debate: pro-vaccine or “anti-vaxxer.” Instead, as with any medication, we advocate that consumers seek guidance from reliable sources, and that medical practitioners and pharmaceutical manufacturers provide truthful, up-to-date information about the medicines they promote and profit from.

Find out if your state is considering a new vaccine law


close up on a cow in a sunny meadow smiling
VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Crazy for Grass

In 1999, Jon Taggart converted the 900 acres of crops on his recently purchased 1,400-acre ranch in Grandview, Texas, into 900 acres of native grasses. Then he launched his 100% grass-fed beef business.

Everyone, including the “people in the cow business and people in the meat business” said he was crazy.

But in 2011, when Texas was hit with a drought that dragged on for nearly 18 months, Taggart was one of the few ranchers who was able to keep on doing business as usual, while other ranchers had to move their cattle out to more fertile ground.

While acres of GMO corn and soy on many of the state’s ranches shriveled up and died, the deep-rooted, “warm season grasses, cool-season grasses, grasses that germinate early and grasses that germinate later” on Taggart’s ranch survived.

And so did Taggart.

Taggart, recently featured in an ABC News “Food Forecast” segment, calls himself a pioneer in the grass-fed, grass-finished—also known as 100% grass-fed—meat industry. But he’s the first to admit he isn’t doing anything new.

“Cows are ruminant animals. They have four parts to their stomach for a reason, and that’s so they can digest grass, which we don’t very well, and convert it to a protein that we can consume. They were designed to eat grass. This system worked for a few million years before we got here. It’s designed to work that way and it works very well if you just get out of the way and let it happen.”

And happening it is.

Read ‘Saving the Soil—and Their Ranches—by Raising 100% Grass-Fed Beef’

Watch the video

Help us support Regeneration International with a tax-deductible donation


bowl of large heads of broccoli
ACTION ALERT

Pass the Veggies, Please

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends we all eat 2 to 3 cups of vegetables per day.

That’s nice. But guess what? If everyone followed those guidelines, there wouldn’t be enough vegetables to go around.

That’s because the Farm Bill, that massive piece of legislation that determines how $90 billion a year in tax dollars is spent to shape our food system, favors subsidies that support processed, GMO junk foods, over healthy, nutrient-dense vegetables.

Once every five years, the Farm Bill comes up for reauthorization, giving Congress a chance to rewrite it. This year, 2018, it’s up again.

If Congress wants to help reduce malnutrition and diet-related disease, it should include legislation in the Farm Bill to encourage the production of more organic vegetables—instead of considering nonsense proposal’s like Trump’s “Harvest Box” which would force-feed nutrient-poor processed (and highly subsidized) foods to SNAP recipients.

It’s time to stop letting Congress use the Farm Bill to subsidize the richest landowners growing monocultures of Monsanto’s pesticide-drenched genetically engineered grains used to make high fructose corn syrup, ethanol and feed for animals in factory farms.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress: Put More Veggies—and Less Junk Food—in the Farm Bill!


black and white pig sticking its nose through a fence on a farm
BLOG POST OF THE WEEK

Cheap and Dirty

If you live in the U.S., you’re far more likely to get hit with salmonella or some other foodborne illness, than if you live in the U.K.  You can thank the factory farm industry for that.

An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Guardian found “shockingly high” levels of foodborne illness in the U.S. The Guardian reports that annually, around 14.7 percent (48 million people) of the U.S. population is estimated to suffer from an illness, compared to around 1.5 percent (1 million) in the UK. In the U.S., 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year of foodborne diseases.

Driving these grim statistics is the multi-billion-dollar industrial factory farm industry that not only makes us sick, but pollutes our water and air, exploits workers, is causing an antibiotic resistance crisis and is unconscionably inhumane.

They do it all in the name of “cheap food.”

TBIJ and the Guardian conducted its investigation based on U.S. government documents containing data on 47 meat plants across the U.S. According to the Guardian:

Some of the documents relate to certain companies, including Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the US’s biggest poultry producers, and Swift Pork. Although not a comprehensive portrait of the sector – there are around 6,000 US plants regularly inspected by Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) – the documents provide a snapshot of issues rarely detailed in public which has rung alarm bells with campaigners in both the US and UK.

Those rarely detailed “issues” include: meat contaminated with fecal matter; meat processing equipment contaminated with grease and blood; and chicken dropped on the floor then rinsed with chlorine and put back in the production line. 

It’s enough to make anyone’s stomach turn.

It’s also enough to make consumers and entire neighborhoods revolt, and citizens to get more politically active.

Read ’48 Million Sickened Every Year by Cheap, Dirty Meat
 
Click to tweet a message to Costco

Post on Costco’s Facebook page 

Call Costco’s customer service line at 1-800-774-2678. If you’re a member, tell them you’ll cancel your membership unless Costco halts its factory farm project.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Costco: Consumers Don’t Want Your Giant Factory Farm!

Make a tax-deductible donation to the Organic Consumers Association