You know your air quality has hit an all-time low when canned fresh air has become a better alternative. That is what it has come to in some Chinese cities, with people clamoring to purchase cans of “fresh” air imported from Australia. Continue reading
Christina Sarich, Staff
Waking Times
There’s the official explanation for why NASA is spraying lithium, a pharmaceutical drug most often used to treat people with manic depression or bi-polar disorder, into our ionosphere, and then there is the probable reason(s). It would be easier to accept NASA’s official explanation if they were not so secretive about everything they study and do in space – but one thing is for certain – NASA’s own personnel have admitted that lithium, along with other chemicals, are intentionally being placed into our environment regularly. It is possible that many of NASA’s own employees aren’t even aware of the true motivations for carrying out such a project, ironically displaying the very behaviors that these chemicals/pharmaceuticals are meant to instill. Continue reading
Chemtrails can be a touchy subject with people. There are many different opinions on what is being sprayed in the skies above us and why it’s being sprayed. There are people who full out deny they are spraying anything. But considering the government has actually admitted to spraying the skies(cloud seeding), that should end the entire discussion on whether they are spraying chemicals in the air. Continue reading
Dr. Patrick Moore, who was one of the original founders of Greenpeace who left the organization in disgust of their current political zealotry, Greenpeace is now trying to have him erased from history for daring to do that. He has now produced this interesting video in conjunction with with Prager University.
Global Warming activists will tell you that CO2 is bad and dangerous. The EPA has even classified it as a pollutant. Patrick Moore provides some surprising facts about the benefits of CO2 that you won’t hear in the current debate.
The new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat.
It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.
(Refreshing News) The “Climate Change/Global Warming” crowd is reaching the point of hysteria. Fewer and fewer people are taking them seriously anymore.
A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.
The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago. Continue reading
The Max Planck Institute in Germany is among the world’s most prestigious scientific research institutions, and a new study coming from its Institute for Meteorology cannot be dismissed by warmist profiteers like Al Gore. Michael Bastasch reports at the Daily Caller:
A new study out of Germany casts further doubt on the so-called global warming “consensus” by suggesting the atmosphere may be less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide emissions than most scientists think. Continue reading
(Reuters) - Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.
Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.
Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.
The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.
Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.
“The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.
Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.
“My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years,” said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.
Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first showed in the 1890s how man-made carbon dioxide, from coal for instance, traps heat in the atmosphere. Many of the exact effects are still unknown.
Greenhouse gas emissions have hit repeated record highs with annual growth of about 3 percent in most of the decade to 2010, partly powered by rises in China and India. World emissions were 75 percent higher in 2010 than in 1970, UN data show.
UN PANEL SEEKS EXPLANATION
A rapid rise in global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s - when clean air laws in developed nations cut pollution and made sunshine stronger at the earth’s surface - made for a compelling argument that human emissions were to blame.
The IPCC will seek to explain the current pause in a report to be released in three parts from late 2013 as the main scientific roadmap for governments in shifting from fossil fuels towards renewable energies such as solar or wind power, the panel’s chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.
According to Pachauri, temperature records since 1850 “show there are fluctuations. They are 10, 15 years in duration. But the trend is unmistakable.”
The IPCC has consistently said that fluctuations in the weather, perhaps caused by variations in sunspots or a La Nina cooling of the Pacific, can mask any warming trend and the panel has never predicted a year-by-year rise in temperatures.
Experts say short-term climate forecasts are vital to help governments, insurers and energy companies to plan.
Governments will find little point in reinforcing road bridges over rivers, for instance, if a prediction of more floods by 2100 doesn’t apply to the 2020s.
A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.
EXCEPTIONS AND CHALLENGES
Pachauri said climate change can have counter-intuitive effects, like more snowfall in winter that some people find hard to accept as side-effects of a warming trend. An IPCC report last year said warmer air can absorb more moisture, leading to heavier snowfall in some areas.
A study by Dutch experts this month sought to explain why there is now more sea ice in winter. It concluded melted ice from Antarctica was refreezing on the ocean surface - this fresh water freezes more easily than dense salt water.
Some experts challenged the findings.
“The hypothesis is plausible I just don’t believe the study proves it to be true,” said Paul Holland, an ice expert at the British Antarctic Survey.
