• Even if you don’t eat at a fast food restaurant, you’re still eating food made for/within that system. [If you haven't already, read Fast Food Nation.]
• “Chickens never see sunlight. They’re pretty much in the dark all the time.”
• “This isn’t farming, this is just mass production.”
• “It doesn’t matter if the chickens get sick, all of the chickens will be sent for processing.”
• Learn about the industrial food system.
• 30% of the land in the US is used to produce corn.
• Farm-raised fish is eating corn.
• Average American eats over 200 lbs. of meat a year. Ugh. Do you know how long it takes for meat to leave your body??
• Reminder: there’s manure in your meat! Bon appetit!

• “We put faith in our government to protect us and we’re not being protected on a basic level.” <— this government protects highest bidders: the massively rich, corporations, and industries
• Consumer safety tip: FDA doesn’t protect consumers and was never designed to do so. Former FDA Commissioner Herbert Lay was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 2, 1970 as saying, “The thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day.”
• If cattle is taken off corn diet and put on [natural] grass diet, they shed 80% of e. coli in their stomachs.
• Hamburger meat filler treated with AMMONIA to kill the e. coli in the beef…in 20% of the market. Bon Appetit! [They project 100% in 5 years.]
• #foodinc is reminding me of why I became a macrobiotic practitioner and eventually a vegan.
• “Faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper!” is the motto of food industry.
• Being an adult who regularly eats fast food is like becoming a new cigarette smoker: way too much information out there to not know you’re asking for trouble. [But I'm assuming you care about your quality of life.]
• If you eat fast food because you don’t have time to cook: try slow cooking. Crock pots are AMAZING!
• I sincerely believe food/diet is responsible for [or a major contributor to] 95% of all health problems.
• Our current economic system KILLS souls. People doing menial, spirit-killing jobs for a wage. Shame.
• I was urged by @andrea_zak to read Kessler’s The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite to find out what happens to factory farmed meat and industrial veggies.
• Someone noted that it costs more to eat well than to eat poorly. Upfront, yes.
• Environmental, health, and social costs for “cheap” food are NOT cheap.
• No to US soy…90% of it’s Roundup Ready: can’t be killed by pesticide. [Roundup Ready products are "herbicide tolerant". To learn more about the effects of Roundup Ready products, check out Roundup Ready Nation: Dying for Profits.]
• Live by your principles. The law is not values-based, thus often lawfully unlawful. The prohibition of marijuana is proof of this. [Note: I am not promoting the use of marijuana, but I am in support of its legalization, especially alongside the legalization of alcohol and cigarettes, which kill an insanely large number of people annually.]
• Become a vegetarian, build an earthship and grow your own food. [Earthships are completely self-sustainable housing. Friggin awesome.]
• Genetically modified foods aren’t labeled. Meat from cloned animals isn’t either. Cheers!
• 70% of supermarket products contains some genetically modified ingredient.
• You can go to prison for criticizing beef in Colorado?!? What the…? [Yes, thanks to the veggie libel law, you can be sued by food producers for libel in thirteen states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas.]
• Some solutions are to support local food. Farmer’s markets. Communnity supported agriculture (CSAs). Plant a garden.
• (y)our diet can change the planet. and your life. see?

Video source: jeanjeansl

I just finished watching Healing Cancer and it relit the torch of my passion for natural living and healing.  My life experiences have granted me a fundamental distrust for at least two things: the medical establishment and the government.

“You can fool some of the people all the time,
and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
- George W. Bush

Since the age of three, I’ve had migraine headaches.  They were much more frequent and more of a nuisance when I was younger, but as I got older, I got fed up with them and my tolerance to meds had grown to such that I had to start off with at least 4 of whatever over-the-counter drug I took.  I was definitely “over-dosing” thinking “at least I won’t have a headache.”

During my freshman year in college, I had a migraine for a week.  Disappointed with failing medicines and pointless doctor visits, I decided to take an alternate route.  It was then that I learned about macrobiotics and, more importantly, food as medicine…or poison.  After 15 years of suffering, I found out that all I had to do was eat real food and eliminate fake and harmful foods from my diet.  On my unemployed student budget, that translated into mostly eating short grain brown rice, vegetables, and scarcely fruit while avoiding meats, dairy, processed foods, sugars, preservatives, and additives.

My dietary changes eliminated my headaches and whenever I start getting them again, the first thing I examine is my food.  I read countless stories about the role diet played in people curing from various cancers and ther diseases, amazed at how much diet is overlooked or altogether ignored during the average doctor visit.

Fast forward a few years and I’ve lost a lot of my nutritional edge, so watching Healing Cancer brought me back to that place I was in during my freshman year.  It’s very important that people understand that healing is not the motive of the medical establishment; it goes against their business model.  Why do doctors insist on inducing women’s pregnancies despite it being unnecessary and potentially hazardous?  Why do they insist on using the same three methods to treat cancer that they’ve been using for the last 30 years despite results so ineffective that they all qualify as placebos?  Why prescribe daily birth control to mitigate three days of monthly pain?  Because the alternatives go against the current business model.  Let’s flip some beds and get some recurring customers!

