Our World and Everything in It

I read an article “More Problems With Plastics” in U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2008, by Adam Voiland that will be very disturbing to males. It’s about chemicals called phthalates found in plastics. I’ve already reported and insinuated that we’re slowly poisoning ourselves with gender bending bisphenol A (BPA), another additive in plastics. Phthalates are endocrine disruptors, (interferes with hormones) like BPA, whose results are already seen in fish with both male and female reproductive organs, no organs, or a variety of mutations in between. BPA could soon affect birds and mammals, if it hasn’t already done so. Who knows? We’re lied to so much with scientific jargon relating to parts per million, trillion, and so goes the story of phthalates.

It takes me a long time to research scientific reports about industrial toxins because I have to look up every other word and then find out what the baseline is. Then I have to look at the industry that produces it and figure out how they are lying about it. It’s like every time I hear that water and air are so much cleaner than 30 years ago.  I want to scream. Thirty some years ago we were so awfully polluted, and I was here to see it, when beaches were closed not sporadically but regularly. Out of this pollution came the Clean Air and Water Acts where we began to clean up. So of course we’re cleaner than at our all time highest pollution levels. But how much cleaner? If we mean 2 parts per trillion less of any of a myriad of toxins in our air and water than in 1970, we can honestly make that claim, but it’s hardly ideal or healthy now is it?

So here we have an article that talks about birth defects from phthalates especially in male babies. One out of 300 baby boys, (scary numbers here) don’t have a urethra that emerges out of the tip of their penis. It ends up somewhere else underneath, midway down the shaft, or barely out of the scrotum. It’s called hypospadias and studies show that phthalates reproduce it in rodents. The article says, “Phthalates are used widely as softening agents in certain plastics,” PVC mostly, but also pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and all types of products. 

The article states that in 2005 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that “most Americans have traces of hormone-disrupting chemicals in their body.” Another advocacy group found “84 percent of American have at least six different phthalates in their urine.”  Scientists have been studying 3 of the most prevalent hormone disruptors that are also linked to “testicular cancer, reduced sperm quality, diminished penis size, and undescended testicles.” Told you it was a male nightmare.

Of course, and here is the lie, not everyone thinks the effects seen in animals justifies concern. Again, the excuse is that the doses the animals are given are higher than anything in humans. Risk to humans is minimal. Lives are weighed by parts per million/trillion. Nice, real nice. One in 300 babies has hypospadias, but nah, no big risk. That’s why many European countries have banned phthalates in certain toys. America is still in the consideration stage at this point; even though some companies stepped up to the plate and phthalate free products are showing up in stores. Now you know what that means.

I have to take the time here to point out one of my biggest complaints also. What’s the sense of experimenting on animals if someone ultimately uses the same tired excuse that it’s not the same for humans? It is why I am and have been adamantly against animal experimentation for a long time. It is an absolute myth that it is necessary. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, NEAVS, and many professionals have been testifying about it for years. We’re in the 21^st century now. There are superior methods. But research animals are a big racket and cheap. Don’t ever lose your cat or dog.

If you’re male and already in your 20’s or 30’s breathing a sigh of relief, think again. Or rather look to your hairline. As a licensed cosmetologist that had my own shop for almost 8 years, I paid close attention to the most successful products for baldness. Baldness is relative to some of the many hormones our body produces. An overabundance of a certain type chokes out the hair follicles. My husband’s father and grandfather on his mother’s side were bald, as were all of his uncles on both sides of the family. My husband is 55 with a full head of hair. Hmmm. Eating freshly cooked meals every night, not drinking tap water for almost 30 years, imbibing minimal pop or junk food, and growing our own fruits and vegetables is starting to really show results. It’s not just a cliché that we are what we eat, drink, and breathe. Believe it!

I’ve complained about an unscrupulous EPA before, showing that some of its exiting hierarchy was tied to the oil industry. I’ve also tried to get the point across that the Bush administration has dismantled the federal government in small increments handing out contracts to for-profit corporations to do the work our agencies used to do, while cutting the budget drastically in many departments across the board. Sound alright? A lot of people think so—less spending. But do we know who is doing the work instead, how the contract was awarded, who is responsible if something goes wrong, or how much the contractor was actually paid for the job?

