Halo Foods: What Healthy-Sounding Buzz Words Actually Mean--And That They Don’t

Halo Foods: What Healthy-Sounding Buzz Words Actually Mean--And That They Don’t

By Kurtis Bright

Watching Out For Tricky Labels That Make Food Sound Healthy, And What They Really Mean

In these weird times when White House officials identify what has hitherto been known as “utter bullshit” by the much nicer but less descriptive moniker “alternative facts,” and when everyone has their own definition of the phrase “fake news” (generally this seems to mean "anything I disagree with") perhaps it is time to identify some ongoing cases of alternative facts when it comes to food labeling.

There are a number of terms manufacturers employ in order to create a health “halo effect” and fool unsuspecting--and let’s face it, naïve--consumers into thinking they are actually eating healthy.

Of course, there is sometimes truth in labeling, but in these times, it is more often a cruel sham. For example, the Senate bill known as the DARK Act by opponents (Denying Americans the Right to Know) that was hastily cobbled together as a fig leaf for big food manufacturers and agrichem businesses that think they should be able to sell the public foods that contain GMOs without telling us, despite the clear evidence that we don’t want them.

It is a bill that allows food manufacturers to “identify” GMO-containing foods by forcing consumers to scan a QR code, visit a website, or call a 1-800 number to find out what’s inside--all this runaround in order to avoid simply putting a label on the package identifying it as something that contains GMOs--again, because consumers don’t want them and the carcinogenic chemicals such crops contain, and to manufacturers, our lack of desire for their products should be no barrier to their ability to sell them.

So with an understanding of the depth of bullshit the food industry will sink to in order to sell us their shitty, unhealthy products that we don't want, here are a few other alternatively factual ways food manufacturers try to con health-conscious consumers.

• Natural - When I see this word I think of John Denver, playing guitar in a Colorado mountain meadow, sunshine streaming down on the golden grasses blowing gently in the wind. Maybe that’s a bit over the top, but at the very least most of us would probably assume that foods that have this word on their label would have some relation to foods that are, well, natural--that is to say, not synthesized in a lab. The sad truth is that the Food and Drug Administration is as culpable for allowing the level of bullshit that food manufacturers favor: the word “natural” has no formal definition for the FDA. So it can mean whatever manufacturers want it to mean. In other words, don’t stop reading when you hit the word natural. Be sure to read the fine print, keeping an eye out for things like high-fructose corn syrup and other added sugars, as well as chemical preservatives.
• Organic - Yet another term that on the face of it might appear to be pretty self-explanatory. However, big food equals big money, and manufacturers and their marketers are nothing if not wily creatures--and their pet politicians who make the rules for consumers are nothing if not greedy. So let’s start with the clear-cut: the USDA organic seal signifies that the food in question was produced without using synthetic pesticides, GMOs, petroleum or sewage sludge fertilizers. When it comes to dairy or meat products, it means that the animals in question were fed organic, vegetarian feed and had “access to the outdoors.” (This phrase is especially interesting: for example a tiny one-foot by one-foot doorway for tens of thousands of chickens leading to a three-foot square concrete pad located at one end of a massive factory farming facility qualifies under the USDA definition.)
  However as we’ve seen with other examples of truth-challenged claims, the devil is in the details. The USDA organic definition only applies to foods labeled “100% Organic.” So if a food label says merely “Organic,” it only needs to contain 95 percent organic ingredients. And “Made With Organic Ingredients” means only 70 percent needs to be organic. But hey, what’s five or 30 percent ingredients grown using glyphosate or human waste among friends, right? "Alternative organic,” that’s what.
• Local - Once again, we see a seemingly straightforward word that has no actual definition from the FDA. Indeed, adding to the deliberate confusion sown by food manufacturers with the aid of the FDA, a recent survey showed that 23 percent of respondents thought that local also meant “organic.” It does not, not even by the weak-ass USDA definition outlined above. Keep in mind too that mom and pop operations such as you might find at farmer’s markets employing a “local” label are often legally able to skirt nutrition facts labeling, so be sure to ask for ingredients when buying jam or pie is unlabeled.
• Gluten-free - Oh, the popular label du jour for faux-health-conscious hipsters in need of some attention. What with consumers mistakenly thinking that cutting out gluten alone will help them lose weight and get a ripped body just like their favorite TV or movie star, gluten-free nonsense probably still hasn’t peaked. One positive: the FDA actually has a definition for this. Products must have a limit of gluten that is less than 20 parts per million. However, this doesn’t meant that a gluten-free label indicates a bullshit-free label. They also may label a whole raft of foods as gluten-free even if they don’t and never have contained any type of wheat, rye, barley or crossbreeds of these grains. That’s why we see ridiculously absurd things like gluten-free tonic water and gluten-free shampoo. Aside from the less than one percent of people who actually suffer from Celiac disease, this label is expressly designed for people with too much money and too little sense.
• Grass-fed - Yet another deliberately obtuse label designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten. The “grass-fed” label is often taken to mean organic, though it does not. What it does mean is that the cattle whose meat is so labeled were fed only mother’s milk and forage. However, the cattle’s feed has no requirement to be organic, nor does it mean that the animal is free from antibiotics or hormones.

