Top Ten ways Corporate Food is Making us Fat and threatening our Food Supplies

Here are the top ten disturbing news stories about our food that have come across my screen in recent days, and which inspire a certain amount of alarm in me.
1. Sugary, i.e. non-diet soft drinks make you fat, especially if you are genetically at greater risk of being fat. According to a study about to appear in the New England Journal of Medicine, teens who had genes that disposed them to put on weight easily were twice as likely to be obese if they drank a lot of soda pop. Pre-modern human beings who lived in conditions of food scarcity probably tried to bulk up when they saw a drought becoming prolonged, and there would have been a survival advantage to being able to put on weight quickly when you were trying. So likely those teens’ bodies thought all the sugar they were being fed was a sign of famine coming, and obliged by storing a lot of fat to get through it. For a certain percentage of the population, extra calories are actually subject to a multiplier effect inside their own bodies. (It can even happen to Lady Gaga.)
Soft drinks have like 160- 180 calories per can and nobody can afford all that in their diet even once daily.
In other words, not only is Mayor Bloomberg’s policy of banning supersized soft drinks in New York justified, actually people should just never drink sugary soft drinks.
2. Here’s the kicker. It isn’t just the sugar that puts some people at risk of obesity. It is bisphenol A or BPA, a chemical used to coat the aluminum cans in which soft drinks come (as well as soup and other cans) so as to prevent them from rusting. A recent study in JAMA found that the one fourth of the thousands of children and adolescents in their study that had the most BPA in their urine were twice as likely to be obese as those in the one fourth that had the least BPA. So I guess if they were drinking sugary sodas out of cans, they were really doomed to be obese. BPA has been implicated in other studies in “diabetes, cardiovascular disease, reproductive disorders, and obesity in adults.”
Think you can get away from BPA by avoiding cans and going to plastic bottles instead? Think again. It is widely used in the making of clear plastics, and there is evidence that it seeps into us from them.
Glass is better.
When exactly will the US government have enough evidence to ban BPA? When we’re all 400 pounds?
3. The Consumer Union has found concerning levels of arsenic in American-grown rice. Apparently much rice in the US is grown in the Southwest and West on land that used to be used for cotton, on which arsenic-laden pesticides were used for decades. Arsenic can cause cancer. Me, I never like to hear the phrases “arsenic” and “in your food” in the same sentence.
4. Over-use of antibiotics may be making us fat. There is now scientific evidence that the antibiotics activate bacteria that are good at turning carbohydrates into fat. That is, the Atkins and Manhattan diets may work mainly because a lot of people’s gut microbe population had already been messed with by the antibiotics. People are always trying to get antibiotics for their children with viruses, which can’t anyway be treated that way. Ironically, they may not only be giving them medicine inappropriate to their malady but may be priming them for diabetes and heart disease later in life.
5. Speaking of antibiotics, 150 scientists and physicians are calling for the end of non-medical antibiotics being routinely administered to livestock All that is happening is that we are evolving bacteria to be resistant to antibiotics, and are already killing 100,000 Americans a year that way (more than die of AIDS). This baneful practice, they warn, has to stop.
6. Genetically modified corn, treated with the pesticide Roundup, were found by a French team of scientists to cause more frequent and more rapidly growing tumors in rats than ordinary corn. The study has been criticized and it is based on a small N. But, I’ll tell you what. Let us decide. Could we please have the genetically modified vegetables marked as such, Congress? I know we ordinary folk don’t pay you the way the corporations pay you, but you are supposed to be representing us lab rats too.
7. The global collapse of bee colonies, a severe threat to the world food supply, according to three new studies, is likely being in some part caused by a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. France and Germany have already banned them. But Corporatocracy America has not. Are there other factors involved in the great bee die-off? Sure, but why not remove a major factor when we can? Oh, and by the way, see 4 above, because another cause may be genetically modified plants that have absorbed pesticides into their genetic structure.
8. It is not just what corporations put in our food. It is also how they produce it that endangers us. Industrialized, often state-subsidized fishing is rapidly depleting world fish stocks. I’ve heard David Suzuki worry that half of all marine species could be extinct in 50 years at this rate, between overfishing and ocean acidification (caused by all the extra carbon we are pumping into the air at the Koch brothers’ behest).
9. Blooms and dead zones in coastal waters from the run-off from corporate farming of massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are threatening the health of our seas.
10. 40% of US corn production goes to making ethanol, and at a time of drought and high food prices, this policy is indefensible. The US has to relax the laws mandating ethanol. Although ethanol claims to be carbon-neutral because the corn takes carbon dioxide out of the air when it is growing, processing it into ethanol releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Moreover the policy of burning it in cars is apparently on the verge of causing malnutrition.