Cuts are going to happen. We must pay for the war.  But we just don’t know all the things that have been cut, until it’s too late that is. Just last year around this time, the Bush administration planned to cut some $500 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and was met with fierce opposition in congress. The complaint was that it would shortchange vital environmental programs and was unacceptable. Do ya think?

Now it’s the FDA. The cover of the April 2008 Reader’s Digest asks “Can We Trust the FDA?—Must Read Special Report,” and reveals the Food and Drug Administration is in crisis. Most of the article is about the drugs we take, but the department is responsible for regulating $1.5 trillion in food, as well as, animal feeds and drugs. The article stated that insiders say, “it’s [FDA] woefully underfunded, dangerously understaffed and fractured by bitter internal tensions.” I immediately suspected feuding within the department exists because some people have ethics. In 2004, the FDA came under fire for silencing a staff scientist about antidepressants causing suicidal tendencies in teens. Ditto for the EPA, when scientists testified before congress last year that they were tired of being suppressed, and their findings/reports compromised.

The FDA receives only $2 billion in funding, which sounds like a lot but as the article says “is about what Fairfax County, Virginia, pays for its public schools.” It’s really frightening to read words like “chilling new report” in reference to the department in charge of our food and medicine. Worse yet the “chilling” report was commissioned by the FDA’s own advisory Science Board that also describes it as “nearly out of control.”

Congress has just begun to help shore up the FDA, increasing their funding by $145 million, but hey compared to billions, that’s a drop in the bucket. Of course about a quarter of that went to the drug review branch, another reason to read this story to see how much conflict of interest there is within the FDA relative to the drug industry. But special interests and conflict of interest on the food side of this equation cause an equal amount of damage. We start seeing problems like tainted food, beef, and chicken recalls, lax inspection of CAFO’s and runoff from them that may make its way into our tributaries, and of course really lax inspection of imported food. I watched a program where farm raised shrimp in an Asian country were swimming in polluted water with feces from farm animals. I check what I buy now. I steer clear of imports. I know the FDA isn’t checking.

The article said the public needs to weigh in. Weigh in? Scream for Pete’s sake. This is our bread, this is our health and it’s being handled shabbily. This type of decision-making and ethics is repetitive in the EPA, and more than likely throughout our federal agencies at this point. As I read the five key problems in this industry, they were similar to the EPA’s problems:

· The FDA suffers pressure from industry to speed decisions, and soft-pedal problems.
· Safety of New Drugs. Safety decisions are many times based on inefficient industry studies.
· Sloppy Record Keeping
· Conflicts of Interest
· Muzzled Experts

This list just about says it all doesn’t it? From the looks of things, we’re on our own.

Read the article: http://www.rd.com/national-interest/special-reports-and-surveys/problems-in-the-fda/article55513.html

There was more on the news today about water contamination in America on ABC news. It seems trace amounts of hormones, antibiotics, and antidepressants are turning up in fish everywhere. This time it was Lake Mead near Las Vegas. Our filtration methods seem to be failing more and more.

It’s been quite a few years since I first heard about genderless, or unisex fish in the waters of New York due to unusually high amounts of human waste in some areas due to poor filtration. I started wondering if that water would have the same gender/hormonal affects on humans eventually? We know that baldness is not just hereditary but also related to hormones, and that it is on the rise. Children are reaching puberty far too early. Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

The next time I heard about gender problems in fish, it was in the Potomac River as reported by Robin Roberts of Good Morning America. That was a year, or more ago. I reported not long ago the same contaminants,  hormones and antidepressants, were found in trace amounts in Lake Michigan. This is an obvious and growing problem—that’s been ignored.

I’ve harped over and over again about CAFO’s and their practice called nutrient loading. I can clearly see a link between nutrient loading and tainted crops. Nutrient loading is when the holding lagoons from farm animal excrement is blown all over the surrounding land as some sort of fertilizer. Read the article link below. It states that: “In several recent studies of soil fertilized with livestock manure or with the sludge product from wastewater treatment plants American scientists found earthworms had accumulated those same compounds [widely used antidepressants] while vegetables — including corn, lettuce and potatoes — had absorbed antibiotics. “These results raise potential human health concerns.” This really needs to change.