Concern about climate change is rising in some nations, however, opinion polls show. Extreme events, such as Superstorm Sandy that hit the U.S. east coast last year, may be the cause. A record heatwave in Australia this summer forced weather forecasters to add a new dark magenta color to the map for temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius (129F).
(CAV News) - First we shared the story that it appeared Exxon ,thanks to a technicality ,would be getting out paying for a spill that wasn’t technically considered “oil.”
FROM RT:
The central Arkansas spill caused by Exxon’s aging Pegasus pipeline has reportedly unleashed 10,000 barrels of Canadian heavy crude - but a technicality says it’s not oil, letting the energy giant off the hook from paying into a national cleanup fund.
Legally speaking, diluted bitumen like the heavy crude that’s overrun Mayflower, Arkansas, is not classified as ‘oil’. And it’s that very distinction that exempts Exxon from contributing to the government’s oil spillage cleanup fund.
22 people were evacuated forced into hotels, with thousands of “oily like” barrels swarming the streets in an Arkansas town. This left many outraged as many didn’t even know the town of Mayflower had a pipeline.
Here’s what a resident told RT:
RT: Have there been any local protests against ExxonMobil regarding the spill? How are Mayflower residents reacting?
CH: There is some anger. There was some shock in the community. A lot of people weren’t even aware that the pipeline ran through the area. There was a community meeting on Saturday afternoon with some Exxon officials present, and there was a lot of frustration shown at the meeting. Very few answers were given, and the people in attendance were quite angry.
However, Exxon has come out to say they will pay for the clean up costs that flooded the Mayflower streets, killing four ducks and forcing over 20 evacuations. They also denied any claim that they were never going to clean up the spill.
Then today, according to AP, jurors in New Hampshire hit the Texas-based company, Exxon, with a $236 million in damages to fix groundwater contamination. This is by far the states largest verdict.
Even though it appears that Exxon will be paying out of their ass with clean up costs, according to the article it only represents two days profit for the company.
FROM AP:
Fadel Gheit, managing director of oil and gas research and a senior analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said the verdict won’t put a dent in Exxon Mobil’s bottom line.
“Exxon will probably make close to a $40 billion profit this year,” Gheit said. “That’s two days’ work.”
He said it’s no surprise that Exxon Mobil would take the state’s 10-year-old contamination lawsuit to trial, saying the company “will make you sweat for every dollar you think you’re going to get.” Company leaders view it as a matter of principle, he said.
Jurors found that Exxon Mobil was negligent in adding MTBE to its gasoline and that MTBE was a defective product. They also found Exxon Mobil liable for failing to warn distributors and consumers about its contaminating characteristics.
Sources: ABC News, RT, Associated Press
(RT) -The central Arkansas spill caused by Exxon’s aging Pegasus pipeline has reportedly unleashed 10,000 barrels of Canadian heavy crude - but a technicality says it’s not oil, letting the energy giant off the hook from paying into a national cleanup fund.
Legally speaking, diluted bitumen like the heavy crude that’s overrun Mayflower, Arkansas, is not classified as ‘oil’. And it’s that very distinction that exempts Exxon from contributing to the government’s oil spillage cleanup fund.
ExxonMobil has already confirmed that the compromised pipeline was transporting “low-quality Wabasca Heavy crude” from Canada’s Alberta region. That particular form of crude contains large quantities of bitumen - a “thick, sticky, black semi-solid form of petroleum which is transported in a diluted form (dilbit) as it makes its way from Canada to US refineries,” explains Oil Change International, which has brought attention on the strange legal exemption.
Companies that transport oil are required to pay $.08 per barrel into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. The cash is used by the US government to respond to oil spills. But there’s a catch - Exxon is exempt from paying into the fund, because its pipelines aren’t considered to be carrying “conventional oil.” However, it’s that very fund that is responsible for cleaning up at least part of Exxon’s mess.
“Exxon, like all companies shipping toxic tar sands, doesn’t have to pay into the fund that will cover most of the clean up costs for the pipeline’s inevitable spills,” Oil Change International claimed on Tuesday.
RT has contacted Exxon regarding just how much of the cleanup will be paid for by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, and is currently waiting for a reply.
The strange exemption of heavy bitumen crude from classification as oil dates back to a time when the extraction of tar sands on a large scale was thought improbable with technology available at the time. However, while oil companies developed the means to transform Canadian tar sands into a booming energy sector, the legal definition of oil remained the same.
