Simple facts about the water we drink

The Water Project reports that, “Every year over $100 Billion dollars is spent on bottled water world-wide.”  That is a whole lot of water!  Why would Americans spend any money on water in a bottle when we can get it right through our facet through the city water, or our wells?  There has been an ongoing debate amongst people in our nation, which is better for you tap or bottled water.  I would like to discuss some pros and cons relating to Americans’ drinking bottled water, as well as the pros from drinking regular tap or well water.

The rational reason people choose to drink bottled water is the convenience factor.  It is available just about anywhere you go, the supermarket, convenience stores, place of employment, parks, schools’ and even our rest stops on the interstate.  We tend to grab the bottle of water feeling that we’ve made a healthier decision than its soda counterpart right next to it.  “It’s the argument that companies like Coca-Cola make to defend their sale of bottled water, which comes not from some fancy spring somewhere, but from a local municipal water supply. You know, the same thing you’ve got in your home — the tap. (Grohol PSYD)”.  The real question to this is how healthy is it really?

Everywhere you look there will be a bottle of water, in our cubicles at work, the cup holder on our exercise machine, the side pockets of our backpacks, every sports event etc, and it’s amazing how also in most of these places you will find half emptied bottles all over the ground.  If you look in a random pick of five cars in America you are bound to find an empty bottle lying around somewhere in the back seat. 

Marketing water didn’t take much work.  People already instinctively know that water is better for you verses’ a soft drink.  In fact, according to Fishman, “The clear bottle allows us to see the water - how clean and refreshing it looks on the shelf. Americans have never wanted water in cans, which suggest a tiny aftertaste before you take a sip. The plastic bottle, in fact, did for water what the pop-top can had done for soda: It turned water into an anywhere, anytime beverage, at just the moment when we decided we wanted a beverage, everywhere, all the time.”  Compared to soda, establishments only set aside 15% for marketing the bottle of water.  The company is saving millions of dollars a year in advertising cost compared to soda, by allowing the clear, refreshing look that a bottle of water gives us.

Both Coke and Pepsi companies’ bottles water with the brand name Dasani and Aquafina draws water from municipal sources (city pipes) and then ships it all across our nation to sell them.  Since Coke and Pepsis’ water comes straight from the tap water in the city they don’t have all the cost like Poland Spring which has “to spend money collecting data from monitoring wells, protecting the virginality of their sources, or battling community opponents.(Royte)”  Since these companies aren’t bottling their water in every city let alone every state they are required to ship all over our country which has a huge impact on our environmental footprint.  Above all else the amount of plastic being used is absurd.  According to Global View Points, “46,000 pieces of plastic litter floats around in every square mile of ocean. Fifty or sixty years ago there was no plastic out there.”  Our nation has become numb to the amount of pollution we are causing the world with each bottle of plastic we use, but it is a fact that just cannot be ignored anymore.

Is bottled water really healthier than tap water?  Marketers would have us believe that it is much healthier. Bottled water is not regulated like normal tap city water.  Many studies have been done on bottled water and they all come back about the same.  Here is one I like best – “Altogether, the analyses conducted by the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory of these 10 brands of bottled water revealed a wide range of pollutants, including not only disinfection byproducts, but also common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals (Tylenol); heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes; fertilizer residue (nitrate and ammonia); and a broad range of other, tentatively identified industrial chemicals used as solvents, plasticizers, viscosity decreasing agents, and propellants.”  Wow there is a great deal that can be found in bottled water.  How come we don’t know this information commonly? We drink bottled water because we are led to believe that it is cleaner, but “the federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water (Blomenfeld)”.  Enterprises believe that the clear clean looking water in the bottle will speak for itself, along with their labels displaying mountains or streams, while in fact they are pumped with virtually the same materials as an oil rig.

One essential mineral to our diet is magnesium.  With the obesity sky rocketing out of control many need to understand that tap water has magnesium which according to Organic Facts, “Magnesium is needed to keep muscle and nerve functioning normal and heart beat rhythmic. It also helps to support a healthy immune system, and keeps bones strong. Magnesium also helps to regulate blood sugar levels, thereby promoting normal blood pressure and supports energy metabolism and protein synthesis. Magnesium has a positive effect on treatment of disorders such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes.”  Much of Americans have one or more of these disorders, however problems associated with weight, requires us to take another look at the benefits of tap water.  “While most filtered and bottled waters are free of cancer-causing contaminants, they provide little or no magnesium (Davis MD).”  As a matter-of-fact the harder the water the more magnesium and other minerals you will get.  According to Helminstein MD, “ Hard water is any water containing an appreciable quantity of dissolved minerals. Soft water is treated water in which the only cation (positively charged ion) is sodium.”  Bottled water is considered the softest water the average person is likely to get.