If drugs show up in crops from manure, why not e-coli from manure as fertilizer on lettuce and spinach? It’s a disgusting situation any way you look at it. I saw the pics of what happened when too much spring rain caused an overflow of those CAFO lagoons down south. It killed all the fish in the subsidiaries all the way to the ocean where more fish were instantly killed.

I remember all these reports.  It seems to be spreading.  Does anyone in charge, truly care about our freshwater?  We keep getting reports that our air, water, and foodstuff is getting increasingly better. Just go ahead and drink tap water, breathe the air from around coalburners, and eat whatever is served up.  We’re just asking for poor health by not being more involved and demanding in the way we want our basic air, food and water. We should really be questioning what’s happening. With all the recalls, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see something very wrong is most certainly happening. It’s not a natural phenomenon that’s happened before. It’s us. It’s not a stretch to think we’re causing global warming, the more we’re aware of the pollution we create by something as simple as flushing our pills.  

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=4422001

I blogged about the Farm Bill and the changes that are needed if we are ever going to get healthy and get the nation turned around so that the small farmer thrives once again. Not going to happen. The November 12th, 2007 issue of Time Magazine had a scathing article by Michael Grunwald called “Down on the Farm” about the farm lobby and the lopsided business of farm subsidies. The article is too long to outline here. But our future for free range chicken, pork, or beef, more fruits and vegetables, and less tainted meat and food supplies in general instead of the top five commodities—corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice is mighty bleak.

The article warns if you “eat, drink, or pay taxes—or care about the economy, the environment, or our global reputation” the Farm Bill is a big deal. We still subsidize farmers billions of tax dollars every year. The trouble is that it is redistributed to millionaire farmers mostly when 60% of small farmers get no subsidies at all. Some of the subsidies even go to farms that are no longer in business!

Besides wasting billions of our money by staying status quo and helping the rich, the way our Farm Bill is laid out:

It contributes to our obesity, and illegal-immigration epidemics and to our water and energy shortages. It helps degrade rivers, deplete aquifers, elimiate grasslands, concentrate food-processing conglomerates and inundate our fast food nation with high-fructose corn syrup. Our farm policy is supposed to save small farmers and small towns. Instead it fuels the expansion of industrial megafarms and the depopulation of rural America. It hurts Third World farmers, violates international trade deals and paralyzes our efforts to open foreign markets to the non-agricultural goods and services that make up the remaining 99% of our economy.

And this description is in the first column of a long article on just how construed our Farm Bill really is. Small farmers get next to nothing in help, and are forced out. This says much about our free market system that conservatives like to tout causes competition and keeps everyone in check. Baloney. I’ve been screaming that there is no such thing as a free market system in America any longer as long as we have lobbies and big interest groups throwing millions at Congress. Again, the wealthy rule and find all sorts of loopholes to get rid of the little guy. Some free market system!

For you and me, that means we will continue to be force-fed high fructose corn syrup in everything we eat. Type II Diabetes will continue to rise. The organic industry will continue to struggle. If you’ve ever complained about the high prices of organic, now you know why. The big guys producing the top 5 crops don’t want you buying that stuff. And you won’t at $1.00 per apple. I’ve walked into the organic section of my store more than once with determination to buy what I know is better for me. The prices drive me out. I look for sales instead and go home with half of what I planned on. Example: If you want to buy cranberry juice, and I mean real cranberry juice, no other fruit juices in it, no corn syrup, no additives, full strength, not from concentrate it’s over $7.00 for 32 oz. Thank the big megafarms and our Farm Bill for that. Or then again thank Nancy Pelosi. As a matter of fact, read the article, then contact Pelosi and tell her what you think of her accommodating the same ole farm lobby once again.

