Health Issues
Big Ag and Big Pharma are interested in profit, not public health, and their lobbyists fight to protect their corporate interests, not consumer interests. OCA advocates for a sustainable, integrative healthcare system with an emphasis on prevention, nutrition, wellness promotion, and freedom of choice in healthcare for everyone.
It’s a growing controversy: Should GMO foods always be labeled so consumers are aware that the product contains genetically modified ingredients?
GMOs—or genetically modified organisms—are created in a lab by altering the genetic makeup of a plant or an animal. Ninety-two percent of Americans believe that GMO foods—widely found in kitchens across the country—should be labeled before they’re sold, according to a recent nationally representative survey of 1,004 people from the Consumer Reports National Research Center
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For the past two decades, developers of genetically engineered (GE) crops and their corporate allies have maintained that because their products are so obviously safe, there is no need to label them. Thanks to marketing campaigns, squelched state initiatives and a flood of GE products on the market, the public has largely adopted this belief as well.
Would it shock the public to know that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never formally approved any GE crop as safe for human consumption?
war on gmos
Since when is the safety of genetically modified food considered “settled science” on a par with the reality of evolution? That was the question that jumped to mind when I saw the cover of the March 2015 National Geographic and the lead article, “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?”
The cover title: “The War on Science.” The image: a movie set of a fake moon landing. Superimposed: a list of irrational battles being waged by “science doubters” against an implied scientific consensus:
“Climate change does not exist.”
“Evolution never happened.”
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For the past half century, cholesterol has been touted as a grave health hazard, and dietary fat and cholesterol have been portrayed as being among the “deadliest” foods you could possibly eat.
This may finally change, as limitations for cholesterol will likely be removed from the 2015 edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It’s about time really, as 60 years’ worth of research has utterly failed to demonstrate a correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease.
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One is a businesswoman and an MBA graduate. Another is a corporate vice president. The third is a registered nurse.
These three mothers — all of them educated, middle-class professionals — are among the vaccine skeptics who have been widely ridiculed since more than 100 people fell ill in a measles outbreak traced to Disneyland. Critics question their intelligence, their parenting, even their sanity. Some have been called criminals for foregoing shots for their children that are overwhelmingly shown to be safe and effective.
Read moreAltrazine
LONDON — Syngenta, a Swiss chemicals company, produces one of America’s most popular herbicides. It is called atrazine, and 73.7 million pounds of the chemical compound were applied in the United States in 2013. It was used on more than half of all corn crops, two-thirds of sorghum and up to 90 percent of sugar cane.
But Syngenta cannot sell atrazine to farms in its own backyard.
Even though the European Union banned atrazine over a decade ago, the company has long insisted that the pesticide was not banned.
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The US does not have a health care system; we have a disease-management system. It’s a system that is largely dependent on expensive drugs and invasive surgeries as opposed to preventive measures and simpler, less expensive treatment alternatives.In short, it’s a system rooted in an ideal of maximized profits instead of helping people maintain or heal their health. The result of such a system is that Americans spend twice as much on health care per capita than any other country in the world.
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Not long ago, the great processed-food companies like Kraft and Kellogg's towered over the US food landscape like the high hat that adorned the head of Chef Boyardee, the iconic canned-spaghetti magnate whose empire is now owned by ConAgra.
But now, Big Food has fallen on hard times. Conagra, which owns Hunts, Reddi Whip, Ro-Tell, Swiss Miss, and Orville Redenbacher along with Chef Boyardee, recently slashed its 2015 profit projections and sacked its CEO.
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By now you have probably seen John Oliver’s comic take on the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on doctors’ prescribing habits. Media outlets from Mother Jones to the Wall Street Journal commented admiringly, and even the American Medical Association felt compelled to declare they were “committed to transparency” around drug company payments to doctors.
But satire will do very little to focus on the real problem if we’re distracted by the humor inherent in self-important doctors being bought off by a steak.
Read moreeating healthy mental disorder
In an attempt to curb the mass rush for food change and reform, psychiatry has green lighted a public relations push to spread awareness about their new buzzword “orthorexia nervosa,” defined as “a pathological obsession for biologically pure and healthy nutrition.” In other words, experts are moving toward saying that our demand for nutrient-dense, healthful food is a mental disorder that must be treated.
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