There is another reason to drink tap water that we all know but decide to ignore and that is, what is it doing to our environment?  We all know that our landfills are being flooded with plastics yet we have grown immune to this element.   “Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere”, according to the Container Recycling Institute.” Wow, above and beyond our garbage, or the machinery to package and ship our “bottled water” we do serious damage in just the making of the bottle.  These are phenomical statistics.

We tend to think that we are paying for conveinence when we purchase something easy to get ranging from paper towels to fast food meals, but even with fast food you know its pretty cheap for the amount of food you are given.  However with bottled water you are paying outlandish prices for conveinence.  Blumenfeld and Leal said it best, “Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian (bottled water brand), a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is.  Why would anyone pay that much money for one bottle of water when compared to tap water?  The corporations have really done a fantastic job brainwashing us to buy such a product.

Bottled water is big business due to the low marketing prices, and the American people thinking its better for you and enjoying the conveinence of it.  However, “Estimates variously place worldwide bottled water sales at between $50 and $100 billion each year, with the market expanding at the startling annual rate of 7 percent (Baskind).”  There are not many commercials on our televisions promoting bottled water, yet everyone knows about it, and most purchase the merchandise frequently.

I have conducted my own research poll of 25 people.  Of the 25 all have admitted to buying bottled water at least once a week.  Twenty of the participants confirm that they do not drink tap water at all because they may get sick, but prefer bottled water because they know its safe.  Two people of the 20 admitted to even using bottled water for cooking.  They refuse to subject their family to the harmful effects that tap water may have.  After I questioned them I then told them about the regulations that tap water providers have to adhere to verses bottled and all the things that are in bottled water verses tap.  However I only swayed two of the participants the rest stand true to their beliefs that bottled is better for you and also that it tastes better.

ABC News show 20/20 features John Stossel, he conducted his own experimental test to see if people really thought it tasted different or if it was just the hype of the advertisements, or their own belief that it had to taste better?  He conducted a study of 20 participants located in New York City and used five common brands of bottled water and of course tap water.  Stossel states, “We asked people to rate the waters as bad, average or great. Lots of people said one of the waters was particularly bad. Was that the tap water? No. Tap water did pretty well. Even people who said they don't like it, liked it on the blind test.”  Maybe everyone that uses the excuse “it tastes better” should try this study in their own home with their own family and see what they come up with.

In conclusion I have come to realize there really aren’t any pros to drinking bottled water at all for every lame man that buys it.  The only positive for drinking bottled water is for the enterprise that is selling it due to the cheap to almost nothing in advertising costs that they incur, since the clear liquid in the clear bottle pretty much sells itself.  There are no positives in relation to our health with a bottle of water.  However tap water carries many essential minerals including magnesium that our bodies need every day.  A person can live for weeks on water alone, but we can’t live more than a couple days without it.  Also, since magnesium helps boost the metabolism if you drink regular tap or well water every day and cut out some of the carbonated drinks you are destined to lose weight if you are heavy-set.

Where taste is concerned I have conducted my own taste test upon myself, and when blind-folded I felt more pressure to get the taste right.  It turns out that when I tried the bottled water I was looking for the chlorine taste that it carries verse tap that doesn’t have much of that type of taste at all.  Once in a blue moon I will buy a bottle of water and carry it around for days, continuing to fill it up with regular tap water.  That is the way I cut out the convenience factor in my own life.  The only other time I purchase bottled water is when we are about to go camping and we will take with us several gallons. Otherwise I live off of tap and am very healthy myself.

            So next time you think you need to grab a case of bottled water at the grocery store, just know that you are doing it well informed.  Try to save the bottled water for occasions that you may need it, for example camping, or sporting events.  Again I have to stress lets save our health and the environment together.

Works Cited

Baskind, Chris. "5 Reasons not to drink bottled water." Mother Nature Network. Ed. Shea Gunther. Mother nature network, 15 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/stories/5-reasons-not-to-drink-bottled-water>.