Thank goodness I have fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and know how to do good old-fashioned canning. But if our weird weather keeps up, I won’t be able to do that. If we have a water shortage and hot searing sun, I won’t be able to water like it’s needed. I lost most of my fruits this past season when the trees were in bloom and we had a freeze. By fall, the very few small apples I had also had a black, oily residue all over the skins. We’ve yet to determine what it is and where it came from. I’m leaning toward jet fuel and just peeling the skins before I eat the stuff. This is going to get about survival. People who only buy from major stores, who don’t eat healthy anyway aren’t going to notice until it gets really bad. But for people who are health conscious, and raise the things they plan to eat, much like the small, unsubsidized farmer, we know what can happen, and happen fast in a bad way.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1680139,00.html.

http://www.house.gov/pelosi/contact/contact.html.
 

Whether or not cloned meat is safe is not an issue. It’s not a good idea based on what the meatpacking business does with real animals on industrialized farms and CAFO’s, the fact that Americans disregarded health warnings and boosted our obesity quotient some 30% last year, and our propensity to waste half of our food supply to begin with. Do we really need to clone animals for food?

It’s highly doubtful looking at these pictures of dead hogs stacked sky high that lived from birth to death confined in a box, chewing on metal bars out of distress, then died for no good purpose whatsoever:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters.

As you look at this stack of pigs, remember that science has declared them to be highly intelligent animals. If we do this to regular farm animals, what will we do with clones? Our cruelty quotient will go up and it’s not all that good now. We turn our heads to all types of cruelty already.

We don’t need to fuel obesity either. Type II diabetes is on the rise and linked with obesity from pounding down too many burgers, 20 oz. steaks, and slabs of ribs. Producing more food from cloned animals is contrary because we’re already stuffed on only half of what we produce. The average family throws away 14% of all their food. If beer and pop counts, I’m surprised it’s not higher. Rounding up cans and bottles from party aftermath is a little unnerving. There are always a bunch of them half empty and a few completely full.

So the push for cloning for more food doesn’t make sense, but the push for cloned animals for research does. We’ll be off and running in that direction all too quickly and with little recourse because we didn’t protest cloning animals for food in the first place. The FDA stated they wanted to get public opinion about cloned animals for food. So let them know.

When we think of the Olympics, we think about human beings exerting their best performance humanly possible in a given sport. In order for the athletes to perform to their best ability, their bodies must be at their strongest, and therefore, healthiest. The two things just go together. So is China a healthy example to be holding the Olympics in Beijing? China likes to put on a facade. They like to present themselves as strong, modern, but it’s the same old communist regime. The change in China’s behavior toward the environment has shown no significant improvement despite the environmentalists that were displayed in a documentary I watched. 

The documentary was 90 minutes of eye-opener. China’s lakes, streams, and rivers are all polluted. The air quality is so poor, some Chinese wear facemasks on the streets. The Chinese have stripped the land bare of trees in many places, so the ground is scorching at a faster rate. The Gobi desert is 100 miles outside the city of Beijing and encroaching.  Beijing is the 16^th most polluted city on earth, city not country. To rank 16^th among that many cities is bad. I’m curious. Who is number one?

CNN reported last night that China is having a heck of a time cleaning up for the Olympics. The outdoor arena where some of the events take place has very poor air quality. Some of the worst air in the city is nearby. According to the World Bank 400,000 people die each year because of the air. The bad air near where the athletes will compete may cause some of the events to be canceled because of poor air quality. There is fear that so many steroids in the food may trigger poor responses for athletes and drug testing. Everyone going to China is warned not to drink the tap water.

China is hardly the model of health and purity, which is a significant part of any athlete’s regime. It is a communist regime that has also decimated a peaceful Tibet, advanced on Taiwan again, exported food and merchandise that is harmful to human beings, and warned us more than a few times “Do not interfere.” The latest warning over not accepting their exported goods is to ruin us economically. They hold $407 billion in U.S. bonds and threaten to dump them if we stop importing their stuff. Isn’t that extortion? We should never have become indebted to a communist regime country. There are over a billion Chinese people. They are dying from their environment. How long will they stay in place? Think about it. If you’re forced to move somewhere, and someone owes you big time, of course you’re  moving near that someone, or in on that someone.  

