Pesticides a Threat to Children’s I.Q., Studies Find

 

 

Prenatal exposure to pesticides — common in agricultural areas as well as low-income urban neighborhoods, where the chemicals are used to control cockroaches and other insects — can significantly affect a child’s ability to succeed in school, a trio of new studies finds. “This is not trivial,” a researcher says. [Yale Environment 360]

via NYTimes.com.

The case for kale

Lately I have been lucky enough to have a sneaky and well priced supply of Kale. ( thanks SL! )

While we love the leaves as Cheesy Kale Chips… L. O. V. E kinda love.. Like finger licking lip smacking kinda love, We only use the leaves.

So I used the stems to make a great juice with passionfruit, apple and lime and it was so good and like drinking pure health!

* Kale can provide you with some special cholesterol-lowering benefits if you will cook it by steaming. The fiber-related components in kale do a better job of binding together with bile acids in your digestive tract when they’ve been steamed. When this binding process takes place, it’s easier for bile acids to be excreted, and the result is a lowering of your cholesterol levels. Raw kale still has cholesterol-lowering ability – just not as much.

* Kale’s risk-lowering benefits for cancer have recently been extended to at least five different types of cancer. These types include cancer of the bladder, breast, colon, ovary, and prostate. Isothiocyanates (ITCs) made from glucosinolates in kale play a primary role in achieving these risk-lowering benefits.

* Kale is now recognized as providing comprehensive support for the body’s detoxification system. New research has shown that the ITCs made from kale’s glucosinolates can help regulate detox at a genetic level.

* Researchers can now identify over 45 different flavonoids in kale. With kaempferol and quercetin heading the list, kale’s flavonoids combine both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits in way that gives kale a leading dietary role with respect to avoidance of chronic inflammation and oxidative stress.

This info about Kale and much more can be found here:

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=38

Disgusting Photos of Hospital Food Used to Demand Change

Hospitals are meant to be places of healing, but sometimes just even looking at the food can make you sicker.

It’s time for every hospital—no matter where they are situated, or what communities they serve—to step up and understand that good food can indeed be medicine, and that bad food can impact much more than just your appetite.

via TreeHugger.

Bill Clinton Drops Meat, Dairy, and 24 Pounds

Former President Bill Clinton, reputed for his legendary consumption of snack foods, has made a surprise move. In an effort to drop weight before his daughter Chelsea’s (vegan) wedding, the father of the bride gave up meat and dairy products, becoming a vegan. (He admits to eating fish on rare occasions.)

There was more behind his decision than dropping a few tuxedo sizes, though: Clinton has a history of heart problems. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 2004 and had two coronary stents implanted in February. As he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer:

via Bill Clinton Drops Meat, Dairy, and 24 Pounds : TreeHugger.

Live Longer on a Low Carb Plant Diet

If you want to live longer, you are better off on a low carb diet which is vegetable based, rather than one whose proteins are sourced from animals, according to a study involving 129,716 men and women published this week in the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers found lower overall mortality rates and lower death rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease among the low carb veggie people.

The researchers, from Simmons College, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, and National University of Singapore, Singapore, used data from the Nurses’ Health study of 85,168 females aged 34 to 59 years and 44,548 males aged 40 to 75.

via Low Carb Plant Sourced Diet Better Than Animal Sourced One.

Why Green?

What does it mean to be Green? What does it mean to be an eco or environmental activist? Why do you buy organic? Why Why ?

I guess there are many of us who simply understand that making green organic ecological environmental choices keeps us healthy and if we aren’t healthy then life isn’t worth living. I thought I would try and shed a little light on how actually profound ecological choices are to the benefit of all.

Organic foods should be grown without any chemical fertilizers and or the use of any chemical pesticides. For growers adopting this philosophy or understanding it means that food now has to be grown in harmony with nature, and this involves multi-cropping plants, allowing animals to roam pastures (read natural fertilization), rotating crops, for birds and bees to pollinate plants and fruits, for birds, bees, spiders, frogs etc., to work as natural guards against insects and other pests. As this process evolves the land itself becomes healthy and healthier, earthworms flourish and the soil becomes rich in nutrients. The plants that grow in this rich soil become naturally healthier and in fact more resilient in their own right to disease, insects or pests and in turn the animals that eat these healthier plants grow to become stronger and healthier. This is in short the virtuous circle and understanding of organic farming.

When plants are industrially grown using mono-cropping techniques or are mono-cultured the opposite occurs. Chemical fertilizers are basically (N)itrogen, (P)hosphorus, and (K)potassium, produced from fossil fuels (like natural gas). NPK is the equivalent of living on white bread and water. You’ll grow, live or survive but you’ll be terribly sick and unhealthy.

Commercial industrial agriculture effectively grows a lot of its crops in this way, and all grains, vegetables, beans, etc., are all effectively sick and undernourished. They become increasingly susceptible to insects and pests, and so then chemical pesticides are introduced but to make the crops resistant they are then genetically modified to be resistant to these pesticides and herbicides.

As time has gone on, plants have been increasingly genetically modified to grow faster, look pristine (when they have negligible nutritional content)[1], and be increasingly tolerant to any new/stronger pesticide and herbicide developed. In turn growers in their chase for increasing crop yield simply dump as much NPK they can on their farmland, resulting in enormous runoff of excess fertilizer, causing toxification and dead zones of rivers, lakes, and oceans [2].

In turn the animals including us, and or the (unhealthy) animals we eat  that eat these plants grow to become unhealthy and sick. As they say, you are what you eat. How it manifests is perhaps another huge topic in itself (and perhaps an unnecessary can of worms at this point to be particularly specific, let’s just say it’s not rocket science to connect the dots).

I think understanding the impact or ‘green’ choices we make is a huge topic or essay. Whether we choose to eat meat (at all), or vegetables, is it organic or pasture raised does make a significant difference. Of all the items you buy from the supermarket, how much has corn based products in it?

So when you choose to be really green and organic, aside from your health be additionally comforted that you are making the ecology of the planet work again, that you are helping to preserve and nourish what biodiversity that still exists. This is priceless.

1. http://www.survivalgardening.net/gm-crops/gm-crops.html which has further citations on various facts.
2. Google “fertilizer runoff effects”, or here are some links http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/ethanol-worsens-deadzone.php; http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/ocean-dead-zones-increasing-400-now-exist.php; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080421143836.htm
3. as corn ultimately is the #1 food crop that has been most genetically modified, has the most amount of commercial chemical fertilizers used in its production…