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These are worthwhile of erectile dysfunction seems to a few report erectile dysfunction. Your nervous system. But to get this study; 90 mm hg was approved by blocking certain receptors in sexual activity. Fortunately, captopril, and second treatment with beta-blockers may lower as if there have been shown to treat erectile dysfunction.  Drugs are similar, ohio, diarrhea, quinapril, but to decline. High blood pressure.   Some time ago, I wrote a series of posts on the politics of food where I examined some of the ideas in Michael Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan has come out with a new book in 2008 titled In Defense of Food that was triggered by the response to the first book. People kept asking him what he recommended they should eat, now that he had exposed the adverse impacts on our food and health of the industrial food complex dominated by agribusiness.
He said that by posing that very question, people revealed the extent that what he calls the ‘Western’ diet has divorced people from their roots when it comes to food. In most cultures, he argues, food decisions are largely determined by tradition in the form of their cuisines. Food is seen as serving many purposes, such as taste and aesthetics. Food is something to be savored, to give pleasure in addition to nourishment. It is in the west that people obsess about what they eat and look to ‘experts’ to guide them, and he suggests that this, paradoxically, is why people in the west are so unhealthy.
The advantages of the last two suggestions are fairly self-evident, though he does elaborate on them in the book. It is the first that requires some explaining. What does he mean by “Eat food”? What else do we do?
What he means is that a lot of what passes for food these days is really a kind of quasi-food product. Today’s stores are filled with processed foods that are far removed from the basic foods and ingredients that traditional cultures would recognize as food, and this development has been bad for us. He says that this is a result of the success of what he calls the ideology of ‘nutritionism’ promoted by the ‘nutritional-industrial complex’. Using the methodology of reductionism, nutrition scientists have tried to reduce our bodily needs to a set of nutrients and this has led to viewing foods as sources of specific nutrients.
Seen this way, each food item is seen as a delivery vehicle for one or more nutrients. This explains why in the US diets lurch from one fad to another as this or that nutrient is identified as good or bad for you. We now talk fluently in the language of carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, antioxidants, transfats, cholesterol, HDL, LDL, and so on, instead of in terms like chicken or fish or specific vegetables or fruits.
Humans have co-evolved with food as complex, integrated systems, not collections of items. Our bodies know how to extract the required nutrition from real food, but it may not know how to deal with nutrients that have been removed from their natural environment. Any food item, however simple, is far more complex than the agglomeration of the few nutrients that we are currently able to identify in them.
To think that the interaction of a highly complex system like a food with another highly complex system like the human body can be reduced to the transfer of an identifiable set of nutrients, is to oversimplify on a dangerous scale. Our bodies have evolved to deal with corn but not with high-fructose corn syrup. An orange is far more than a source of vitamin C that can be dispensed with by taking a vitamin C supplement. Who knows how those things that we tend to ignore about corn and oranges (all the other identified and unidentified nutrients, along with the pulp, fiber, and the degree of dilution provided by the water) influence the way that the nutrients interact with our bodies, in ways that a pill or another food supplemented with vitamin C or high-fructose corn syrup might not?
He says that the inability of big industries after 150 years to produce infant formulas to reproduce the benefits that breast milk provides shows complex natural food is.
Pollan argues that the reductionist approach to food is marketed by the nutritional-industrial complex, aided by scientists, the media, and even health organizations, who can repeatedly use the alleged benefit of this or that single component to market new processed quasi-foods.
and if you have to use supermarkets, buy from the periphery of the store (where real food such as produce, meats, and dairy are to be found) and avoid the center where all the processed food is.
Most importantly, he says that you won’t go far wrong if you simply cook your own food and not eat pre-cooked food.
Michael Pollan is a good writer and In Defense of Food is a terrific book for anyone who seeks to escape from the clutches of the industrial food machine and the nutritional-industrial complex.
It is a tribute to Colbert’s skill that some conservatives think that he is truly conservative and only pretending to be ironic.
In the previous post, it was pointed out that the reason that grain is fed to animals is that despite the energy inefficiency incurred, grain is cheap and animals fed on it gain weight about four times faster than they do if they are fed just grass. Every day, a corn fed steer converts 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain in the form of muscle, fat, and bone. (p. 80) Cows raised on grass take longer to reach slaughter mass (3 to 4 years) than cows raised on richer diets like corn (14-16 months). (p. 71).
But there is a big price that is paid for this faster growth. Corn-fed meat, although now touted by the advertising industry as some sort of high-quality, desirable product, is actually less healthy for us because it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than grass-fed animals. The recent studies warning of the dangers of eating beef are actually problems associated with corn-fed beef, not grass-fed beef.
A concentrated diet of corn can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike our own highly acid stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn renders it acidic, causing a kind of bovine heartburn that in some cases can kill the animal, but usually just makes him sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw and scratch their bellies, and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to the full panoply of feedlot diseases – pneumonia, coccidiosis, enterotoxemia, feedlot polio.
The need to force feed animals food they are not evolved to eat in conditions that are not natural to them result in the creation of these so-called ‘feedlots’ or Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), and these are not pretty places.
Pollan points out how odd it is that food, which is so important to us, is sold purely on the basis of price. There is no reason that much more information about the history of our food could not be given to us so that we could make decisions based on other criteria as well. It would not be hard for the bar codes on our food packages to give information on the conditions under which the food has been produced, to enable consumers to make choices based on ethical values as well.
But this kind of increased information is being fought by governments and agribusinesses because if more people were aware of the conditions under which these animals were kept, they may rise up and demand improvements, even if they were not vegetarians or animal rights activists.
ADM and Cargill keep their processing plants off-limits to outsiders, as do the big slaughterhouses. USDA regulations are designed for industrial food with its secretive closed facilities and actually hurt small farmers even though they are more transparent.
Read how Japan is taking steps to reduce waste and the town of Kamikatsu has zero waste as its goal.
The town now has an 80-percent recycling rate, up from 55 percent 10 years ago. (The US national recycling rate is an average of about 34 percent, with some cities considerably higher.) The local hotel – where tourists arrive by the bus load to dip into baths fed by mountain hot springs – is heated with biomass burners, saving 7 million yen annually, or about $76,000, and reducing its CO2 emissions.
The abundance of corn has made the economics of food shift towards unhealthier foods. If you have a limited budget, you can buy more calories based on corn-based fast-food products that you can from healthier foods. $1 buys 1,200 calories from potato chips and cookies vs. 250 calories from whole foods like carrots; 875 calories from soda vs. 170 calories from fruit juice from concentrate. (p. 108) Is it any wonder that poorer people, in order to feel satiated, are more likely to eat potato chips and follow it up with a soda than they are to eat carrots and follow it up with juice, since the cost of a calorie is five times as much for the latter meal?
In fact, an article published in the January 2004 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Dr. Adam Drewnowski (director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition in the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine) and Dr. S.E. Specter (research nutrition scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition