One Little Smear of Peanut Butter, One Giant Nanoparticle for Mankind
Oh, how we’ve become the victims of the modern bait and switch Joseph Mengele of the very modern despicable kind. Not just sinister scientists, the triumphant technologists and the corrupt corporations and their massive on-going Petri dish experiment on human kind. Not just some latent harkening back to syphilis put into the human biochemistry of Alabama blacks or incarcerated Guatemalans.
We are nanoparticle plagued, and by 2015, the market for nanoproducts is going to hit $2.4 trillion according to Global Industry Analysts, Inc. From air, to soil, to roots, to grains, and then, bam, into human destinies.
Don’t expect the doctoral students and superstar PhDs to be on our side when studying nanomaterials. They are a sloth-like bunch, lumbering with their scientific method, placating industrialists, hedge funders, the captains of corruption in high and low office.
The scientists think nanomaterials are amazing, and they have thrown out precautionary principles into the very vats of zinc and cerium dioxide they see as holy grail.
Here, read on — Science Direct, a book on nanostuff — here and another one —here.
SUMMARY
The nanoparticle and nanotechnology field is a fast-growing research niche
Research has already led to significant breakthroughs, and several products are available commercially. It is currently anticipated that the number of exposed Quebec workers, both in use and processing and in production, will increase over the next few years. The purpose of this literature review is to determine whether nanoparticles represent health risks for workers. The chosen presentation format has the advantage of covering all the aspects that must be considered in toxic risk assessment. For some nanoparticles, the toxicological data are very partial, so this presentation format reveals the scope, and especially the limits, of the information currently available. Nonetheless, several studies exist on the toxicological properties of nanoparticles.
Although the various toxicological aspects and the diversity of the nanomaterials assessed are just beginning, many deleterious effects have been documented, particularly in animals. Insoluble or low solubility nanoparticles are the greatest cause for concern. Several studies have shown that some of them can pass through the various protective barriers of living organisms. The inhaled nanoparticles can end up in the bloodstream after passing through all the respiratory or gastrointestinal protective mechanisms. They are then distributed in the various organs and accumulate at specific sites. They can travel along the olfactory nerves and penetrate directly into the brain, just as they can pass through cell barriers. These properties, extensively studied in pharmacology, could allow organic nanoparticles to be used as vectors to carry medications to targeted body sites. The corollary is that undesirable nanoparticles could be distributed throughout the body of exposed workers. Some of these nanoparticles have shown major toxic effects.
Another special feature of nanoparticles is that their toxicity seems to be linked to their surface. This is a major difference from the usual situations, in which toxicity is normally linked to a product’s mass. Nanoparticles are so tiny that small quantities (expressed in terms of mass), could have major toxic effects, because of their large surface. Several studies show much greater toxic effects for the same mass of nanoparticles as compared to the same product with a higher granulometry.
The available studies have shown several effects in animals, depending on the type of nanoparticles. Nephrotoxicity, effects on reproduction and genotoxic effects have been identified so far. Some particles cause granulomas, fibrosis and tumoural reactions in the lungs. Thus, titanium dioxide, a substance recognized as non-toxic, shows high pulmonary toxicity on the nano-scale. Cytotoxic effects have also been reported.
In general, the toxicological data specific to nanoparticles remains insufficient due to the small number of studies, the short exposure period, the different composition of the nanoparticles tested (diameter, length and agglomeration), and the often-unusual exposure route in the work environment, among other factors. Additional studies (absorption, translocation to other tissues or organs, biopersistence, carcinogenicity, etc.) are necessary to assess the risk associated with inhalation exposure and percutaneous exposure of workers.
You want more on nanoMADNESS? ** Miller Highlife Beer!
Plastic imbued with clay nanoparticles helps make Miller Brewing Co. beer bottles less likely to break as well as improves how long the brew lasts in storage. Simply H’s Toddler Health nutritional drink mix includes 300-nanometer (300 billionths of a meter) iron particles. And a wide range of cooking and cleaning items now employ nanosize silver particles to kill microbes.
Yet, the Washington, D.C.–based environmental group Friends of the Earth (FoE) reports that none of the more than 100 food or food-related products it identified that contain nanoparticles—puny particles between 100 and one nanometers—bears a warning label or has undergone safety testing by government agencies.
“Products created using nanotechnology have entered the food chain,” says report author Ian Illuminato, FoE’s health and environment lobbyist. “Preliminary studies indicate there is a serious risk…. We should know that it’s safe before we put it in our food.”