So good luck avoiding stepping in the fully organic bullshit that seems to be everywhere these days! Hope this helps.

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Poisonous Fields Forever: Why You Should Always Buy Organic When It Comes To This Fruit

Poisonous Fields Forever: Why You Should Always Buy Organic When It Comes To This Fruit

By Kurtis Bright

Delicious But Deadly, This Fruit Is Almost Certainly Loaded With Deadly Chemicals

With each passing day it becomes ever more clear that the agencies purportedly regulating the food market are firmly in the pocket of Big Agriculture. Neither lawsuits, pleading, marches, nor any other kind of citizen action is going to make them pull their heads out of the toxic sand and actually do the job of protecting consumers from dangerous chemicals.

However, the flipside of this is that more and more people are coming to realize that we’re essentially all alone out there when it comes to making healthy decisions on the food we eat and provide for our families. You just cannot trust what they tell you anymore, it’s as simple as that.

And if you look at this the right way, there is a certain freedom in being on your own when it comes to making healthy food choices--more on that later.

One prominent case in point illustrating the utter failure of the regulators to regulate the poisons that go into our food comes in the form of one of Americans’ favorite fruits, the humble strawberry. Recently a loophole was pried open--following several intense rounds of lobbying by the Dow Chemical corporation--allowing California strawberry growers to double the amount of cancer-causing pesticide Telone they may legally spray on their fields.

You may think, so what? What difference can one more chemical make in a land that is already awash in them?

The thing about strawberries is, much like certain recently elected neo-politicians, they are notoriously thin-skinned.

Which is to say that strawberries literally have a very thin outer covering. What this means in terms of your health is that anything they are sprayed with is almost impossible to wash off. In fact, they actually absorb the chemicals with which they are treated, so no amount of washing can make a chemically-treated strawberry clean.

And here’s another fun fact, but one most of us already realize about strawberries: they are delicious. The consequence of this is that not only do humans love to spend time in strawberry fields nibbling on them, so do bugs of all kinds--not only Beatles.

(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

So strawberry producers who use conventional growing methods--which means heavy, multiple treatments with harsh and toxic chemicals--are among the worst for chemical contamination of their product.

And strawberry manufacturers not only douse their fields before planting--using gasses that were developed for chemical warfare but have since been banned from combat (pity the soldiers that eat strawberries; there’s no Geneva Convention protecting them against U.S. agriculture). They use up to 60 different kinds of pesticides on their crops.

One USDA study in 2014 found that 98 percent of all strawberries sampled came back with pesticide residues, and 40 percent of them had residues resulting from 10 or more pesticides. So keep in mind, if you buy non-organic strawberries, here’s what you are getting as a garnish:

• Carbendazim - This fungicide disrupts the male reproductive system and was found on 30 percent of the strawberry samples tested in the aforementioned USDA study. Banned in the E.U.
• Bifenthrin - 40 percent of the samples tested turned out to have traces of this chemical, which is identified in California as a possible carcinogen.
• Malathion - Most of us have probably heard of this neurotoxin and probable human carcinogen, which is used to kill mosquitoes. However it is especially dangerous to humans because when it breaks down into its core components it becomes malaoxon, an even more toxic chemical.

The real takeaway here should be an awareness that any and all of these chemicals are going to be on--and importantly, in--your strawberries. It doesn’t matter how well you scrub and soak and clean them: if you buy conventionally-grown strawberries they will have absorbed some or all of these deadly toxins.

