Corn-petroleum powered grain

In Micahael Polans book Omnivors Delima,he recounts the sight of freight trains being loaded with mountains of the ubiquitous grain to be made into everything from sugar to whiskey to low quality beef.This is not your grandfathers backyard garden variety,it’s mostly in-edible.When a farmer was asked who buys his corn he said “the military industrial complex”.

During WWII the USA was feverishly refining fossil fuels into bombs and poison gas for the killing fields of war. Afterwards we had these large facilities which were converted from munitions and poison gas manufacturing to fertilizer and what I call the ‘cides(pesticide,fungicide,herbicide,slow motion suicide).They can also be found at your friendly neighborhood  hardware megastore as Roundup and Miracle Grow. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeder so it soon became the perfect dumping ground for our petroleum refined fertilizer and ‘cides to the tune of BILLIONS of tons per year just in the USA!!This is absolutely disastrous for our soils effectively making them sterile and dependant on the chemicals. Our farmlands have gone from a marvelous,sybiotic relationship between microbes,water,flora and the sun to a dead,lifeless medium that is just there to hold the plants up while they turn fossil fuel into your dinner and snacks. Also in the off season the farms that grow these commodities are baren,muddy wastelands, I can’t think of a more un-sustainable,un-healthy and vunerable model of food production.

So like other unfit for human subsidized commodity crops,(soy,wheat,canola)we have an overabundance and an artifical market. I always say that the only vote that counts is what you buy with your money so consider the corporations you support the next time you sit down at the dinner table,oh yeah and leave the grass seed to the birds.

http://www.localharvest.org/

Paleo Diet and Multiple Sclerosis

In this excellent lecture given by Dr. Cordain, author of the Paleo Diet, we get down to the nitty gritty of what plant lectins are and what they can do to you whether you have this particular disease or not. I highly recommend anyone with even a passing interest in nutrition to watch this vid.

Lectins and phytates are referred to as anti-nutrients because I suppose just calling them toxins may be to alarmist for the USDA/grain pushers. So what are the big offenders??

1. wheat and grain of any kind…that’s right,your beloved bread is the worst offender because not only does it offer a hearty dose of WGA lectin but it also packs quite a glycemic load as well as being profoundly addictive for most people,just the thought of life without bread sends shivers down the spine of a wheathead, also FYI corn is a grain and it’s in anything that’s made in a factory.

2.beans, beans musical….well you know the rest. A hefty dose of anti nutrients especially in the canned variety but a more friendly glycemic load. Also peanuts and cashews are legumes and not nuts.

3.Potatoes…yep that’s right white potatoes are bad news. If thoroughly cooked and peeled much of the toxic alkaloids are probably avoided however they are very high in carbs and low in nutrient value. They are a member of the deadly nightshade family of plants which include tobacco,tomatoes,eggplant and peppers. These are reported to be especially problematic for people with arthritis.FYI sweet potatoes and yams are not included as they are  members of the Morning Glory family and from a GL and nutrient perspective they are much healthier choices.

4. Pasteurized dairy…this stuff is so nasty I will devote a whole post on this subject alone. BTW it’s the proteins in dairy that are problematic.

So what do our grains,beans and taters all have in common?

Well they are all quite poisonous in their raw form and require some form of processing to be edible. You see plants are smart like that, they have to be because they can’t move. If every animal that came upon some grass seed plants(grains) ate and digested the seed then the plant species would’nt last very long so they contain these toxins as a means to discourage eating and/or digestion and hopefully propagate their species. The opposite of this would be fruit which is by nature designed to be eaten so that the seeds may be distributed.

Humans are omnivores and thus highly adaptive.It is in our genetic code to be extremely resilient until after we pass child bearing age which I would say is about 30. Dietary damage can take a long time to manifest so it is easy to speculate that selective pressure in the human population for tolerance to lectin is a non-issue because most will have successfully reproduced by the time significant damage occurs thereby nullifying selective pressure for lectin tolerance.

Paleolithic diet simplified

In this trailer for the movie Big Fat Lies we get a quick and simple breakdown of the dietary principles of the Paleo diet. Much of what we think we know about nutrition is based on the crumbling foundation of the lipid hypothesis which states eating fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries.

When you look into the reasearch what you will find is that carbohydrates drive insulin which in turn drives fat storage,inflammation,atherosclerosis and a whole array of metabloic disorders. If you follow the USDA food pyramid you will get 6-11 servings of grain based carbs per day! It’s no wonder the western world is in the midst of a degenerative health crisis.