Or is something out of Ivy League Cornell more up your alley? **
Billions of engineered nanoparticles in foods and pharmaceuticals are ingested by humans daily, and new Cornell research warns they may be more harmful to health than previously thought.
A research collaboration led by Michael Shuler, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering and the James and Marsha McCormick Chair of Biomedical Engineering, studied how large doses of polystyrene nanoparticles — a common, FDA-approved material found in substances from food additives to vitamins — affected how well chickens absorbed iron, an essential nutrient, into their cells.
The results were reported online Feb. 12 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
And to think this quick little Dissident Voice piece started out as an indictment on SOY, soya, both the bean and the industry.
Each nano-second of our lives — whether REM-charged emails, credit and debit transactions, auto trips to the bookstore, movies checked out, every single HR pinprick into our lives, every burping, belching and begetting moment — is not just tracked, recorded, stored and analyzed, but our biological selves have been infiltrated with the disease of economies of scale, bulldozed economics, disaster profiteering, trillion-dollar pirating.
We are one giant gooey experiment for the mind benders of the IT Google Gates Bezos Zuckerberg Zionist kind, and we are the end products of toxin after toxin. Things go better with Coca Cola is a homily to a bygone era. Now, things run on carcinogens, warped economics, Abu Graib education, and blatant slash and burn class war, the sort of war where the 80 percent have no fight left in them or any way to break out of the solitary confinement of our media mush existences.
We are a global dietary experiment gone Frankenstein. The Gestapo of the Corporations rule even our taste buds. But it all goes back to easy living through chemistry:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s primary source for information on exposure to industrial chemicals in the population. In the late 1970s, the agency began searching for exposure to heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Since then, the CDC has periodically conducted a census of American bodies called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The agency uses the data for many things, ranging from children’s growth charts to obesity statistics—and, since 2001, to produce a study called the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. The next such report, due out late this year, will include data on the prevalence of 228 of the most common environmental toxins.
Approximately 1,000 new chemicals are added every year to the 85,000 already on the federal registry. As Jane Houlihan, the senior vice president for research at the nonprofit watchdog organization Environmental Working Group, testified in Congress last year, “Companies are free to use almost any ingredient they choose in personal-care products, with no proof of safety required.” Houlihan argues that the FDA should claim the authority to oversee cosmetic safety, by requiring registration and testing of products and ingredients, making public-health-injury reports mandatory, and enforcing safety requirements—which is the way the agency oversees pesticides and food additives.
Read on — here and more here, and here!!
I’m talking about soy, that rotten substance now controlled by global Mafioso, the Monsantos and ADMs and Nestles and World Food Domination Project.
The bottom line is when it comes to soy, we are all participating in what Daniel M. Sheehan, former senior toxicologist with the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research, has called a “large, uncontrolled and basically unmonitored human experiment.” And soy cultivation—particularly genetically engineered soy—is one of the most devastating things we can do to the environment.
We’ve put into our souls the endless pureed putrid substances of the industrial age – those chem. farmers, those monoculturists, those people who have found DNA across all species as the next big un-organic thing.
The problem is our guts, the very essence of humanity’s willingness and able-bodiness and physicality to be more than a consumer of New Jersey dyes and Dow hyphenated toxins and the grocery chain thugs’ cash cows.
Soy — Web Site on Allergy Awareness Network.
1. VAAN; Vancouver Allergy Awareness Network
Contact Name: J. Seo, T. Fewel
Contact Email: moc.nsmnull@oeseajy
City: Vancouver
Country: USA
Mission: We are an educational food allergy support group for families. Our mission is to support, educate, and advocate for change.
Here is the end all of soy research gathered in one spot!
“The huge rise in allergic reactions to soy is in line with the increasing use of soy products in processed foods during the 1990s, and should be regarded as a major public health concern.”
About the Author
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN, is the author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food (NewTrends Publishing, 2004). She is a board-certified clinical nutritionist and a health educator who teaches classes and workshops on disease prevention, optimum health and maximum longevity. Dr Daniel can be reached through her website, http://www.wholesoystory.com
Soy is one of the top allergens—substances that cause allergic reactions. In the 1980s, Stuart Berger, MD, labeled soy one of the seven top allergens—one of the “sinister seven”. At the time, most experts listed soy around tenth or eleventh—bad enough, but way behind peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, shellfish, fin fish and wheat. Today, soy is widely accepted as one of the “big eight” that cause immediate hypersensitivity reactions.