Money from that same fund has already helped to clean up another spill caused by a ruptured pipeline. In 2010, more than 1 million barrels of diluted bitumen (crude oil) were spilled into the Kalamazoo River. To make matters worse, unlike conventional crude oil, bitumen heavy crude sinks. The ensuing environmental impact has made that Michigan spill the most expensive in US history, as toxic substances seeped into the surrounding soil.
There is also the fear that bitumen heavy crude could be more corrosive to pipelines than conventional crude. Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International, told ThinkProgress that it’s past time for the law to be changed:
“The question is why we should continue this exemption given that it’s clear tar sands oil is more likely to spill because it’s more corrosive… and more and more tar sand is coming into the US.”
For its part the oil industry disputes the claim, and has produced scientific impact research that does not reflect higher corrosion by transporting bitumen heavy crude.
Judge Allen Dodson of Arkansas’ Faulkner County seemed to reflect the concerns of those impacted by the latest spill of heavy bitumen crude, saying: “Crude oil is crude oil. None of it is real good to touch.”
(NaturalNews) If you talk to the global warming crowd, carbon dioxide — CO2 — is the enemy of mankind. Any and all creation of CO2 is bad for the planet, we’re told, and its production must be strictly limited in order to save the world.
But what if that wasn’t true? What if CO2 were actually a planet-saving nutrient that could multiply food production rates and feed the world more nutritious, healthy plants?
As it turns out, CO2 is desperately needed by food crops, and right now there is a severe shortage of CO2 on the planet compared to what would be optimum for plants. Greenhouse operators are actually buying carbon dioxide and injecting it into their greenhouses in order to maximize plant growth.
The science on this is irrefutable. As just one example, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food says:
CO2 increases productivity through improved plant growth and vigour. Some ways in which productivity is increased by CO2 include earlier flowering, higher fruit yields, reduced bud abortion in roses, improved stem strength and flower size. Growers should regard CO2 as a nutrient.
If you want to understand why CO2 is an essential nutrient for food crop growth, check out this informative slide show. It explains that “CO2 may be repidly depleted during crop production” daylight hours, because the plants pull all the CO2 out of the air and use it in photosynthesis.
The CO2 found in modern-day atmosphere is 340ppm. But food crops would grow far faster if the concentration of CO2 were closer to 1000ppm, or roughly 300% higher than current levels. In fact, most greenhouse plant production causes a “CO2 depletion” to happen, shutting down photosynthesis and limiting food production. As the “Carbon Dioxide in Greenhouses” fact sheet explains:
Ambient CO2 level in outside air is about 340 ppm by volume. All plants grow well at this level but as CO2 levels are raised by 1,000 ppm photosynthesis increases proportionately resulting in more sugars and carbohydrates available for plant growth. Any actively growing crop in a tightly clad greenhouse with little or no ventilation can readily reduce the CO2 level during the day to as low as 200 ppm.
Thus, greenhouse plants are “running out” of CO2. They are starving for it. And when you add it to food crops, you get higher yields, improved taste, shorter flowering times, enhanced pest resistance and other benefits.
This brings up an obvious answer for what to do with all the CO2 produced by power plants, office buildings and even fitness centers where people exhale vast quantities of CO2. The answer is to build adjacent greenhouses and pump the CO2 into the greenhouses.
Every coal-fired power plant, in other words, should have a vast array of greenhouses surrounding it. Most of what you see emitted from power plant smokestacks is water vapor and CO2, both essential nutrients for rapid growth of food crops. By diverting carbon dioxide and water into greenhouses, the problem of emissions is instantly solved because the plants update the CO2 and use it for photosynthesis, thus “sequestering” the CO2 while rapidly growing food crops. It also happens to produce oxygen as a “waste product” which can be released into the atmosphere, (slightly) upping the oxygen level of the air we breathe.
This is a brilliant solution because humans want to live on a world with low CO2 that supports frozen ice caps in order to keep ocean water levels low, but they want to eat a volume of food that requires high CO2 for production. The answer is to concentrate CO2 into greenhouses where food production is multiplied by CO2 nutrition.
I’ll bet you’ve never heard Al Gore talk about CO2 as “nutrition.” He declares it a pollutant and wants to tax you for producing it. But CO2 is actually a key nutritive gas for food crops. Without carbon dioxide, we would all have starved to death by now.
