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What Are We Doing To Our Food?
In recent years, we've become more aware of the connection between diet and health, and so we're making an effort to eat more fruits and vegetables. To keep up with this trend, even die-hard burger-and-fries establishments are now offering vegetarian choices and fresh salads on their menus. This is definitely progress. Yet, when we take a close look at what's in and on our fruits and vegetables, it's obvious that, in many ways, we're undermining our efforts to stay healthy.
The aggressive use of large-scale intensive farming practices over the past several decades has left our agricultural soil depleted of minerals and beneficial microbes. This translates into lower nutrient levels in produce, reflected by a lack of flavor. My seven-year-old son loves to eat apples, but he frequently complains that they're dry and tasteless, and unfortunately he's right. I remember biting into a pear or an apple as a child and savoring its ripe, juicy sweetness. Such fullness of flavor is rarely found in fruits and vegetables today. Most produce, grown in impoverished soil, is picked before it's ripe to facilitate transport and storage. This means that even the few vitamins and minerals it does contain will never become fully bioavailable.
To make things worse, our crops are dowsed with toxic pesticides, which jeopardize the health of farmers and their families, und ultimately that of the consumer. Pesticides pollute the air, the soil, and our water supplies and, of course, the food they're sprayed on. Conventional agriculture uses thousands of pesticides; it is estimated that, worldwide, several billion pounds are applied annually. Synthetic fertilizers, too, are undermining the health of planet Earth and its inhabitants. Every year, thousands of tons of highly soluble nitrogen fertilizer are applied, much of which ends up in our ground and surface water.
But we're not happy just treating our foods with chemicals. We also need to redesign them! So we're working with biotechnology to merge genes from plants, animals, viruses, and bacteria in ways that do not occur in nature. As an example, let's say that DNA from an Arctic fish, such as a flounder, is spliced into the DNA of a vegetable, such as a tomato, to make it frost-resistant. Our knowledge of the consequences of the genetic engineering of foods is extremely limited, and many scientists are concerned that it may cause irreparable damage, for instance through accidental cross-pollination and the creation of modified viruses and bacteria that may introduce new diseases unknown to humans, animals, and plants.
In Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature (Park Street Press, 2001), authors Martin Teitel, Ph.D., and Kimberly A. Wilson express their concern about the uncertainty of biotechnological processes: "Once genetic modifications are made, there is no way to tell how the effects of the genetic recombining might change and even move into other organisms."
One way in which consumers can avoid foods that have been bio-engineered or treated with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics is to eat organically grown produce, meat, and dairy. The steep increase in organic food sales (15 to 20 percent annually) shows that consumers are indeed casting a vote in favor of natural foods and sustainable agriculture. But the organic farming sector is still extremely small compared to the powerful mega-farms and agricultural conglomerates.
The assault on our food continues in our own kitchens, where the microwave oven has all but replaced conventional methods of cooking. Many people don't realize that microwave heating dramatically changes the molecular structure of foods. One of the changes is the suppression of amino acid hydrolysis. Another is that the amino acid L-proline is converted to its d-isomer, which is known to be toxic to the nervous system and poisonous to the kidneys.
One short-term study involving microwaved foods demonstrated that pathological changes occurred in test subjects following the consumption of microwaved foods. Test subjects scored an increase in leukocytes, an indication of serious stress in the body. There was a decrease in lymphocyte count greater than the decrease typically associated with food poisoning. Total cholesterol levels increased, and blood iron was reduced.
Samples of cow's milk tested after exposure to microwaves showed several significant changes in quality, including increases in acidity and sedimentation, a change in the structure of fat molecules, a reduction of folic acid content, and an increase in non-protein nitrogen.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of the destructive effects of microwave heating comes from a 1991 lawsuit in Oklahoma involving a hip surgery patient who died from a transfusion of blood that had been warmed in the microwave oven, rather than through the usual conventional means. Microwave radiation had altered the blood to such an extent that it killed the patient!
In all our efforts to stay healthy, we seem to forget that disease always results when we violate the laws of nature, whether that means chemical agriculture, genetic engineering, or microwaving our foods. And only a realignment with these laws will restore us to health. As Edgar Cayce says in reading 759-13: "Nature is much better yet than science!"
This article first appeared in the January/February, 2003, issue of Venture Inward and has been used by permission of the author.
Simone Gabbay, a registered nutritional consultant in Toronto, Canada, is the author of Nourishing the Body Temple
and Visionary Medicine. She maintains a website atSend E-Mail to: dudleydelany@webtv.net
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