Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Why Put Drugs in Animal Feed?

With todays headline news reading "Dispute over drug in feed limiting US meat exports", you might ask then why put drugs in animal feed at all?

The correct answer is you should never have to, that is if you free graze your livestock allowing them to do as they would in nature. Unfortunately that is not the case for nearly all of the meat raised and sold in and by this country (pork, chicken, turkey, beef). Instead these animals, once brought to feedlots, live out the remainder of their short inhuman existence standing in piles of their own excrement as well as the mangled bodies of their short lived brethren, where they receive their daily unhealthy and most unnatural rations of grains and ground up animal parts.

So when you look the amount of money and time that is being carelessly and corruptly vested (wasted) in incorrectly running our countries food industry (factory farming), you can then see that the answer to why drugs are put into animal feed clearly becomes 'out of necessity!' If you are going to poison an animal with an unnatural and unhealthy diet as well as an unhealthy and unsanitary living environment, then you have no choice but to load them up with countless different pharmaceuticals just to keep them alive long enough to slaughter...

Support local Farming NOT Pharming!
Choose locally raised grass-fed meats!
Live Happy and Healthy!

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

A Gut Check

If inflammation is the root of all evil (disease in all its forms) then the gut is the body's first, last, and only line of defense.

The term "gut" typically refers to the digestive track; stomach, intestines, etc. But the gut is far more than a group of organs working together, in fact the gut is a hotbed teaming with life. Home to hundreds of trillions of microorganisms (healthy bacteria), it's symbiosis at its best. But like any symbiotic relationship both sides have to be in perfect harmony with each other at all times. With each side totally dependent on each other, it is a powerful yet delicate balance that must be maintained. The beauty of this sort of relationship though is that each side benefits from the others existence. We provide a home (the gut) for the bacteria to flourish and in return they make digestion (life) possible, and without proper digestion we cannot survive. If we cannot breakdown our food properly we not only deprive our bodies of the key nutrients required for life, we damage our intestines compromising our immune systems. And a compromised immune system (gut) is a perfect environment for inflammation (disease) to thrive.

Back before agriculture reared its ugly head we were healthy hunter gatherers. Our diets were pure, free of all disease causing foods; refined sugars, refined flowers, processed foods, and grains in all their forms. Our digestive tract maintained that perfect pH balance that makes for a hospitable environment for our symbiont (intestinal flora). This of course all changed about 10 thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture, and from then on our loyal symbiont has been getting the short end of the stick. We poison ourselves daily with diets high in processed foods, refined sugars and flowers, and so many grains (whole grains, breads, pastas, cereals, cookies, cakes...) that our guts normal bacteria friendly environment becomes an unbalanced inflamed mess.

But the rise of agriculture and decline of our health wasn't an instantaneous event. In its infancy we still had no processed foods, no refined (white) sugars, no refined (white) flowers, and no high fructose corn syrup. And just as significant, we had no means of preserving foods beyond the most natural and basic of methods... fermentation! This meant that all of these new foods, primarily grains and dairy, were often fermented in order to consume, in the case of grains and legumes, and or to preserve, in the case of dairy. And the amazing thing about this natural method of food preserving and preparation, is that fermentation like digestion requires help from these same microorganisms (bacteria). Without bacteria fermentation, or the breakdown of carbohydrates (sugar), would not be possible.

Fermented foods are not only easier to digest then their unfermented counterparts due to the elimination anti-nutrients, but they also become a healthier food containing increased levels of nutrients (vitamins, proteins, amino acids...) as well as an excellent source of healthy bacteria.

So this tells me that agriculture (grains and dairy) at its most primitive early state was not the cancer to our health that it has evolved into (factory farming). So what can we as people currently living in agriculture's most deadly years do to protect ourselves? We can eat primarily locally grown organic produce and grass fed meats. We can greatly reduce our intake of processed foods. We can significantly cut back on our grain consumption. And we can do our guts a favor and start living up to our end of the bargain... Eat more fermented foods!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Inflammation Will Kill You!

I spent nearly all of my twenty's into my early thirty's suffering from many inflammation problems. My demons were food allergies (soy and dairy) and tendonitis in nearly all of my joints. It was a horrible time in my life but now that I feel I have turned the corner to a tendonitis free life I believe I owe all that I've learned and what I continue to learn to the very inflammation that haunted me; my food allergies!

I can tell you from my own allergy experiences, as well as my own personal research that I've done, as a result of my allergies, in this personal quest to achieve optimal health, that food/seasonal allergies, migraines, arthritis, tendonitis, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and all of the many chronic inflammatory diseases have one major factor in common... Inflammation. In some form or another inflammation is at the root cause of nearly all the ailments that the western diet causes. I can also say that the more research I do the more the finger gets pointed at grains and legumes such as soy. They are very high in Omega-6 which by nature promotes inflammation, as apposed to Omega-3 which is a natural anti-inflammatory. The ratio in a humans diet, of Omega-6 to 3, should be any where from 2:1 to 1:1, but instead the average American diet promotes omega-6 to 3 ratios as high as 20:1 which is an inflammatory disaster! Americans get it from the meats eggs and dairy they consume because of factory farming, animals fed a diet consisting solely of grain instead of free-ranging (i.e. grass), as well as all from grains consumed either directly (whole grains, breads, pastas, and crackers) or indirectly in the form of vegetable oils, high fructose corn syrup and whatever else science can manipulate the corn or soy molecule into... Sad but true. We are by nature not designed to eat this way (diets so high in grains).

We are Omnivorous with the emphasis on Carnivorous not herbivorous.

I believe that those that suffer from food allergies are blessed with a warning that others never get until it's too late. So I urge you to do the research and let it take you beyond your soy or gluten or dairy allergies. Find out for yourself why eating locally raised grass fed meats eggs and dairy are so important. Find out why locally grown organic everything is so important. Find out why diets based so heavily around annual monocrops such as soy (legumes) and corn (grains) are so unhealthy. Find out why perennial polyculture is so important not only to our health but to sustainability. And most of all Live happy and healthy!

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