Allergies are abnormal inflammatory responses of the immune system to dust, pollen, a food or some other substance. Those that involve an antibody called immunoglobulin E (IgE) occur immediately or within an hour. Reactions may include coughing, sneezing, runny nose, hives, diarrhea, facial swelling, shortness of breath, a swollen tongue, difficulty swallowing, lowered blood pressure, excessive perspiration, fainting, anaphylactic shock or even death.
Controversy has raged since the 1920s as to whether or not babies could be sensitized to allergens while still in utero. In 1976, researchers learned that the fetus is capable of producing IgE antibodies against soy protein during early gestation, and newborns can be so sensitized through the breast-milk of the mother that they later react to foods they’ve “never eaten.”
Read here.
And continuing the story:
Since we Americans eat so much of it, it’s important to understand how soy can affect us. What we do know about soy is a bit alarming:
- Soy contains very high levels of phytic acid, which reduces your body’s assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. High phytate diets have caused growth problems in children.
- Two senior U.S. government scientists, Drs. Daniel Doerge and Daniel Sheehan, have revealed that chemicals in soy could increase the risk of brain damage in both men and women, and abnormalities in infants.
- Protease inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion and have caused malnutrition, poor growth, digestive distress, and pancreatitis.
- Lectins and saponins in soy can cause leaky gut and other gastrointestinal and immune problems.
- Scientists have known since the mid-1940s that soy phytoestrogens are powerful enough to affect fertility and even promote estrogen-positive breast cancer. Although scientists discovered only recently that soy lowers testosterone levels, soy phytoestrogens are known to disrupt endocrine function and are so potent, they are marketed to older women for relief of hot-flashes and other menopausal symptoms.
- According to a British toxicologist’s calculations, a baby fed exclusively on soy formula would be consuming the estrogen equivalent of five birth-control pills a day. Thirty to 40% of babies in the United States are fed soy formula. If the hormones in soy are strong enough to relieve hot flashes, why would we feed it to children?
- Soy phytoestrogens are potent antithyroid agents that can cause hypothyroidism and may cause thyroid cancer. In infants, consumption of soy formula has been linked to autoimmune thyroid disease.
- Vitamin B-12 analogs in soy are not absorbed and actually increase the body’s requirement for B-12.
- Soy foods increase the body’s requirement for vitamin D.
- Processing of soy protein results in the formation of toxic lysinoalanine and highly carcinogenic nitrosamines.
- Free glutamic acid or MSG, a potent neurotoxin, is formed during soy food processing and additional amounts are added to many soy foods.
- Processed soy foods contain high levels of aluminum which is toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys and strongly implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.
- Archer Daniels Midland recently withdrew its application to the FDA for GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status for soy isoflavones following an outpouring of protest from the scientific community. The FDA never approved GRAS status for soy protein isolate because of concern regarding the presence of toxins and carcinogens in processed soy.
I’ve coursed through food, farming, field-to-fork sustainability topics for more than two decades. Longer, really, when considering my work looking at braceros and migrant field workers and their exposure to hell, both of the human enslavement kind and the toxic chem. kind. Localism, one hundred mile diet, holistic grazing, the new red is green, all the Slow Food and Fast Food Nation stuff, all the stuff on dead zones in the Gulf caused by 100 million acres of corn and soy draining their toxic brew into the Mississippi.
Really, food, ag, sustainability, food security, hedge funding our universal right to eat, all of that, plus the nuanced stuff around free trade or beyond free trade, or to be a vegetarian or to not be a paleo-dietitian, oh, the stuff I’ve written about, studied, and been exposed to, well, who would have thunk that gluten and soy and corn are the worst things to happen to humankind since the splitting of the atom?
My significant other got no reprieve from headaches, gut wrenching daily pain, hot and cold flashes, fatigue, aches, the whole rotten auto-immune system breakdown nine-yards – not from Western med, not from alternative med.
Through a process of elimination, we found that soy and gluten were the culprits. Tough giving up that daily bread, for sure, but who would have thought soy and the hundred hidden products with soy as its base would be that tough to eliminate.
The soy mafia, like the drug cartels, get the knife into everything, and then they twist it.