The pain of paying through the nose for organic foods is real, especially in the deadly stagnant economy the neoliberal elites have seen fit to impose on us in order to the stock market and unemployment high and job security low, thus protecting their own fortunes. And in all honesty there are some foods you can take a chance on buying non-organic, thick-skinned fruit and veg like bananas, pineapples and avocados.

But non-organic strawberries--at least those grown in the U.S.--simply aren’t safe.

But don’t expect any agency to tell you that--in this age of misinformation serving money uber alles, we have no one to watch out for us except ourselves.

We are truly on our own.

But while this might sound like a rather doom-filled concept on the face of it, it doesn’t have to be disheartening.

There is something compellingly liberating, something that feels like a weight being taken off your chest about finally, once and for all understanding that there is no one looking out for you, at least not in the halls of government. When we finally realize we can no longer rely on our elites to defend our interests, and that we must fend for ourselves, we become truly free.
 
But just because the government has been fully assimilated by the businesses it is supposed to regulate doesn't mean you are alone. There are resources out there for finding out the truth about the unhealthy foods Big Ag is trying to foist off on us. There are communities of like-minded people to be found on the internet and in real life, places to commiserate, trade recipes and tips, and gain support. There are tons of resources on how to start your own organic garden.

But what we must realize is that we can no longer trust the food that corporations--with the assistance of complicit, compromised government regulators--want to sell us.

The moment you fully understand you are truly alone is the moment you become free.

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Cancer Hiding In Your Kitchen: Avoid These Foods At All Cost

Cancer Hiding In Your Kitchen: Avoid These Foods At All Cost

By Kurtis Bright

How These Foods Hide Their True, Cancer-Causing Nature

 

As more and more information about how the powers-that-be really operate comes to light, more people are beginning to suspect that maybe they don’t have our best health interests at heart. Forget about politics--look at the ongoing fights against Monsanto, Big Pharma, Big Soda, Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and more.

Do you ever wonder why we are paying billions of dollars to government regulators who are supposed to protect us from these entities when they threaten our health? It’s almost like their jobs aren’t to protect the public, but rather to protect businesses, even as they poison us and the environment.

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up to the fact that we are going to have to be responsible for watching out for our own health.

What this means in practical terms is that we are going to have to do our own research and make our own choices--for instance, when it comes to shopping for food--while taking what labels tell us with a giant grain of salt. These days it has become all too apparent that just because something is on the shelf of your local supermarket that doesn’t mean it is safe for human consumption. The corruption of the USDA, the FDA, Congress and other regulators is without end, as proven over and over again as in the Vermont GMO labeling battle.

Having said that, here are a few foods that have been proven carcinogenic--and yet are still widely available on store shelves--foods you may not typically think of as unhealthy.

• Microwave popcorn - The fact that this product is still available with no warning label or media campaign against it is downright criminal. Those convenient bags that cause your microwave popcorn to pop so quickly and evenly are lined with perfluoroctanoic acid, a toxin found in Teflon and which has been linked to infertility along with a cornucopia of cancers, including bladder, kidney, liver, pancreas and testicular cancer. Also, let’s not forget that the popcorn itself is rife with chemicals and likely contains GMOs, for instance soybean oil.
• Canned tomatoes - Tomatoes and the lycopene they contain in particular are good for the prostate and other health functions, so it is easy to understand how a person might want to take advantage of a quick and convenient option for getting a dose of tomato goodness. However, the sad truth is that canned tomatoes--along with almost every other canned fruit and vegetable--comes in cans that are lined with bisphenol A, aka BPA, a chemical that has been linked to endocrine problems as well as cancer. This is a serious enough issue that the use of the chemical has been discontinued in children’s items. But for industry-friendly regulators, the health of adults--and any children who are fed canned veggies and fruits, it should be noted--allowing its continued use in all manner of plastics and other consumer items that come in contact with food is A-ok. The problem with tomatoes in particular is that, in coming into contact with BPAs, their natural acidity causes the chemicals to leach out into the food.
• Processed meats - Sorry, lovers of meats like prosciutto, cacpicola, salami or even plain old hot dogs: these highly processed foods are likely to contain sodium nitrates, which have been shown to be cancer-causing in rat studies, increasing the chances of early death by 44 percent. Do keep in mind also that even unprocessed red meat causes you to run a risk: a recent bombshell of a study showed that red meat actually causes a toxic, allergic reaction in humans eliciting an immune response, one that may be the precursor of cancer among red meat eaters.

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