I got a great new book from one of my best friends this past Christmas called The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
Once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down.
It is essentially a very truthful, shocking, and thorough document of how we manufacture and market our food.
I know it doesn’t necessarily sound exciting, but if you read some of the facts that are in this book you’d be hooked to.
The first section is about industrial corn.
According to Pollan, of the 45 thousand items in the supermarket, about 25% of them contain ingredients manufactured from corn.
Now, you’re probably thinking that’s a good thing, seeing as though corn is a vegetable. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The truth is, corn is making is sick and fat.
Corn is being grossly over produced in this country. With the prices of corn constantly falling (and worth very little) farmers have to produce more and more of it to pay their bills and keep their head’s above water financially.
More corn is being produced than the country knows what to do with it.
So, where does this crazy grain go? For starters…..
- It goes to feed cows living on factory farms to fatten them up quicker than if they were on their natural grass diet.
- It feeds pork, chickens, and other animals in factory farms.
- It’s being fed to the salmon and the tilapia and all the other fish being farm raised.
Therefore, eggs, yogurt, cheese, and milk are all essentially made of corn.
Corn is in all products within a chicken nugget, soda, TV dinners, Cheez Whiz, canned fruit, ketchup, mustard, candy, fast food, processed food, soups, baked goods, frosting, gravy, waffles, processed meats, mayo, margarine, salad dressing, and even vitamins.
In fact, corn is in such abundance that it is even being added to the ingredient list in non food items: toothpaste, make up, trash bags, diapers, matches, batteries, wallboard, joint compound and much, much more.
You might be wondering why we even care that corn is in everything these days.
Here’s just one very big reason: E coli poisoning.
The cows are forced to eat massive quantities of corn (not their natural diet) and this corn in their digestive system provides an acidic environment which is a brilliant breeding ground for e coli. The e coli gets out of control and then, when the cow goes to the slaughter house to be hacked apart so that you can have a steak, the e coli comes into contact with any surrounding meat and infects it.
This is what is you eat. Infected meat.
And instead of dealing with this major issue logically, by NOT feeding them corn, they just try to kill the E coli in the meat by injecting it with ammonia.
So, with the infected meat, you get a nice serving of ammonia on your plate.
What can you do to prevent being infected with E coil and ingesting ammonia? Avoid meat in grocery stores that was raised on factory farms. That’s practically all of it.
If you are going to eat meat you need to eat it from animals that were raised naturally – that means from cows who were allowed to roam the farm freely and eat grass.
Not only will you avoid e coli contamination by consuming meat from grass fed animals but you will be ingesting high quantities of Omega 3 fatty acids, which may support fat loss efforts and help prevent disease such as cancer, and conjugated linoleic acid, a little known naturally occurring trans fat that is very healthy for our bodies.
I’ll be back again soon with a few more ways that the overabundance of industrial corn is is making is sick and fat.
Susan, MS, CSCS
Author, Ultimate Home Workouts
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