There is SO much research coming out on soy and on gluten, that the world now is totally bombarded with babes in the woods screaming at the top of their lungs about a million injustices. We are at the Cry Wolf to the 100th power level. Daily, you can survey your local town, your own little heaven of a rental 12-wide, anything, your workplace, the roads you drive on, anything, even the madness of a dying media and the steroid-dosed crap that entertains us, but really, unfortunately, modern civilization and the corporate thugs on top, all of it is just too much in a day for the average human to contemplate. Someone like me, coming out premature some 56 years ago, well, maybe I was embedded with a systems-thinking set of wires leading to switches that basically point out that anything to do with humankind-money-governments-corporations, well, the entire rotten mess and calculus will bring a storm of tears, blood, sweat, death upon humankind. I see the world, like others have and do and will, as tied to the sin of all sins — money, or wanting it, coveting it, or converting animal, land, soil, water, air, humanity into it. The worst of all evils propelling us into Bedlam.
Pain. Even the simple thing of pushing that smart phone for another Amazon order. Yes, everything associated with capital, greed, the chosen few ruling the despicable masses, well, it’s a killing machine:
This is a daily argument, again, that shifting baseline syndrome – if it is here, pernicious, completely embedded in our modern thought process, then, what the hell is the problem? Amazon is the best thing to happen to man and woman kind since sliced, err, Wonder Bread.
From that limpid Salon.com, no less –
“They’ve devalued the concept of what a book is, and turned it into a widget,” said Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson, one of Amazon’s most prominent critics. He also alleged that major publishers were afraid to speak on the record about Amazon’s tactics for fear of retribution.
Amazon is evidently seen, by Obama and his administration, as the sort of American job-creating corporation that underpins the economy. However, unlike, for example, Walmart, a company with many deplorable practices but a massive ability to generate profit, Amazon uses everything (cheap, cheap books; distribution centers; the Kindle) as a loss-leader for everything else. Profits dropped again last week, though the company’s stock didn’t appreciably drop.
For instance, the company got $269 million in back taxes forgiven by the state of Texas contingent upon the creation of new distribution centers and jobs. But as Johnson pointed out, “Amazon winds up doing what they were going to do anyway.” A company that aims to get customers the books, DVDs and artichokes they want by the next day will need more and more distribution centers as its consumer base keeps growing, but they’re able to spin the construction of distribution centers as a favor they’re granting the state.
Amazon is bound up with the government beyond the state level; the company is contracted for $600 million to host the CIA’s private data in its “cloud” system; the State Department withdrew its planned $16.5 million no-bid contract with Amazon in 2012, at the height of the Department of Justice trial.
So, the heat and beat and disasters keep going on. So, the soy diseases are coming on strong. Organizations around the globe getting epinephrine pens as a common tool of the modern kitchen. You know, peanut allergies. Well, think corn (looks and acts like peanuts), gluten, soy.
And I am a bloody vegetarian, looking at the tripe around what is better for the planet, veggies or beef.
Mother Jones, and read the 460 comments, too **
A dyed-in-the-wool vegetarian, I had always assumed that when it came to sustainability, my diet would beat the leather pants off that of my burger-crazy friends. But as I wrote in “Get Behind Me, Seitan,” (July/August 2010 issue of Mother Jones) some environmentalists and farmers claim that eating responsibly raised meat can actually be good for the planet. So who’s right? I posed the question to five smart people: Eating Animals author and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, farmer and writer Joel Salatin, Diet for a Hot Planet author Anna Lappé, Bard College geophysicist Gidon Eshel, and food-waste expert Jonathan Bloom. They answered below and then responded to readers’ questions and comments during our three-day forum.
Another go at vegetarianism and the environmental impacts!! MJ ** That’s 287 comments!
That’s not the only issue with fake meat. Consider the process that keeps your veggie burgers low in fat: The cheapest way to remove fatty soybean oil is with hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and suspected neurotoxin. A 2009 study by the Cornucopia Institute, a sustainable-farming nonprofit, found that Boca, Morningstar Farms, and Gardenburger (among others) market products made with hexane. The finding was enough to turn Cornucopia researcher Charlotte Vallaeys off of fake meat. “I can’t think of a single meat-alternative product where I could explain how every ingredient is made,” she says. “With a grass-fed burger, well, there’s one ingredient. And with grass-fed burgers I actually might be doing something good for the environment.”
