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Old May 12th, 2012 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Politics of Food, Medicine, Cancer

Writing On Food Politics and Food Freedom
Posted by Karen De Coster on May 10, 2012 08:23 PM

It is interesting to note that Reason Magazine online now points to an archive of "food politics." The coverage of food politics doesn't begin until July, 2011. I welcome my fellow libertarians who are finally waking up to the government-corporate state's war on the non-industrial food movement through coercive and violent political actions. I am pleased that my fellow libertarians are finally supporting the individual's right to be free of coercion in terms of his or her food choices. My question is - Dear Reason, where have you been?

As I have pointed out to Lew Rockwell in the past, when I first started covering these topics (health tyranny, the medical establishment, food freedom, food politics) on my own blog and Lew's website in about 2003 or so, I received a lot of vicious hate mails and attacks from LRC readers, and even fellow libertarian writers and Austrian economists, who could not understand why I would attack "the glorious free market." It took a long time for dogmatic libertarians (often deemed libertarianoids, by me) to understand that GMOs (genetically modified organisms) are not a product of the free market, and neither is the ginormous industrial food machine that uses its political power and its sponsored quasi-government agencies to advance its own agenda and crush its smaller (mostly local) competitors. The violence of the Industrial Food Machine goes well beyond the well-known savage and totalitarian acts of Monsanto. It took a long time for these folks to discover that Big Pharma is not the free market, and neither is the Medical Establishment or Big Cancer.

In fact, I am actually humored by the attacks that still occur, on the part of a few of my fellow libertarians who should be my partners in freedom, as they step up their puerile attacks on me on their forums and facebook threads. How can I not enjoy the panorama of fools and smile when I am consistently Facebook tagged and attacked for doing something so egregious as indicating my passions in terms of my choices, writing about them, and then offering others potential alternatives to the system and choices they have been roped into by the coercive establishment? Persuasion and the offering of alternatives aren't coercive acts - they are voluntary options.

It took many years for the emails to swing the other way (from a dash of hate to a lot of love), but when it did, there was an instant light bulb followed by a swarm of "Karen, now I get it" emails in my inbox each day. The amount of those kind of emails that I now receive has grown exponentially. The turn of events has been priceless.

My one great anchor, I believe, is that I plant one foot solidly in my occupation and the other foot in my passion, without having to find myself in a position where I am compelled to negotiate my principles to ensure my libertarian survival. Doing so allows me the freedom to stick to my guns without having to worry about who I am pissing off and whether or not I am blowing a potential paid opportunity or making the "right" allies. Quite frankly, in my libertarian world, I couldn't give a frickin' hoot about forging allies and acceptance and long-term job prospects. LewRockwell.com author Gary North has written more than once about "the calling" vs "the occupation." Here is a link to Gary's philosophy on handling both the job and the passion. Gary writes:

I define "calling" as follows: the most important thing that you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace. I define "occupation" as the way you put bread on the table. Sometimes these can be the same, but not very often. The most important thing is your calling. Your occupation should support your calling.

When I first read those words in 2006, I felt like they were scripted for me. Yes, I get paid for a lot of what I do in my 'second job,' and yes, I still do a lot of work for free, too. Crazy? Maybe. But perhaps not. I often turn down a lot of paid work to do what I want to do - some of that for free - because time is short, life moves fast, and I have no time or inkling to sell my soul to the highest bidder. Sometimes I just want to get the message out there, whether or not there is any monetary compensation. Hence I have my occupation, which is definitely still a passion, but mostly, it provides me with the education that undergirds a lot of my knowledge, and, more importantly, it is a funding mechanism for the rest of what I want to accomplish in my one term here on earth (sorry Shirley MacLaine). Thus my occupation allows me to be flexible in terms of my calling.

But folks are coming to my website and LewRockwell.com, and they are learning about why this issue is so important across the board. Ultimately, isn't that what we are here for?

