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Two Deer
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Alzheimer’s disease, which affects an estimated 5.2 million Americans,1 is a devastating degenerative brain disease that develops slowly over time, and tends to be quite lethal in its final stages. According to the latest data, the death toll from Alzheimer’s exceeds half a million Americans per year.2 This places Alzheimer’s in the top three killer diseases in the US, right behind heart disease and cancer.
gmofoodslabels
WASHINGTON — In the ever-complicated debate over labeling of genetically modified foods, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offers this idea: Use your smartphone.
Vilsack told members of Congress on Wednesday that consumers could just use their phones to scan special bar codes or other symbols on food packages in the grocery store. All sorts of information could pop up, such as whether the food’s ingredients include genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
If the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) gets its way, Lake View Natural Dairy Farm, owned and operated by David and Heidi Berglund and their daughter Lyndsay, will be fined $500 per day until they submit to an unconstitutional inspection of their farm.
When the farm briefly explored the possibility of selling milk for processing, this triggered a call to the MDA by the processor, and the MDA realized they had no record or control over this farm.
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
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.”
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.
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.
Altrazine
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.
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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