So plant protein is usually the greener choice, as long as it’s not overprocessed. But for the meat we do eat, the best approach is to return to our traditions, says Jim Howell, a senior partner at the Savory Institute, a think tank that promotes ecologically sound grazing practices. Howell points out that the world’s prairies coevolved with herds of herbivores, meaning that cows (and other grazers, like bison) are great grass farmers. While conventional farms rely on oil-based synthetic fertilizers, grazers make their own organic version—their excrement nurtures grasses that grow year-round. Well-managed pastureland also retains topsoil remarkably well—switching from cornfields to pastureland, according to Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, cuts soil erosion by 93 percent.
Yet 71 percent of America’s prairies have been converted to cropland. And more than half of all corn and 98 percent of all soy grown in the United States goes to raise livestock, even though feeding this diet to cows promotes virulent strains (PDF) of E. coli and liver abscesses—which farmers treat with high doses of antibiotics. “So there’s all this land going to feed livestock that aren’t even really evolved to handle that kind of food,” says Howell. “If you made all that land into tall-grass prairie, you’d still have land to grow grains for humans.” You’d also sequester more carbon: A USDA study found that Great Plains pastureland stores 54 percent more CO2 per acre than cropland.
Oh, hell, modern man and woman plaguing the planet and their own physiologies with the quick buck, instant pudding, fast-food, anytime-burger mentality. But back to soy, and how that industry is akin to the other industries of the world – corrupt, cretins, philistines, and pure market-loving kings and queens who want more so the serfs can suffer even more.
Sell us what we never wanted, never needed, never dreamed of!
HIDDEN SOY – HIDDEN SOY ALLERGIES
If your child is allergic to peanuts, you must eliminate all soy as well as all peanuts from your child’s diet. Your child’s life may depend upon it.
Take care, even if your child has never reacted poorly to soy in the past. Some sensitive children have “hidden” soy allergies that manifest for the first time with a severe—even fatal—reaction to even the low levels of “hidden” soy commonly found in processed food products. Those at the highest risk suffer from asthma as well as peanut allergy.
Other risk factors are other food allergies, a family history of peanut or soy allergies, a diagnosis of asthma, rhinitis or eczema, or a family history of these diseases.
(Source: Letter from Ingrid Malmheden Yman, PhD, Senior Chemist, Sweden National Food Administration, to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, 30 May 1997)
And you want more?
The first report of “occupational asthma” appeared in the Journal of Allergy in 1934. W. W. Duke described six persons whose asthma was triggered by dust from a nearby soybean mill and predicted that soy could become a major cause of allergy in the future.64 Today it is well established that soybean dust is an occupational hazard of working in bakeries, animal feed factories, food processing plants, and health food stores and co-ops with bulk bins. Dust explosions are a safety hazard at soybean processing plants.
Most victims develop their “occupational asthma” over a period of time. In one well-documented case, a 43-year-old woman spent six years working at a food processing plant, in which soybean flour was used as a meat extender, before she developed asthma. Symptoms of sneezing, coughing and wheezing would begin within minutes of exposure to soy flour and resolve two hours after the exposure ceased.
Adverse reactions caused by soybean formulas occur in at least 14 to 35 per cent of infants allergic to cow’s milk, according to Dr Matthias Besler of Hamburg, Germany, and the international team of allergy specialists who help him with the informative website, http://www.food-allergens.de/contents-2000.html.
Dr Guandalini’s helpful website, http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic2128.htm, reports the results of an unpublished study of 2,108 infants and toddlers in Italy, of which 53 per cent of the babies under three months old who had reacted poorly to dairy formula also reacted to soy formula. Although experts generally attribute this high level of reactivity to the immature—hence vulnerable—digestive tract of infants, this study showed that 35 per cent of the children over one year old who were allergic to cow’s milk protein also developed an allergy to soy protein. In all, 47 per cent had to discontinue the soy formula.
So that kiss of death occurs in-vitro, at the lunch counter for our children, in the hospital wards, in the workplace, in the kitchen, or grocery store. Hell, even if we try to go off the madness grid, the number of pollutants plaguing the planet, even some serene place near Timbuktu, it’s seeded with the syphilis of Zionist Captialists, Christian Hedge Funders, and Muslim Oil Tycoons.
The chosen people — the One Percent and their Thugs, the Nineteen Percenters.
Out daily bread is DNA warped, nano-pureed, empty calorie media, the laughing cows watching small business after small school after big and small city topple in their Sim City/Sim Universe game of destruction.