The U.S. government’s solution to power plant emissions, however, is to just shut down coal-fired power plants, causing rolling blackouts across the USA, especially during hot summer days. The EPA has forced hundreds of power plants to shut down across the USA, achieving a loss of power infrastructure that vastly exceeds what would even be possible by an enemy invasion of high-altitude warplanes dropping bombs.
The EPA, under the excuse of “saving the planet,” is destroying America’s power infrastructure and leading our nation into a third-world scenario where power availability is dicey and unsustained. It seems to be just one part of the overall plan to gut America’s economy, offshore millions of jobs, put everybody on welfare and destroy small businesses.
But what if we harnessed coal-fired power plants instead of shutting them down? What if we used them as “CO2 generators” that fed CO2 into vast greenhouse operations that produced organic, high-growth foods that could feed the nation? Coal-fired power plants can produce both electricity and food nutrition at the same time.
Better yet, if you combine this concept with aquaponics, you get simultaneous production of plants and fish while using no soil, no GMOs and one-tenth the water of conventional agriculture.
See, the solutions to all our problems already exist. The only reason we are suffering as a nation is because political puppets try to brainwash us into believing complete falsehoods like, “carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant” or “the people don’t need healthy foods; they need medications and vaccines.” When societies believe falsehoods, they crumble and collapse.
That’s where America is headed, of course. And it’s all being accelerated by deceptive bureaucrats who want to convince you that growing real food is bad and we should all be punished for exhaling carbon dioxide, an essential nutrient for food crops. Carbon dioxide is not the enemy it’s been made out to be. It’s actually plant nutrition that helps regrow rainforests, food crops and wetlands. In fact, higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere would make the planet more lush and abundant in terms of plant life, forests, trees and food crops.
(TheDailySheeple)The national average for a gallon of gasoline is currently at $3.65. On top of that sky-high price, the International Monetary Fund has now proposed that the U.S. should impose a tax of $1.40 per gallon in order to pay for social programs around the world and help the environment.
Neil Cavuto discussed this proposal with FBN’s Charles Payne, who said sometimes you hear things and you just have to ask, “Are you nuts!?”
(RT) -Americans lost more than just an hour of sleep when they set their clocks ahead over the weekend to switch to Daylight Savings Time: a new report says the transition took nearly half a billion from the US economy.
The Carpenter Co. commissioned the group Chmura Economics & Analytics to conduct a study in order to see what the real cost of the annual transition is, aside from just losing 60 minutes of slumber. The results, a report entitled “Estimating the Economic Loss of Daylight Saving Time for US Metropolitan Statistical Areas,” concludes that the total price of pushing the hour hand ahead is roughly $433,982,548.00 for the United States — or around $1.65 per person.
Chmura says they came to their conclusion after going through peer-reviewed academic journals where the aspects of economic losses are shown with solid evidence. The result, they report, is that the annual DST change is linked to an increase in heart attacks, workplace injuries in the mining and construction sectors and “increased cyberloafing that reduces productivity for people who typically work in offices.”
The group says they studied more than 300 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) in the United States to come to their findings. Of those they researched, four of the five regions with the biggest loss the day DST kicks in all include areas of West Virginia. The West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Trainins reports that coal occurs naturally in 53 of the 55 counties in the state, and that more than $3.5 billion annually of the gross state product comes from the natural resource. Also hit hard was the Kingsport-Bristol region near the Tennessee/Virginia border and sections of Florida.
At number 349 on the list of cities struck hardest by Daylight Saving Time is the greater Washington, DC metro area, which includes parts of Maryland, Virginia and that state’s coal-rich neighbor. Chmura Economics say that the one lost hour this week left DC losing nearly $7 million, but when is Washington not to blame for the country’s economic woes?
(KGW.com) Taxing the air we breathe may be coming to Washington state. Yes, the insane taxing of every behavior is rising to a whole new level with the proposed “bike tax” in Washington.
According to lawmakers who proposed the bike tax, it would help raise $1 million over the next decade to be used for road maintenance. The new $25 tax will be applied on every bike sold for over $500 in the state.
One Washington lawmaker is making twisted argument in support of the new fee. Rep. Ed Orcutt wrote in an email to a bike shop that the CO2 that bicyclists exhale while riding is just one of the reasons he supports the bike tax.