Blomenfeld, Jared, and Susan Leal. "The real cost of bottled water." Common Dreams. Org. San Francisco Chronicle , 18 Feb. 2007. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0218-05.htm>.

"Bottled Water - Making a Clear Choice." The Water Project. N.p., 2011. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://thewaterproject.org/bottled_water.asp?gclid=CPq3rsWj46oCFRAE2godB3Az8A>.

Chenes, Elizabeth D., ed. Garbage and Recycling. Farmington Hills: Christine Nasso, 2011. 132. Print.

Davis MD, William. "Is your botteled water killing you?." Life Extension. N.p., Feb. 2007. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2007/feb2007_report_water_01.htm>.

Fishman, Charles. "Message in a Bottle." Fast Compay. Ed. Robert Safian. N.p., July. Web. 27 Sept. 2011. <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html?page=0%2C0>.

Grohol, John M. "The Psychology of Bottled Water." Psych Central. Ed. John M. Grohol. N.p., 2011. Web. 26 Sept. 2011. <http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2007/07/27/the-psychology-of-bottled-water/>.

"Health benefits of Magnesium." Organic Facts. Rural Tech Services, 2011. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/minerals/health-benefits-of-magnesium.html>.

Helminstein MD, Anne M. "Chemistry of hard and soft water." Chemistry. Water Works, n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2011.

Naidenko, Olga. "Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 pollutants." Environmental Working Group. N.p., Oct. 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.ewg.org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-Quality-Investigation>.

Royte, Elizabeth. Bottlemaia. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. 38-39. Print.

Stossel, John. "Is bottled water better than tap?." ABC News 20/20. ABC News, 6 May 2005. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. <http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=728070&page=1>.

Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital

Besides all the monopolies and industrialization of school, it further more costs future employers’ drastically due to all the training they have to account for.  Since our school system isn’t giving us hands-on training, our employers are forced to do it.  Even many college classes are still related to book smarts, industrialization and a money maker, but very little hands-on, real-life training actually occurs.

What is the real purpose for all the testing they give our high school students?  Is it to really see how much knowledge they know or to produce more money for the school district?  Many can sit down and take a test, but have no idea how the concepts really work in real job scenarios.  These standardized testing standards are a false assessment of where an individual stands.  It has been proven time and time again, that even if you pass these tests, you fail in real life, as well as those who don’t pass the testing my come out and excel above the rest.

This NCLB act, just allowed the government to take even more control over our school system by the amount of school forced to restructure from lack of APY scores.  Most schools that failed the APY scores had few options for restructuring, but choose to relinquish control of the school over to the state, thus more government power.

Then you still have the issue of money.  Where is all this money going that these institutions or school districts are raising?  Many school have completely cut out extracurricular activities completely.  I know that one of the High Schools here in Richmond, Kentucky only require two semesters of P.E. (Physical Education).  When I was much younger and in school, that was a 3x’s a week requirement.  There were always kids out on our streets playing football, tag, basketball or any other physical activity that they have learned in school.  That is obsolete, we just don’t see that anymore.

Art is another class that has vanished from many American schools.  Art may not be seen as important, but it can lead to a whole new area of communication as it has for thousands of years.  Art can also be useful in breeding hobbies, that so many of us Americans don’t have anymore, its either video games, watching television or eating.  Art class can be so much more than learning how to draw or paint, sewing, cross-stitching, candle making, etc. were all forms of hobbies that are currently obsolete.

In a nut shell, there news to be an intense look at our school system in all regions of America.  The future work force doesn’t even stand a chance in todays’ society as it is, however if they converted to community training, hands-on activities, and classes meshed together teaching my science interacts with math, and why history intermingles with economy, etc. we have a good chance at becoming the number one nation again.  Money should never been the reason why a child doesn’t get the proper education, or why big business are industrializing our institutions. This has got to change.

Foster, John B. "Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital." Monthly Review. N.p., 22 Aug. 2011. Web. 14 Sept. 2011.

Proposal - Simple Benefits of Water

Lindsey Petersen

Proposal

English 102

Simple benefits of water

            According to the “Get America Fit Foundation”, “Obesity is the #2 cause of preventable death in the United States. 60 million Americans, 20 years and older are obese and 9 million children and teens ages 6-19 are overweight.  There is one simple and very inexpensive way to change these statistics and that is to drink just regular tap or well water.  I’d like to discuss tap drinking water in this paper.  I can go on forever on the benefits, but I have just chosen a few.