All the ruckus over Chinese imports, especially food, may have caused many of our own food producers to rush to change their packaging to assure the American public that American food is fine. I got a kick out of the packaging on some popular American brands of chicken at the grocery store today. They assure 100% chicken with no antibiotics or additives in big bold letters on the packaging.

Does that mean there were antibiotics and additives in their before? Or is our food industry worried that now that we’re nosey and picky about imports we might be looking over everything with a discerning eye. Like I said, I’ve quit eating pigs and cows until they roam the farm or range as free spirits again, er um, if we have any ranges left. Eleven states are burning now. Up two more states since the last time I blogged about fires.

But chicken and turkey what about them? I’ll tell you, they live horribly in deplorable conditions until they are killed and brought to the store all packaged up with labels assuring us they are without antibiotics or additives. No antibiotics in the conditions I’m going to explain is a little frightening quite frankly. A good dose might go a long way to staving off what might be ailing the poultry we eat after they live their short lives in hell.

Here’s a little excerpt and the website where a lone writer ventured to see for himself what a typical industrial sized chicken farm is like. Brace yourself. It’s not all that much better than the Smithfield Foods expose another reporter from Rolling Stone researched that I blogged about as ” Pig Poo Who Knew?” Michael Specter of the New Yorker said:

‘I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe…. There must have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way.’

Lovely huh? I have to thank China for bringing curiosity about the food we eat to millions of Americans—finally.  Pay attention. Boycott if you feel the need. It would go a long way as a wake up call to the meat packing business in this country. I’ve pretty much gone vegetarian and it doesn’t bother me a bit. My grocery bill is cheaper too. And whenever there is a recall on any meat, I don’t have to sweat. I don’t eat any of it.
 
The FDA only has the capacity to inspect 1% of all our imports. And their funding has been cut, the war you know. So where does that leave them with our food? Specter reported about 30,000 chickens in one spot. You honestly think we have enough FDA to inspect all our farms and do it well?
 
We need some big reforms in this country. Chinese tainted food imports are just the start. The last largest 3 recalls were all home produced meat folks, not imports. Get informed. Contact your reps. Some things gotta change. Myself, I’m having Morning Star Farms Prime Grillers for burgers these days. They’re tasty, and it didn’t require that a living thing suffer in hell before the slaughter. Until chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows are allowed a normal life on a farm again where they have a pen, a pasture, are allowed to bear young in livable conditions, and eat normal food, they won’t be on my plate. For more info on chicken farming: http://www.chickenindustry.com/. 

“Fast Food Nation” may not be a Michael Moore documentary, but it is a movie about some timely topics like why more and more of our food is showing up tainted with E Coli. It covers quite a few subjects, many of which I’ve already written about. I witnessed a lot of true facts in this star studded movie about eminent domain, migrant workers, industrialized farms, and greed in exchange for our healthy food supply. Oh, and yes a lot of mention about the machine that’s at work in this current, less than ethical, administration of ours that is at the core of much that is wrong today.

 Watch it. It is poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes disgusting, but done well and worth seeing. For a public that’s always whining about not getting the truth, this is in your face with it. Just be prepared.

So there is a beef and seafood recall in Michigan and everyone is up in arms about imported food from China. Their catfish is full of antibiotics. This is laughable because ours is full of PCB’s from its food source. That was on the news years ago. I know. I love farm raised catfish and remember well my options: farm raised equal PCB’s, ocean caught equals mercury. Now I have a third choice. With China’s catfish I get antibiotics. I guess our concern is what quantity of harmful substance is in our food. Is this not a pitiful situation? It never occurs to anyone that these things shouldn’t be there at all? I’m waiting for a national expose on our industrialized farms. I feel like a hypocrite so many times when I watch the media get in a dither over substandard imports while ignoring our own shortcomings. We’re throwing stones a lot lately.

As far as China’s use of antibiotics, our industrial farm raised meat is full of it along with hormones. You don’t honestly think a baby cow or pig ripped from their mother as soon as possible and confined for the rest of their life in a bin where they can’t turn around or scratch themselves, while standing above fumes from the cesspools below where all the droppings, afterbirth, babies that have fallen through the slats, and pesticides that have doused the animals are drawn upward by large exhaust fans, isn’t sick? Heck, they are traumatized and many are barely alive before they become our food. They have to be shot up with antibiotics in this environment. And we think Korean’s are barbaric for traumatizing dogs as meat before eating them. We do it all the time.