“Since CO2 is deemed a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride,” Orcutt wrote. Therefore, they should pay taxes to help the environment as well as the roads.
Here is his full email:
(Natural Society) -A company specializing in oil spill science has accused the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of violating the Clean Water Act by blocking science regarding oil spill cleanup that could have aided in better cleaning up the BP oil spill of 2010 while simultaneously cutting billions in costs.
In a press release by Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference group, the Oil Spill Eater International (OSEI) company calls out the EPA for what founder Steve Pedigo says boils down to blocking the development of oil spill cleanup science that is environmentally safe while also effective. In the release, Pedigo cites research and investigation by the Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization (LAEO) on the current industrial cleaning agents used in the aid of cleaning up oil spills. The agents used in the cleaning process, such as the notorious Corexit, have been found time and time again to be highly dangerous to human health and the environment as well.
Despite this fact, the EPA has failed to utilize alternatives. A move that Pedigo says is purposeful, as the EPA has favored dispersants like Corexit that studies have actually shown can be even more damaging than the oil itself. As NBC reported back in late 2012, Corexit was actually found to make oil from spills a whopping 52 times more toxic. When considering that 2 million gallons were dumped into the ocean during the ‘cleanup’, this is very concerning news.
Despite cleaning teams requesting environmentally-friendly alternatives, which Pedigo says includes OSEI’s Oil Spill Eater II, the EPA did not honor the requests and instead enforced the usafe of dispersants like Corexit in the face the concerning evidence. According to the statements in the release, BP even made a direct request to switch to a better alternative. In the write-up, Peido goes against the EPA for:
“Violating the very Clean Water Act it is there to enforce by pre-approving toxic dispersants and tampering with science testing and results to justify inadequate oil spill cleanup protocols used on the BP Oil Spill.”
Overall, the mass use of Corexit has polluted the Gulf like never before, leading many consumers to avoid the purchase of seafood from the Gulf due to serious health concerns. When it comes to marine life, Corexit poses a special risk to the very delicate balance of life within the world’s oceans — a balance that has been disrupted by the introduction of over 2 million gallons of the extremely toxic dispersant.
(Natural Society) -While we may be under the impression that our democratic system of government is here to protect us, corporations—and the politicians getting paychecks from them—do a fair job of making that difficult. This manner of “legislative capture” is manifesting itself in a host of appalling ways far beyond those listed here. Here are 8 ways corporations are poisoning our food supply, humans, and mother earth.
Sugary drinks, especially soda, run rampant in the U.S., with corporations shelling out millions to advertise to both children and adults. Kids are taking in 7 trillion calories of sugar each year from soda alone, with sodas making up 15-25% of the daily recommended caloric intake for kids aged 2 to 19. Sugar-sweetened sodas can contain upwards of 200 calories per can, but even artificially sweetened drinks should not be considered safe. Several studies show that artificial sweeteners—like cancer-linked aspartame—can contribute to tooth decay, obesity, kidney damage, and depression.
BPA is a hormone disrupting chemical used in canned goods and plastic bottles. The chemical, which is labeled as “toxic” in other nations, had a chance to be banned of March 2012. In a move that angered activists within the US and even internationally, the FDA ruled against the ban. This ubiquitous chemical has been linked to:
You may not know this, but many organic companies are actually owned and operated by major corporations like Coca-Cola or Kellogg. Companies like Honest Tea and Odwalla may appeal to health conscious shoppers, but they are actually owned by Coca-Cola. Another popular ‘health’ brand is Kashi, owned by the Kellogg corporation. Some products from these companies may be ’100% organic’, but do you really trust their labeling practices? Or perhaps more important, do you really want to give support to the corporate producer?
Further, these large corporations are buying out some of the companies many natural-health advocates have grown to love. One example is when New Chapter, a vitamin and supplement company offering worthy products since 1892, was bought out by mega-corporation Proctor & Gamble.
These days, physicians are a little stab-happy with their antibiotics, often to just please the patient with a medical solution (a placebo effect, if you will). But it could be setting us up for lifelong obesity – at least that’s what some research has to say. In addition to killing “bad” bacteria, antibiotics kill “good” bacteria in the gut, thereby disrupting digestion even in the long run. There’s also mounting evidence that antibiotics may be promoting diabetes and metabolic syndrome—but not killing the cold and flu viruses that parents think they are (antibiotics cannot kill viruses, only bacteria).