CORRECTION: Reason's "food politics" archive actually extends back to 2007. However, historically, Reason has done a sparse job of covering food politics, eco-agriculture/small-scale farming, and the government-corporate state's war on the non-industrial food movement through coercive and violent political actions. Most of the website's coverage, until the last year+, extends to topics centered around defending food choice (the free market for fast food, the war on obesity and its assault on market choices, etc.).

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewr...ml#more-111861
 
Old May 12th, 2012 #2
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Good that you bring this up alex.

Food is amongst many things used as a weapon against the goyim. Sugar, carbs, fast food, alkohol, it destroys your soul. How can you be awake and healthy if you are poising your body?

You are what you eat.
 
Old August 9th, 2012 #4
Squarehead Chris
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I have relatives in Sweden who visit once in a while.
Their idea of breakfast is fresh fruit, a little cheese, rye toast, orange juice and things like that.
The adults will sometimes have a cup of black coffee.
And when they grocery shop, they actually read the labels.

I compare this with the average kwan breakfast...
Fat fat fat for the adults, and corn syrup soaked cereals for the kiddies.
 
Old August 9th, 2012 #5
Solskeniskyn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Squarehead Chris View Post
I have relatives in Sweden who visit once in a while.
Their idea of breakfast is fresh fruit, a little cheese, rye toast, orange juice and things like that.
The adults will sometimes have a cup of black coffee.
And when they grocery shop, they actually read the labels.

I compare this with the average kwan breakfast...
Fat fat fat for the adults, and corn syrup soaked cereals for the kiddies.
Corn-syrup and all the nasty vegetable oils- those would be the two the main culprits I would name for understanding the sickening demise of the state of the Kwa's health and food, looking in from the outside as a Swede myself. And although the individual fat Kwan is responsible for his/her bad choices, laziness and complacency, the industrial interest instrumental in shaping the sad state are to blame too. There is enough lazy, dumb Swedes to go around, I can tell you that much, that would probably be 300+ pound fat pigs if they had been born in the Kwa, but they just don't degenerate to the same level, as the quality of the foods available to us is generally so much better.
 
Old August 10th, 2012 #6
Alex Linder
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The perils of high-fructose corn syrup

http://lewrockwell.com/rep3/corn-syrup-infographic.html
 
Old August 12th, 2012 #7
Alex Linder
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Real Food vs Food Pyramid Non-Food
Posted by Karen De Coster on August 12, 2012 04:01 PM

This is a really nice article hitting on all interesting aspects of the ancestral health movement and/or the paleo-primal way of life: "Why eating like we did 20,000 years ago may be the way of the future."

Part of the problem is that virtually everything we thought we knew about eating is wrong; the current health crisis is in no small part caused by widespread and pervasive food confusion - and much of driven and reinforced by the modern food industry. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we now know that saturated fats are good and that salt has been unfairly vilified. It's becoming apparent that whole grains are extremely unhealthy, and that sugar is far, far worse than we previously thought, a conclusion that has led some experts to essentially describe it as poison.

A nice companion to this article is this fantastic TEDx talk from Stephan Guyenet, a 16-minute summary of "The American Diet," and how the US government enabled industrial food complex has radically changed the American diet via the subsidization and institutionalization of commercially prepared foods while demonizing real foods that, just two generations ago, were understood to be healthy. He discusses how the departure from historical norms in terms of diet has lead to an exponential increase in a whole new set of disease epidemics. He also makes the comment that industrial foods are "extensively engineered foods meant to maximize palatability and maximize the likelihood of repeat purchase while minimizing purchase costs." In summary, Guyenet notes the following in his short talk:

- Consumption trends toward commercially prepared food.

- The decline of butter and lard in favor of margarine, shortening, and refined seed oils.

- Fat consumption trends moving toward cheap polyunsaturated fats, due to the refined seed oils in the modern American diet.

- The decreased quality of breast milk composition.

- The rise of sugar consumption from beverages.