The American Medical Association’s (AMA) purpose is to, as much as possible, decrease competition to MDs, who focus on treating symptoms rather than preventing illness.  The AMA  has plenty of financing from big business, and in fact, is its own brand of big business, so throwing its weight around is not a concern.  I respect the degree of intense training MDs receive, but not that they’re most qualified to cut me open and prescribe me pills after problems have manifested.  Gunshot wound, MD.  Chronic problem, I’m seriously investigating alternatives.

It’s increasingly important that we understand disease (dis-ease) and health.  At one point of time, migraines were my curse.  After a shifting my perspective from pain management to prevention, I learned so much.  Everyone isn’t the same.  We all have different levels of sensitivity.  I discovered my system won’t stand for a lot of things I forced upon it.  Some stand in my amazement to exhibit such willpower when it comes to how I eat, while I stand in amazement at some people’s refusal to make small shifts that can dramatically improve their quality and length of life.

Your health story is critical, as your body is your number one resource.  Pay attention to it.  Learn from it.  Find the good.  I now consider my migraines a blessing in disguise.  Who knows what my diet and lifestyle would be like if it weren’t for my headaches. 

What changes could life be directing you towards that you are fighting?

It turns out that 90% of the sea animals caught in the fishing industry are “bycatch: dumped dead or dying into the sea, or turned into fertilizer, pet food and fish food.”

As a semi-vegan/pescetarian, I think I might need to add a little diversity in my fish choices, skip it altogether, or eat Whole Foods quality farm raised. The sacrifices we all have to make so as many people as possible can enjoy this planet for as long as possible…they’re really not that big.

Source: Ode Magazine

I have six honest serving men
They taught me all I knew
There names are What, and Where and When;
and Why and How and Who.
- Rudyard Kipling

The point: question everything.

Learn more about grayscale thinking here.

The fact that politicians lie shouldn’t be new to anyone. With both presidential candidates geared up and ready to go, you might want to do some research on who’s telling the truth before you cast that vote.

To assist you with deciphering the truth, enter FactCheck.org.

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

Who are we? What are we doing? What are we agreeing to? With our silence? Our obedience? Our complacency? Our willful ignorance?

We can connect the dots if we so choose to, but we choose not to. Why? Ignoring reality does not change reality. Does not make it go away. Does not push it further away from us.

So scared of losing everything, of dying, that we cannot see that we lose everything in our decision to not act with humanity, with love.

We lose everything while we sit and watch others suffer, sitting idly in our security ignoring all the signs that tell us “this isn’t real.”

This isn’t real! So much of our lives, of what we do, eat, think is fake and choosing to be okay with that means we’ve already lost it all. We lost. Because we’re not living anyway.

“We will defeat this war by making it unworkable on the ground
through thousands of collected acts of rebellion and disobedience.”

“We do not walk today to ask concessions from the powers;
they will never legislate peace or freedom.
We come to you. We turn to the living.
Their armies cannot occupy our dreams and their jails cannot hold our number.
This is our world and these streets belong to us.”

To learn more, go to FreeTheSlaves.net.

Read more here.

So…when is it Bush’s turn?

Earlier this month, Obama got a lot of heat on his “flip flop.” I’m just now getting hip to what that flip flop was and what it means. After promising to oppose the Protect America Act, Obama’s recent vote helped get the bill passed.

He offered a flimsy explanation on his blog. Some believe that this single issue shouldn’t cause voters to abandon their allegiance to the Democratic candidate. This isn’t just a single issue.

To learn more about the latest version of this Act, watch the video and download the text below:

Those experiencing it the worst are the same people who, at some point, were actually saving money.  I’m talking about suburbanites.  Suburban existence is completely dependent upon car transport and the availability of cheap fuels.  Well say it ain’t so, but yeah…peak issue is a very real concern no longer relegated exclusively to energy industry.  Peak oil doesn’t mean that there isn’t anymore oil, but that we’ve reached the maximum level of production, so from this point onward, every barrel of oil will be harder to get out of the ground, of lesser quality, and more expensive.  The days of cheap energy are over.

A while ago, there was an explosion of SUVs on the market.  Little men wanted them to feel more manly.  Big men wanted them for more space…and to feel more manly.  And little women wanted them to feel more manly.  (Strange, yes?)  Then hits rising energy costs and SUVs are no longer regarded as cool, but stupid if the space was unused and unnecessary.  If you didn’t sell/trade-in your SUV when they were still “in”, the likelihood of selling/trading-in now is low.  If you live in the suburbs and drive a SUV, effectively your little toe bleeds as the gun falls out of your hand. 

We’re going to see a continuing rise in urban populations and the development of more urban spheres.  Local living is key.  Moving forward, living, buying, working, and eating locally are all going to be of increased importance, something most suburbanites just can’t do without automobile reliance.  According to James Howard Kunstler, “The Wal-Marts of North America have very efficiently and effectively destroyed almost every local and regional network of economic, commercial interdepence.  And those networks are going to have to be rebulit.”

I found a great 52-minute documentary about this called The End of Suburbia.  Watch it below.

Human-to-human contact

Check out PandemicFlu.gov/AvianFlu.gov for US government information.  Flu Wiki and Nature also have some valuable info.