America is now experiencing the aftermath of one of the most devastating weeks in American history. The Virginia Tech massacre, in my opinion, is just another symptom added to an already long list of symptoms that is crying for us to Wake-Up. One of the most important aspects of natural medicine is that we do not treat symptoms, but instead, try to get to the root cause of these symptoms. This is exactly what needs to happen, quickly, in the US if we want to continue the access to the freedoms that most of us take for granted.
While I am not a huge conspiracy theorist, it is very difficult not to wonder why we are being bombarded, from within, by so many terrible happenings. Every time a crisis occurs we have freedoms that are taken away in the name of safety and we all nod our heads in agreement because, afterall, who doesn't want to be safe? But I submit to you that this is only dealing with symtoms, not the cause.
Dealing with health concerns on a daily basis, I understand the importance of good health and well being, possibly even more than most because I am also a cancer survivor. We are now in the midst of a huge bombardment against clean food, clean water, clean air, clean personal care products and clean supplements. Just as we are losing freedoms in the name of being safe, so are we losing health freedoms in the name of convenience. Let me explain my thoughts about this.
Clean Food
Right now, this very minute, Big Food, is trying very hard to make it to where we cannot know what is in our food or how it has been processed. Never mind that all pre-packaged food has only a small amount of useable nutrients and is filled with chemical preservatives, but now the FDA allows labelling foods as 75 percent organic knowing that the public will hone-in on the word organic. I would love to know exactly what 75 percent organic means--wouldn't the 25 percent that is NOT organic negate anything that is organic? Think about it. They also want to remove labeling requirements for irradiated foods and allow raw almonds to be pasteurized, which technically means they will no longer be raw but will still be labeled in that manner, while continuing to label them as raw. On top of this they have decided that we do not need to know if we are eating cloned meat or if the vegetables that are offered in grocery stores have been genetically modified. Why is there such a push to audulterize our food supply? Could it be to control a population by keeping them in bad health?
Big Food realizes that most consumers do not have the time or means to grow their own vegetables, another concern as now they are even messing with the seeds, chop their own vegetables, find local farms to buy dairy and meat from, etc. We do not even have time to daily sit down for one family meal. Why? Too much to do and too many places to go. Just so much easier to drive into the local fast food joint, pick up some burgers, fries and drinks and be on our way. We eat fast food or prepackaged foods for breakfast, lunch, dinner and late night snacks and never consider the ingredients. In doing this the average American consumes 160 pounds of sugar each year. Found in over 42,000 food products, the average American consumes close to five grams of Trans Fat a day, while evidence suggests even one gram is too much for a healthy diet.
Common sense tells most of us that messing with food and/or trying to improve on Gods creation may not be the smartest thing to do. And we would do well to listen to this common sense.
Clean Water
Who would have ever thought we would see the day when we would have to pay for clean, pure water? Well, we have arrived. We have polluted our water to where more and more chemicals must be added to make sure it is safe. Of course safe means different things to different people. Huge amounts of fish and frogs are being contaminated and dying because of chemicals and pharmaceuticals flowing into our waterways and ground water. Most fish are not even safe to eat because of mercury contamination. Even our bottled water, packaged in the ever convenient plastic bottle, is compromised by the plastic leeching into the water. Of course all the big plastic companies have promised that this should be of no real concern.
We now have bottled water companies that are conveniently adding fluoride to the water so that our childrens bodies will now have more of this carcinogenic chemical to ensure health concerns at some point in their life. Most city water municipalities fluoridate the water, conveniently, so that we will have strong and health teeth. If this were actually helping our teeth why is there still a need for dentists?
Clean Air
I have lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas all my life. I was diagnosed with cancer while living in one of the most air polluted counties in Texas. In the name of convenience we are now walking through a maze of polluted air that mostly affects the endocrine system. Asthma and allergies are at all time highs. We now must have home air purification in order to take care of all the out gasing from appliances, wood, paint, flooring, etc. and because homes are made so air tight that that the air becomes unhealthy. If we open the windows we are exposed to all the polluted air from industry. We have been told that ozone is hazardous, do your research about ozone, to our health and for our convenience we now have ozone alerts when actually they should be named chemical alerts. Supposedly industry must follow strict air quality standards but the fact is they ignore these standards and should they have a chemical or gas release they are fined a very minute amount compared to what their yearly profits amount to, basically just a slap on the hand.
Clean Personal Care Products
We must realize that the skin is the larges organ of the body and that whatever goes on the skin will usually go into the body in some form or fashion. I encourage you to, right now, get up and go get your shampoo, deodorant, make-up, toothpaste and perfume and cologne and magnifying glass and then begin to read the ingredients. How many can you pronounce? How many ingredients do you actually know what they are? Can you even read the ingredients? Most are in tiny fonts so that you will need a magnifying glass. These are products that you use on your skin and in your mouth on a daily basis, sometimes more than one time per day. Now add these chemicals to all the chemicals you ingest from your prepackaged foods. And we are constantly told that these chemicals will not harm the body. Please read my ebook Chemical Soup Your Health Under Siege
Clean Vitamins & Supplements
We are now to the point to where we must supplement our body with vitamins because our soils have been so compromised that we no longer get the vitamins and minerals that our body must have in order to maintain health and well being. We have companies that are marketing synthetic vitamins and doctors that are promoting them. They are inexpensive because they are synthetically derived and convenient since all the corner drug stores carry them. We even have some companies in the natural health industry that continue to put harmful excipients into their supplements along with misguiding customers as to how much product is really contained in each tablet or capsule.