Last year, The Guardian wrote about 150 scientists and 50 farmers—including a former FDA commissioner—demanding that Congress regulate antibiotic use in livestock. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has even blamed overuse of antibiotics for the global resistance to antibiotics, which could make antibiotics futile against disease-causing bacteria. And this is not even considering the other ill effects antibiotics have on the animals we eat.
If you are into organic foods and have been following GM news, you know that the latest and greatest chance for GM labeling was with California’s proposition 37. Needless to say, the bill was not passed, but Prop 37 did teach us a lot about the interest of various companies and mega corporations. It was no surprise to see biotech giant Monsanto dish out over $4 million to fight the bill, but some people were surprised to see Naked Juice, Kashi, Cascadian Farm Organic, Honest Tea, and some others on the side of anti-GM labeling. As mentioned above, many of these companies are owned by corporations like Coca-Cola or General Mills.
They all support GM food, are anti-GM labeling, and subsequently support the use of herbicides and pesticides. Pesticides that are being used in greater amounts each day thanks to mutated insects that become resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup-ready GM crops.
According to numerous pieces of research, GM foods like Monsanto’s corn have been implicated of contributing to weight gain, organ disruption, tumor development and infertility in rats. Roundup—a glyphosate-based herbicide— is to thank for contributing to water pollution, resistant rootworms and superweeds, and environmental devastation.
Although technological products like cell phone towers and cell phones are hurting the bee population, herbicides, insecticides and pesticides brought to us by Bayer, Monsanto, and Dow AgroSciences appear to be the main culprits. It has been shown time and time again that these chemicals are ravaging these tiny insects that are essential for agriculture purposes and pollinating food crops.
“…a document was leaked revealing that a bee-killing pesticide put in use by the EPA may be to blame [for the bee decline]. Adding to the controversy, more records have emerged showing that the USDA was fully aware of the pesticide’s threat to not only bees, but humans…Neonicotinoids, the particular type of pesticides used, are absorbed systemically into plants, including the pollen and nectar. Once the bees begin to pollinate, they also absorb the insecticide, and die.”
Neonicotinoids have been banned in France and Germany, but not the United States.
If you purchase your meat from a grocery store instead of a farmer’s market or co-op, it was probably raised in a factory farm. Not only are these farms known for extreme animal cruelty (which many undercover videos have gruesomely pointed out), but they are also responsible for polluting groundwater, drinking water, and contributing to massive deforestation. Actually, they produce 100 times more waste than the entire U.S. population.
Run-off from these establishments as well as non-organic crops are contributing to blooms and dead zones in coastal waters. Earlier this year, a scientific paper argued against the case of factory farms feeding the world, but with the USDA and FDA deep in industrial farming’s pockets, it will take considerable time and effort before we see any changes.
Additional Sources:
(New Hope 360) A new report released last month found that Americans are unhealthier than 16 other developed countries.
The report, which was compiled by the National Research Council and the Institutes of Medicine, found that, despite the fact that Americans spend the most money per year on healthcare, we’re not healthier or living longer than other countries.
Several factors contribute to U.S. debility, such as a large uninsured population, high consumption of calories, high drug abuse, less use of seatbelts, high levels of poverty, high reliance on cars and low physical activity. No single factor explains the overall status of American health.
Of the health areas studied, Americans ranked worse than other countries in nine categories, including, among others, drug abuse, heart disease, obesity and diabetes, and lung disease.
The study found that U.S. men live the shortest lives of all 16 countries at 76 years, and U.S. women ranked second-to-last at just under 81 years. Americans are more likely to die younger because of illnesses like obesity and heart disease.
“I don’t think most parents know that, on average, infants, children, and adolescents in the U.S. die younger and have greater rates of illness and injury than youth in other countries,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, chair of the panel and of the department of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, according to NBC News.
But there is a silver lining. Americans who live to the age of 75 are expected to live longer than those in the other countries. Not to mention people in the U.S. control blood pressure and cholesterol better and have a lower death rate from cancer.
The nutrition industry is concerned with the results of this study because of its implications for the world of consumer health and the industry’s interest in improving the well-being and health of the country.
Industry experts Mark LeDoux, chairman and CEO at Natural Alternative International, Inc.; Steve Mister, president and CEO of the Council for Responsible Nutrition; and Robert Craven, CEO of FoodState, commented on the findings of this study.