Our poor food animals chew on the metal of their bins out of frustration. This is a hell we allow animals to live in; the same lovely farmyard animals we like to introduce our kids to on petting farms. If those kids only knew the hell sweet little “Charlotte the Pig” endured before being slaughtered … This is not right. It’s very hypocritical especially when on the other end of the media it’s been reported that pigs are up on the intelligence scale with dolphins and elephants. They are beyond the intelligence of the Korean dog evidently but are next weeks sickly pork chops anyway. But then again we shouldn’t expect much, we don’t treat each other well either, another whole spectrum of hypocrisy.

If you think, I’ll just eat chicken and turkey; think again. Poultry doesn’t fare any better. Many birds are crammed into one little cage, where they can’t stand or spread their wings, and peck each other horribly out of sheer frustration. The cages above pollute the cages below. The visions we have of farms where animals are in a yard, a pen, or pasture to roam have all but disappeared. The petting farm is a facade of what America’s farms used to be. It will take a monumental movement by people to stop the way our food is raised or should I say tortured to death. Industrialized farming is so wide spread the idea of reversing it is daunting. We’ve used up quite a lot of farmland at a rapid rate with urban sprawl and congress of late has decided bio fuel should be the front-runner for alternatives to gasoline. So available land will go to corn and we will deal with imports.

Pay attention to the new Farm Bill. Call our congress people often. The movement for change must start somewhere. Congress is presently involved with this bill so it will be a timely e-mail or phone call if you do so now. Act out, for a change or nothing will improve. The farming conditions we have in this country are deplorable, immoral against living things, harmful to our environment and us, and shameful for this nation. 

I got a kick out of the controversy over cloned food that made the news this morning. The FDA is ready to make a new ruling. They say meat and milk from cloned animals is as safe as any other meat. More than likely, our other meat is pumped with hormones. Our other meat is fed food that is filled with additives and fertilized with the hormonal animal manure, blood, and bacteria. Our other meat is doused with pesticides while breathing the fumes from the cesspools below them.  Our other meat is sickly and then pumped with drugs to keep alive. Where is the Center for Food Safety for these conditions? They are voicing their concern over cloned meat.

So to say cloned animals are as safe as any other meat is not saying much at all. I wonder if some of the medical conditions we suffer are from eating meat like this? Kids suffer Attention Deficit Disorder. Adults suffer ADD also. There are conditions out there that go undiagnosed after years of tests. Autism is growing. Girls reach puberty earlier. Boys go bald sooner.

We need to pay attention to our food industry. We’ve had a preview of tainted food already. Not a terrorist to blame but ourselves. We’ve allowed industrialized farming and they are terrorists of a different sort according to the small farmers they’ve put out of business.  And we’re worried about cloned animals? I suggest if we take up the fight against cloned animal meat do it also to discontinue industrialized farming. Read my “Pig Poo” blog. The future of our food and freshwater depend on our petitioning our representatives to stop monopolies like Smithfield Foods and other industrialized farmers.

45% of Americans polled thought cloning animals is morally wrong. Industrialized farming is the most immoral act I’ve read about yet. The pollution from them is overwhelming. The animals live a life of hell. They are literally traumatized from birth to slaughter. And this is on the heels of science that declares pigs have a high degree of intelligence. Oh how I loved pork. I don’t eat it anymore. Red meat is an occasional treat.

You might say animals have always been foodstuff. The act of slaughter is not pretty. But I like to think we at least allowed the animal to have a life first, grazing, and procreating. It’s called kosher.  A decree by God for his animals. They are to be treated with care and decency. The slaughter should be clean and swift. Our idea of morality and the animal kingdom is like the fickle finger of fate that points and misses more than not. We’re concerned about cloned animals while the suffering of those given us by God goes ignored.

The next time you receive “junk mail” that is from Farm Sanctuary, or a Farm Animal charity, read it. They exist for a purpose. We not only need to watch how much we eat for our health, but what that food went through to get on our plate.