Drinking tea may help prevent chronic illnesses

Research has long shown the antioxidant properties and health benefits of drinking tea, but new findings suggest that tea may also have significant preventative properties against chronic disease.

Recent findings were discussed Wednesday at the Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health in Washington, D.C.

"If there's anything that can confidently be communicated to the public, it's the ability of tea to be associated and demonstrated in the primary prevention of chronic disease," says meeting chair Jeffrey Blumberg, a professor in Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Boston.

One of those is osteoporosis, the "brittle bone" disease. Green tea in particular may help reduce the risk for fractures and improve bone mass, a leading health concern as people age, suggests a study by researchers at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. "Osteoporosis is a non-curable disease and prevention is key," said Chwan-Li "Leslie" Shen, associate professor of pathology.

In a six-month trial of 171 postmenopausal women with low bone mass, researchers found participants had improvements in bone formation by consuming 500 mg of green tea polyphenol capsules a day, the equivalent of four to six cups of tea, alone or in conjunction with practicing tai chi. Tai chi is a gentle form of exercise based on Chinese martial arts.

Green tea promoted bone remodeling within three months of consumption and reduced oxidative stress damage, Shen said. "Bone loss can be slowed. You can slow the progression. You can delay the onset of osteoporosis."

Among other preventative properties of tea reported were in the area of cardiovascular health. A small study of 19 people with hypertension and 19 people without found that drinking just one cup of black tea before consuming a high-fat meal supported healthy arterial function and prevented negative effects on blood pressure.

"It is evident that the ingestion of black tea may be able to induce a protective effect by not only reducing blood pressure but also reducing the negative action of the fat load on the arteries," said researcher Claudio Ferri, director of Internal Medicine at the University L'Aquila, Italy. Flavonoids, which induce dilation of the arteries, are the most important component in tea, Ferri said. Consumption of black tea could lead to a reduction in strokes, heart attacks and cardiovascular diseases, he said.

"If we were able to reduce blood pressure just slightly and shift the entire population to a lower blood pressure, that has a significant public health impact in terms of reduced numbers of (people with) hypertension and of course the consequences for cardiovascular disease. Small, modest, long-term benefits on blood pressure can be quite important on the public health point of view," Blumberg said.

Additional findings were also presented, building on previous studies:

-- Consumption of green tea and caffeine can help burn up to 100 more calories a day, through increased energy expenditure and fat oxidation, according to researchers at Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

-- Tea drinkers experienced better task performance and alertness in a placebo-controlled study conducted by Unilever R&D, Vlaardingen, the Netherlands.

-- Flavonoids in green and black tea can provide a probiotic effect in the lower gastrointestinal tract, according to Alan Crozier, professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Tea's polyphenols, natural plant compounds, and flavonoids, compounds in plant-based foods, are full of health benefits, Blumberg said.

"There are a lot of flavonoids in fruits and vegetables. Many people aren't getting as many flavonoids as they need to. Another way to get them is tea."

"If you don't drink tea," Blumberg said, "you should start. It's really delicious. It's convenient. ... It has zero calories."