Mark LeDoux, chairman and CEO, Natural AlternativesInternational: The first obvious issue that arises from this report is that the “healthcare” system in America is a misnomer. We don’t provide healthcare, we provide sick care. Many of the commondiseases that lead to our mortality rates being high are directly linked to what we affectionately call “high-risk behaviors.”
If we look at food choices in the family from an early age, we see that convenience plays a role in generating unhealthy choices. Getting a frozen dinner and plopping oneself in front of the television while eating retards the development of proper social family time. When children go off to public school, they are often fed by institutional food service programs that are big on quantity, but not necessarily up on freshness or quality. It never ceases to amaze me that people will order 1,200 calories of fat laden foods at fast food restaurants, and then order a super sized diet soft drink, thinking that simply by ordering a diet beverage they are somehow redeeming the poor choices of food that accompany the beverage. Unfortunately, when it comes to healthcare in America we have seen the enemy, and he looks an awful lot like us.
Supplements can and should play a vital role in securing appropriate nutrient densities in our tissues and organ systems, but failure to be mobile leads to a whole set of other negative consequences. Gluttony leads to obesity, and that condition takes a toll on overall health—putting undue burdens on the ‘sick care’ system in America to hopefully alleviate the symptoms of self-wrought misery. It would seem self-evident that Americans may be the most overfed and undernourished people in the developed world.
Steve Mister, president and CEO, Council for Responsible Nutrition: This report is certainly troubling. At the same time, maybe it illuminates some opportunities for potential growth in the U.S. supplement marketplace. As the researchers noted, it’s not any one factor, but rather a whole collection of health-related behaviors that contributes to the U.S.’s health score.
As individuals we all need to be more conscious of the small daily behaviors that collectively contribute to a longer, more healthy life—everything from easing up on the accelerator, to taking a daily jog, to passing on the second piece of chocolate cake. When we think about health as a constellation of lifestyle choices rather than “I need to lower my cholesterol orI need to lose weight,” we can start to understand how all these things work together. Our bodies are not a collection of unconnected parts, they are integrated holistic systems all working together. So what we eat, the supplements we take, the exercise we get, all impact our entire bodies and life outlook—not just our blood pressure, or just our mood or just our alertness, but everything. Supplements are just one of those behaviors, but because they are easily incorporated into a daily regimen, they can be a daily reminder to do other healthy things too.
Daily supplement regimens have direct effects on health, but just the act of taking a supplement can also serve as a reminder to engage in other healthy behaviors. It gives us a feeling of autonomy and empowerment over our health which in turns makes us more conscious of our health and more invested in protecting it. Marketers ofsupplements could move the needle toward a healthier U.S. if they rebrand the routine of taking supplements as a brave, deliberate act of defying the unhealthy culture around us.
Robert Craven, CEO, Food State (MegaFood): Like Mark, I am convinced that new legislation will do very little – although I was in favor of the super-size soft drink ban in NYC. I got into a Facebook fight on this one as some of my friends started saying that this was taking away “freedom” and “liberty” and I made the point that if your liberty and freedom starts costing me money it ceases to be your freedom. But I digress.
I believe our industry has a real opportunity to take a leadership position here—not from a legislative perspective, but from one that is much more aspirational. What if our industry was the healthiest industry in the nation? What if we could prove it? What if our industry did more for turning around disease directly—meaning we had more of an impact than any doctor or legislator or health insurer ever could? What if we could prove we were healthier with real data? I think this would do more for our positive stature in the world than anything else we could ever do. It’s walking all the talk.
What if the leaders in our industry got together and did nothing else but decide that all of our employees would be healthy? Has anyone ever taken a count of how many people that would represent (employees of natural and supplement companies and their families)? Has to be in the millions…
If we did nothing else but decide that we (our industry) were going to set an example by being healthy, that as CEOs we were going to lead the charge and set the example—being healthy ourselves; creating systems and support that truly promoted health within our own companies; leading the conversation with other CEOs in our communities; ringing the bell for wellness right where we live—wouldn’t this one act, if we had enough great companies on board and bought into the vision, do more for solving the U.S. health crisis than any other act? Especially given that our employees and customers are the most willing participants.
I can’t think of any other answer. In the end, there may not be enough of us out there to ultimately solve the problem—regardless, as for me and my company, we are going to try.