            Magnesium is a known mineral in tap water, but what many don’t know is that Magnesium is a great way to boost ones’ metabolism.   The national institute of health reports, “Tap water can be a source of magnesium, but the amount varies according to the water supply. Water that naturally contains more minerals is described as "hard". "Hard" water contains more magnesium than "soft" water.”  We aren’t going to get much in the way of minerals through “bottled water”

            Which brings me to my next topic is bottled water bad?  The Water Project reports that, “Every year over $100 Billion dollars is spent on bottled water world-wide.”  Bottled water is not regulated like normal tap city water.  Many studies have been done on bottled water and they all come back about the same.  Here is one I like best - Altogether, the analyses conducted by the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory of these 10 brands of bottled water revealed a wide range of pollutants, including not only disinfection byproducts, but also common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals (Tylenol); heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes; fertilizer residue (nitrate and ammonia); and a broad range of other, tentatively identified industrial chemicals used as solvents, plasticizers, viscosity decreasing agents, and propellants.”  We drink bottled water because we are led to believe that it is cleaner, but “the federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water(Blomenfeld)”.  All studies done on bottled water have shown that most are nothing more than filtered tap water, so how are we getting the magnesium we need?

            There is another reason to drink tap water that we all know but decide to ignore and that is, what is it doing to our environment?  We all know that our landfills are being flooded with plastics so I will not touch on this, but how about other environmental factors.  Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute.”

            So next time you think you need to grab a case of bottled water at the grocery store, just know that you are doing it well informed.  Try to save the bottled water for occasions that you may need it, for example camping, or sporting events.

Blomenfeld, Jared, and Susan Leal. "The real cost of bottled water." Common Dreams. Org. San Francisco Chronicle , 18 Feb. 2007. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0218-05.htm>.

"Bottled Water - Making a Clear Choice." The Water Project. N.p., 2011. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://thewaterproject.org/bottled_water.asp?gclid=CPq3rsWj46oCFRAE2godB3Az8A>.

Global Viewpoints. "Garbage and Recycling." Greenhaven Press. Global Viewpoints. Farmington Hills: Christine Nasso, 2011. 138-53. Print.

"Magnesium." National Institute of Health. N.p., 13 July 2009. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/magnesium/>.

Naidenko, Olga. "Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 pollutants." Environmental Working Group. N.p., Oct. 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.ewg.org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-Quality-Investigation>.

"Obesity Related Statistics in America." Get America Fit Foundation. National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kid, 2007. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.getamericafit.org/statistics-obesity-in-america.html>.

Royte, Elizabeth. Bottlemania. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008. 1-229. Print.

Another Education is Happening

Response 4 

            Remember when you were young and there was a school field trip?  It didn’t matter where you were going, but you anticipated the day with much excitement to go into the community and learn something valuable.  That is what this article is all about.

            To form education through real life experiences in the real world, would give kids a real fundamental outlook on life and how it works.  To many of us were made to sit at a desk and listen to lecture after lecture and read boring text books, while having no clue what was going on outside of our schools’ institution. 

            Even simple things like cleaning the highways’, or roads would give children the sense of what littering is, rather than just being told, “Don’t throw that on the ground its littering”.  To a child this makes no sense, what is littering?  So what, what does littering have to do with me?  Or going to watch a production line of some sort, would give them a whole new outlook on how things were made, the people and machines that were involved to make these things. 

            I agree that we do need to spend some time in the classroom for writing or mathematics, however if much time was spent in the community we would have things to write about, and better understand math.

            To allow children to maintain the streets, plant gardens, recycle waste, refurbish buildings, etc., would give them a desire to be more environmentally sounds too.  The gardens would give them a respect for their vegetables, which we all know kids don’t have as of now.

            Is all this testing the government wants from their school kids really productive when these same kids have no idea what it means outside of their schools’ institution.  I also think if there were more “school field trips” planned, kids would want to go to school to learn.  Parents and teachers would have a much easier time dealing with the so-called ADHD, and other learning issues that are related to steady boredom.  Through the years the government has talked about increasing the length of school to go until five o’clock at night and on Saturdays.  I believe this would be easy to accomplish if kids enjoyed school, were out in society learning about real life and their community.