- The traditional American diet was simple, homemade, had minimally refined ingredients, and it required effort to produce.

- The modern American diet contains hyper-palatable items, is commercially engineered, is composed of refined ingredients, is high in added sugar and fats (from seed oils), and it requires minimal effort to prepare and consume.
 
Old August 17th, 2012 #8
Alex Linder
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here on ghee, butter, and vegetable oils
http://lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster194.html
 
Old December 11th, 2012 #9
Solskeniskyn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Solskeniskyn View Post
Corn-syrup and all the nasty vegetable oils- those would be the two the main culprits I would name for understanding the sickening demise of the state of the Kwa's health and food, looking in from the outside as a Swede myself. And although the individual fat Kwan is responsible for his/her bad choices, laziness and complacency, the industrial interest instrumental in shaping the sad state are to blame too. There is enough lazy, dumb Swedes to go around, I can tell you that much, that would probably be 300+ pound fat pigs if they had been born in the Kwa, but they just don't degenerate to the same level, as the quality of the foods available to us is generally so much better.
Cross-post:

Quote:
... Let it exist as is. Those who want a healthier life and a bigger return on that investment will choose to hone their body.
To a point, I agree, and there is no doubt a lot of sheer laziness and complacency involved in creating monsters like these gals'; but you still have a bigger overreaching problem with the current-day food-supply. And that is not to say you should forbid this or that, or even that government necessarily should be involved in any way or form in regulating - or even recommending - what people put on their plate (though that is a wider ideological discussion); rather; it's just a recognition of the fact that unholy alliances between the government and industry is partly to blame for the current mess.

Because you're going to have big problems when when the government starts to not only recommend and subsidize things on dubious and unproven grounds, but actually promote the opposite of what is correct. The 'Dietary cholesterol causes heart disease' is one of the disastrous, propped up BS paradigm that is partly to blame for the last ~40 years health-meltdown. 'Saturated fats= bad, polyunsaturated fats= good', another. The claim that sugar and HFCS are interchangable, a third.

Now, I'm looking in on the kwa as an outsider - but even so, I know better than to nurture the illusion that the U.S was a frugal, cook-from-scratch from quality produce- country even 40 years ago (hell, even 60 years ago). There were a lot of packaged foods, ready-made meals, cookies, candy, sodas, chips, etc. - not to mention fast food - even back then. So where did things go wrong? When the trans-fats, preservatives and other additives entered the scene? When the HFCS started replacing sugar in large scale?

Sorry, the questions tend to get tediously leading when you ask them yourself, and I'd say both played a major role, but regarding the former: why would they decide to willfully push to add these things? Out of sheer malice? No, it's important to understand that there was a drastic change in the products themselves that made it necessary to add the preservatives, and induce the trans-fats, in order to secure the shelf-life, and that was the change from the traditional saturated oils (coconut-oil in particular, but also tallow and palm-oil to a lesser degree) to the food-industrial-complex's push towards the polyunsaturated vegetable oils (Soy, corn, canola mainly).

(Trans-fats are formed when liquid, highly unsaturated oils, that are very unstable and reactive on their own, are hydrogenated in order to mimic the stable inherent qualities of saturated fat that gives it a long shelf-life.)

So the stable, natural, healthy saturated fats were replaced with the alien, highly reactive, toxic, highly unsaturated oils -hydrogenated to boot- and a lot of shitty preservatives entered the scene, together with additives and taste-enhancers needed to cover up for the shit oils and the huge drop in quality.

... and paralleling this change you get the government starting spouting these shitty oils as healthy - combined of course with the unbacked claim that saturated fat causes heart disease. Circle closed.

Together with the sky-rocketing HFCS consumption, charted out in the graph below, you have what I suggest are the two leading causes for the kwans degenerated health.


