Each time you make a choice about what to eat, THINK not only about the direct impact it will have on your body and health...but also on our world. Yes, your choice affects our entire world.
So you may think...just how is this so? Here are a few brief points to ponder:
FAT:
Over consumption of fats will react and "oxidize," turning into compounds that can lead to heart disease, cancer, and other degenerative diseases. Although there are healthy fats, processed food fats otherwise known as "hydrogenated fats" are the worst. If you need one fat to stay away from for the rest of your life- this is the one!
This man-made process takes vegetable oil from a liquid to a semisolid fat and was designed for increasing shelf life and product stability. The trans-fat that is created ("trans" is the pre-fix because of the the "trans" chemical structure) is just as bad, and arguably worse than saturated fat. Choosing foods that use this process sends a statement to big business that we will allow such ingredients to lace our food choices.
BUY LOCAL:
Buying produce that is farmed in California (when you live in NYC) means that you are contributing to fuel pollution and rising fuel costs. Buy produce that is farmed locally. Not flown in on a 747 from across the country- or world! This not only helps our local business, but reduces your carbon footprint.
THINK BEFORE YOU (M)- EAT:
If you eat meat, buy meats that are organically fed, live free-range, are raised without antibiotics and most important- consume the natural diet for their species. Here are a few brief points to keep in mind:
WHAT ARE THEY EATING?: Today's factory cow is fed a diet of grain, and "other things" that a cow is not naturally able to eat. Things like protein substances (sometimes from other animals), corn and soy (two products that receive 80 percent of all herbicides used in the entire United States!) are todays factory cow's feed.
Something else to consider- According to a recent article in US News & World Report: some '40 billion pounds a year of slaughterhouse wastes like blood, bone and viscera, as well as the remains of millions of euthanized cats and dogs passed along by veterinarians and animal shelters, are rendered annually into livestock feed.' If you research this topic, you will find an over-whelming amount of information. This is not propaganda.
OUR WORLD: There are massive amount of waste produced on a factory farm today. You may think that animal waste is good (as manure) for the environment and in the case of the small farm, it is.
But with large farming facilities (where most of our dairy comes from) we are talking about massive amounts of waste - fecal ponds if you will - devastating the surrounding environment. There are cattle lots in California where confinement farming operations create as much waste as a city of 21 million people- all in one location. Imagine what that is doing to the surrounding environment, our lakes, rivers and streams.
Last, the growing problem we have with antibiotic resistant diseases in today's world is directly related to these large farming cattle lots. Cows get sick from not being able to digest the feed and from the poor living conditions (so heavily polluted with fecal matter). Therefore, today's mass-farming methods consist of a daily dose of antibiotics to aid in preventing illness. Due to these heavy doses of antibiotics your steaks and burgers, chicken and hot dogs, are all laced-up with antibiotics. Milk has been noted to contain traces of up to 80 different antibiotics, depending on the farm and location.
If you really want to boggle your mind, start realizing the connection between government backed programs related to such industry practice and how they may connect into many of our global problems. (...corn farming subsidies... crop exportation..terminator seeds...the pharmaceutical industry...the food pyramid...)
For some more information and interesting things to THINK about check out this link:
http://www.sustainabletable.org/getinvolved/tools/
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