            There is so much we don’t know when we leave our parents house and finish high school.  I don’t know about others, but for myself I was completely lost on what I was suppose to do.  There was little support for me from people around me.  I was told, “you should have learned all that at school”, we’ll “no I didn’t”.  I’m now 31 years old, and still learning about things that would have been very handy had I learned in school.

            I understand there is a conflict between what the school thinks we should learn from our parents and what our parents think we should learn from school.  When are we going to pull together and operate as a community instead of segregated groups?

Someplace Like America

Response 3

08/31/2011

Someplace Like America

                All Americans have a different perception on the values they hold in their own home country.  Is our government really corrupt?  Is the food industry really poisoning us?  Are the homeless and needy really that way because they have no choice, or because they feel sorry for themselves?  We all have tough questions that we want answered, but unfortunately there are no cut and dry answers.  There are professionals on either side of the coin that will argue their own point-of-view.  I would like to discuss some statistics that will show that we are upon difficult times in our society.

                There are more people homeless in our home country than most of us choose to acknowledge.  We have grown deaf or numb to the astonishing statistics, either way we find it bliss to live without fully comprehending others struggles.  In 2010 the New York Times produced an article about homelessness and one part reads, “The Bloomberg administration said Friday that the number of people living on New York’s streets and subways soared 34 percent in a year”.  Think about this for a minute, it doesn’t say New York is 34% homeless, but rather the homeless people rose by 34%.  In any case these statistics are incredible.

                Are people really going hungry in our country?  How can this be true when we produce more food for cheaper than any other country in the world?  According to Worldhunger.org, “In 2008, 17 million households, 14.6 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States.”  This doesn’t make sense.  If I go and sit at the park with my kids I can be sure that one out of every ten people I see enjoying their afternoon are going home hungry.  This is phenomenal! 

                Of these people that are hungry without enough food to eat, how many are also stricken with food poisoning on top of it?  Our government isn’t observing our food production as much as they should be.  We like to think that just because it is FDA approved that its safe, but really the FDA is in bed with companies like Monsanto and Con Agra.  This is for a whole other paper, but for now I’d like to share one more statistic with you.   The New York Times in published an article in 2010 stating, “According to the new estimate, about 48 million people get sick and more than 3,000 die each year from food poisoning in the United States.”

Just in this little paper we have outrageous statistics on homelessness, hunger and food poisoning.  Yes people it is true our country is falling apart.  One single person can’t change the world, but we can change how we do things in our own home, influence others, and become a shining beacon to those in distress.

Bosman, Julie. "Number of People Living on New York Streets Soars." The New York Times. N.p., 19 Mar. 2010. Web. 31 Aug. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/nyregion/20homeless.html?ref=homelesspersons>.

"Food Safety." The New York Times. N.p., 20 Dec. 2010. Web. 31 Aug. 2011. <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_safety/index.html>.

"Hunger in America: 2011 United States Hunger and Poverty Facts ." World Hunger.org. N.p., 2011. Web. 31 Aug. 2011. <http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm>.

Five Questions about me asked by professor in English 102

1)      Where do you come from?

a.       Born in Corona California, raised in Las Vegas Nevada taught me much about city living.  I’ve been on the east coast for about a decade now through marriage.  I miss the city life a lot, things being open 24 hours, awesome buffets and eateries, things to do all year round.  I currently live in Richmond, Kentucky and hoping to move to Lexington before this semester is over.

2)      What is my experience with writing.

a.       Attempting to write different things has occurred many times through my life.  When I was in grade school I use to try to write short stories.  During my mid-twenties I attempted my own life story.  Currently I write a very extensive Bible Study that I attend to at least once every other day. 

3)      What is seriously important to my beliefs?

a.       About a year and a half ago I was one of the many people that turned off cable and subscribed to Netflix.   I quickly realized that they didn’t really hold much in the way of current movies, but they had an awesome selection of documentaries.  I never considered myself a documentary buff, but it was something to pass the time.  I stumbled upon one called Food Inc. and my whole life changed.  I capitalized on Food Inc. with others such as Earthlings and King Corn.  These documentaries opened my eyes to the food industry.  I think us Americans are brainwashed and stupefied when it comes to our main existence and that is food.  I quickly gained momentum in learning all I could in the food industry and the use of GMO’s in plants and ingredients in animal feed.