 
Old January 28th, 2013 #11
Alex Linder
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The Connection Between the Diet Aristocracy and Big Food / Big Pharma
Posted by Karen De Coster on January 28, 2013 07:15 PM

I've explored and written on food politics for years, using articles and direct links back to my sources to show evidence that the Big Agra-Big-Food-Big Pharma-Big Government complex is a pernicious corporatocracy with various satellites in place to conduct its dirty work of politicking, plundering, deceptive marketing, and purposefully miseducating the masses. I long ago declared that the food corporatocracy's nutritional-food satellites such as the two ADAs (American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetes Association), the USDA, and the FDA are criminal organizations. The American Dietetic Association recently changed its name to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND).

Michele Simon, president of Eat, Drink, Politics, a watchdog organization, has produced a useful 50-page report titled, And Now a Word from Our Sponsors: Are America’s Nutrition Professionals in the Pocket of Big Food? [pdf] This is from her executive summary:

Quote:
Against this backdrop, we must ask: what is the role of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND)—the nation’s largest association of nutrition professionals—in preventing or at least stemming the tide of diet-related health problems? What responsibility does this influential group of registered dietitians bear to be a leading advocate for policy changes to make eating healthfully more accessible? Does forming partnerships with the food industry compromise such a group’s credibility? And what does the food industry gain from such partnerships?

Why does it matter? As this report will show, the food industry’s deep infiltration of the nation’s top nutrition organization raises serious questions not only about that profession’s credibility, but also about its policy positions.
The report is another in a long chain of scathing indictments against the corrupt corporate state that has turned a mostly healthy populace into a sickly and obese society that has become disgustingly dependent on the pharmaceutical-psychiatric-medical machine that has long neglected unprofitable preventative care measures in favor of profitable standard medical protocols that address symptoms in the short term so as to make people patients for life.

You'll note that Simon, in her study, points to her friend Marion Nestle, a writer and author and long-time antagonist of Big Food, and a dissector of all things food politics unless it indicts government as one of the culprits. Make no mistake - both Simon and Nestle are statists to the core. Neither of them have challenged how the Big Food corporate state became so omnipotent in the first place. The entire world of food politics in which they live, breathe, and swim is littered with the carcasses of government policy and dictocrat decrees. Still, they refuse to acknowledge the depth of the food politics for which they claim expertise, and they consistently maintain a position that their roles are to influence and change policy. Yes, policy = politics. They are self-declared politicians and they make a financial living off of politicking.

On page 23 of the report, Simon describes how the annual AND meeting was akin to a junk food industry showcase. Then she goes on to say the "positive" aspects of the annual meeting were the folks hawking "Meatless Mondays" and the American Cancer Society. The American Cancer Society is another corrupt satellite of the government-pharmaceutical-medical establishment, and its mother ship, Big Cancer, is another quasi-governmental machine that profits immensely off of keeping people sick and uninformed. Apparently, while carefully studying the AND's long list of Big Food and pharmaceutical sponsors, Simon neglects to mention the similar sponsors of the American Cancer Society. Additionally, Meatless Monday is a statist concept with government-public health influence, and various local governments often try to ram this down the throat of their local constituency.

Near the end of the report (page 38), Simon backpedals and waxes poetically about personnel changes at the AND that are moving the organization along a path to change. She is setting the stage for the notion that the AND can revive its tarnished reputation (page 38). Statists like Simon are fond of revealing the evidence of gross misconduct and then ramping up an opposition cloaked in apparent principles, but always, they leave the door open for a future alliance and a potential consulting gig. This report has a lot of valid bark and recites much useful evidence, but there exists no bite whatsoever.

Due to the prodigious influence of Big Food and its cornucopia of marketing lies, the entire Registered Dietician profession is made up of legions of hypnotized automatons who have been reciting the standard, politicized text for decades, while their helpless victims - uneducated, sick people - have paid the price in terms of their lives, whether it be quality or quantity. Don't expect the self-declared soldiers of food politics, like Simon and Nestle, to strike at the root of the problems anytime soon.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewr...ml#more-131479
 
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