Please, read some of these people who still are the Don Quixotes of the Internet —
A Brief History of Soy
It is only very recently in our history that humans have been eating processed soy foods and soybean oil. Grown on a large, commercial scale by U.S. agribusiness during the 50s and 60s, by the 70s and 80s, the soybean industry was troubled by emerging evidence that soybean oil consumption lowered immunity, increased susceptibility to infectious disease, and promoted cancer.
At this same time, the bigwigs in the soybean industry got the bright idea that if they could demonize the competition by making saturated fats like lard and coconut oil appear to be the cause of heart disease—the nation’s number one killer—people wouldn’t pay much attention to the negative findings coming out about soybean oil. Starting in the mid-1980s, the soybean oil industry began a multi-million dollar anti-saturated fat campaign. Saturated fats increased cholesterol, they said, and high cholesterol causes heart disease. The tropical oils (coconut, palm, and palm kernel oils) were singled out as being the worst offenders because of their high saturated fat content.
Some, but not all, saturated fats can raise total cholesterol, (coconut and palm oils do NOT) but there is no solid evidence that high cholesterol actually causes heart disease. That is why high cholesterol is only considered a “risk factor” rather than a cause. In fact, it looks like high cholesterol is a protective response in the body against dangerous inflammation—which does cause heart disease. But that didn’t stop the soy industry. The soybean industry fed misleading information to gullible consumer advocate groups like The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which were persuaded to begin their own campaigns against saturated fats.
These high-profile organizations placed anti-saturated fat ads in the media, published newsletters, magazine articles, and books, and lobbied for political action against the use of tropical oils and other saturated fats. Since the bulk of the attack came from supposedly impartial third parties, their message had more impact. People were swayed against saturated fats and the tropical oils they had been using safely for hundreds, or even thousands, of years.
Restaurants and food manufacturers, sensitive to customer fear, began removing these fats from their foods and replacing them with vegetable oils. Tropical oil consumption plummeted while soybean oil sales skyrocketed. In the United States, soybean oil soon accounted for about 80 percent of all the vegetable oil consumed.
During this time, one thing the soybean industry conveniently neglected to tell the public was that the saturated fats were not being replaced with ordinary vegetable oil, but rather by hydrogenated soybean oil! Hydrogenated soybean oil contains toxic trans fatty acids and is far more damaging to the heart than any other fat. Trans fats have also been linked to numerous other health problems including diabetes, cancer, and various autoimmune diseases. In terms of health, trans fat is absolutely the worst fat that you could consume.
The soy industry was aware of many of the detrimental effects associated with hydrogenated vegetable oils and trans fats, but they succeeded in demonizing all saturated fats, including healthy coconut and palm oils, for the sake of profit. The plan was an overwhelming financial success. Over the next two decades hydrogenated vegetable oils found their way into over 40 percent of all the foods on supermarket shelves, amounting to about 40,000 different products. Hydrogenated soybean oil consumption dramatically increased, and so did numerous diseases now found to be associated with trans fats.
With the growing awareness of the dangers of trans fats in hydrogenated vegetable oils and the landmark announcement in 2002 from the U.S. Institute of Medicine stating that “no level of trans fats is safe in the diet,” tropical oils are returning. Careful review of previous research and more current medical studies have exonerated the tropical oils from the claim that they promote heart disease. In fact, they appear to help protect against heart disease as well as many of the other diseases now known to be linked to hydrogenated vegetable oils.
Many restaurants and food manufacturers are now replacing their hydrogenated soybean oil with palm oil. Consequently, soybean oil sales are declining. In an effort to protect their profits, the soy industry has resorted to two strategies: 1) diversifying their market with new soy products like margarine, soymilk, “nutrition” bars, protein powders, pseudo-meats, livestock feed, biofuel, and more, and 2) returning to demonizing the competition in order to make their products more acceptable.
Desperate to find an alternative means of attack, the soybean industry has found a new ally in highly vocal, politically active environmental groups. Fueled by financial support and misleading data from the soy industry, some environmental groups have now waged a war against palm oil on the grounds that palm cultivation is destroying the environment. They claim that rainforests are being leveled to make room for palm plantations, destroying the ecology and bringing endangered species, such as the orangutan, to the brink of extinction.
Anyone with any sense of responsibility for the environment would be swayed by this argument. The problem, however, is that while palm oil plantations are responsible for some deforestation, the soybean industry is causing more destruction to the environment than probably any other agricultural industry on the planet.
Read her stuff —
“Why Soy is Bad for the Planet,” by Annie Sophie — *****
If you don’t eat your soy, you won’t get your meat!