4)      Why the hell am I in college?

a.       Being green conscience has always been an interest of mine.  I started and ran a very successful and reputable metal recycling business in Fort Wayne, Indiana for about 5 years till the market crashed, then relocated to Kentucky.  One year I invested in a pair front loader washer and dryer unit because they used less energy and water to wash clothes.  A year and a half ago I became aware of the food industry and their lack of concern for the environment and human health.  Once I realized what they were doing with our meat, I went vegetarian for about four months till I found organic meat readily available.  I have since realized the importance of organic fruits and vegetables as well without all that GMO crap in them.

b.      There is only so much I can do in my own home with food, florescent lights, going 65 mph on the interstate rather than 70 to capitalize my mpg, energy efficient appliances, etc.  It is time for me to get a full education so I can assist in informing people about the environment and what they are putting into their bodies every meal of every day.

5)      What culture do I consume?

a.       Whenever I ask people if they have a hobby, they either say no or yes – television or video games.   I subscribe to many hobbies such as camping, swimming, writing my own bible study, cross-stitching and lots of research into food and the environment.  I believe people that don’t have hobbies get themselves in a rut that either causes depression or they have so much time on their hands they find themselves in trouble with the law or within their families.

Response 2 - Why being a foodie isn’t ‘elitist’

Why being a foodie isn’t ‘elitist’

            This article really hit it on the nail.  I started watching documentaries in the summer of 2010 through Netflix.  I never imagined I would stumble upon food production documentaries.  The first one I watched was “food Inc.”  I soon became “born again”, in the realm of food.  Food Inc. was the first in a very long ongoing study for me, ranging from, vegetarians, vegans, organic eaters, activists, vitamin nutrition etc. 

            Many people dread taking a nutrition course in high school or college and cringe when our parents recommend that we “eat our vegetables”.  If a neighbor offers a dish and says its healthy for you, secretly we just throw it away when they aren’t looking, feed it to our kids, or even just give it to the dog.  Why do we act this way towards healthy foods or the idea of eating and staying healthy?  I am no expert, but I think I’m a novice in information almost two years after my desire to learn more about what I am putting into my body.  People are brainwashed through commercials and false advertising.  When something says “natural” on the label it has most likely still been genetically modified, had pesticides added, or cloned.

            The food industry is extremely sad to say the least.  Through documentaries and much research the visualization on the treating of animals by feeding them corn (when they should be grazing), making them stand in thigh deep bowel movements all their life, beating them, crating them, slaughter techniques and the list goes on, is enough to make most go vegan (those that don’t eat or wear anything containing any animal product).  I personally did go vegetarian for about four months after watching a documentary called “Earthlings”.  This is just talking about animals in particular.

            For vegetation in general – vegetables and fruits – most Americans eat food that has been genetically modified to grow faster, thicker and bigger.  Most have a pesticide built right into the gene molecule before that plant has even sprouted.  Unless you are a full blown organic eater chances are you are eating these things every meal of every day.  Why don’t we know this as common knowledge?  Our government has done its best to make unaware of the food we eat.  One of the most common biggest corporations that deal in all this is Monsantos.  Their employees frequently switch from working at Monsantos, then working a government job such as senator, governor, or even the FDA, and then they go back to working at Monsantos.  Yes the government is fully in bed with the making of these products.  Americans are nothing more than guinea pigs.  Our health problems have escalated, obesity is more common than anyone ever imagined it would get and these health issues are related to the food we eat.

            One more topic I’d like to mention is the farmers.  Most farmers have been pushed out of business if they don’t’ succumb to government standards and produce genetically modified yields.  Even those that do can’t support themselves, without government help.  We like to envision farmers like “little house on the prairie”, but in fact – using corn as a prime example – the farmers corn is completely inedible until it has been sent off to be processed first.

            I could make a book out of this topic but we are required to make it short, so I’d just like to end with please do a little bit of research.  If nothing else at least take the time to watch “Food Inc.” and “Earthlings”.  Become educated.  Many say organic is just too expensive, but if you don’t eat properly you will have outrageous medical bills sooner or later.  So why not pay a couple extra dollars a grocery bill to keep your body healthy.

My Political Compass