So What are the Solutions?
At OAW we are all about answers and solutions. There is always hope and always answers. After reading all of the above it can make one want to throw up their hands in defeat. I am constantly asked What can we do to stop killing ourselves in the name of convenience?
My first recommendation is that we must realize that convenience does not equal no consequence especially when it comes to health and well being. We must take time for ourselve, time to nourish the mind, the body and the spirit. This cannot be done by driving up to a window and asking for a serving of each. It takes desire, discipline and determination and it is usually NOT convenient as it takes WORK.
The second thing is to continually research and educate yourself. I would suggest signing up for the FREE OAW monthly newsletter Advanced Health and Wellness where we offer up to date and cutting edge articles about natural medicine and getting healthy and staying healthy. There are other great natural health newsletters and information sites on the Internet.
The third recommendation would be to change your diet. I am convinced that IF people would change their diet to a healthy one, we would probably see at least three fourths of all disease diminish and or go away. Why do I say this? Because I have seen many clients get well by just changing their diet. A healthy diet does NOT include the following: white sugar, white flour, hydrogenated oils, grocery store dairy and meats, foods that are pre-packaged in cans, bags, etc., sugar drinks, tap water, GMO vegetables and fruit, baking powder with aluminum, table salt, irradiated or nitrate-containing meats and farmed seafood. If you want to get healthy, lose weight and stay healthy then I recommend our e-book Optimum Health Strategies Doing What Works at http://www.oasisadvancedwellness.com/products/optimum-ebook.html
If you are not healthy then, obviously, what you have been doing as far as life-style is concerned has not worked. The next recommendations would be exercising (walking) for 30 minutes every day, 30 minutes of sunshine on as much of the body as is legal, drinking half of your body weight in ounces of clean, pure water every day, making sure that your personal care products are all-natural and do not contain chemicals, organic excipient-free supplementation, alleviating stress and negative emotions and getting eight to ten hours of sleep every night.
The last recommendation I would make is to get off as many pharmaceutical drugs as you can. This is something that you will need the help of your doctor in accomplishing. However, the healthier that you get, the more likely you will not need pharmaceutical drugs. I am always amazed at the fact that when the body becomes healthy, the emotions also become healthy. When the body is not being controlled by chemical drugs, the emotions become healthy. The body does not get sick from a lack of pharmaceutical drugs which are toxic chemicals that only mask symptoms but NEVER get to the cause of the health concern.
Your mind and emotions are crucial to good health and well-being. If you are altering your mind with chemicals, of any kind, then the whole body suffers. Mind and mood altering drugs are not the answer for depression and anxiety. The answer lies in bringing the body into good health and well being and keeping it in this state. The answer lies in learning skills of how to address anger, depression, stress, anxiety and the issues of life.
We must learn to take responsibility for our own health and emotions. God has put within our body certain healing mechanisms; mechanisms that do not work well when chemicals are added. We must learn to be inconvenienced in order to put healing foods and water into our body. We must be willing to take the time necessary for ourselves; time to nourish our soul, time to physically nourish our body. Health matters! Just ask someone who has recently been diagnosed with a life threatening disease or illness.
We have witnessed a mass killing of innocent young people by a person who exhibited signs of needing help. Instead of being helped he was given a quick fix of mind-altering and personality altering drugs. This is also what happened at Columbine. This is almost always the case when a parent takes the lives of their children. Conventional medicine says the answer lies in a few pills, very convenient and no work involved. Just pop a pill and everything will be ok. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is NOT working. Until we decide to confront the REAL issues of getting harmful and addictive chemicals out of our lives, then we will continue to see the VA Tech episode repeated. It is time to take back our health from Big Pharma, Big Food and conventional medicine and to become responsible for our own health. We MUST do this if we are to continue to remember what good health and well-being consist of. The powers that be would love for us to forget. And many people have done just that.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Sunday, April 8, 2007
FDA Proposes Calling Irradiated Foods 'Pasteurized'
Frontier Natural Products Coop newsletter
April 6 2007
The Food and Drug Administration Tuesday suggested allowing the use of the term "pasteurized" to describe irradiated foods as part of its proposed easing of the rules on labeling of irradiated foods.
The proposed new rules would require irradiated food to be labeled only when the radiation treatment caused a material change to the product, such as changes to the taste, texture, smell or shelf life. In order to use the term "pasteurized" for irradiated products, companies would be required to show the FDA that the radiation kills germs as effectively as conventional pasteurization. Companies would also be able to petition the agency to use additional alternate terms other than "irradiated."
Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said, "This move by the FDA would deny consumers clear information about whether they are buying food that has been exposed to high doses of ionizing radiation." The FDA seemed to acknowledge that allowing alternative ways of describing irradiation would confuse consumers in their proposal: "Research indicates that many consumers regard substitute terms for irradiation to be misleading," but were not available for further comment.
The FDA posted the proposed rule changes on its Web site and will accept public comments on the proposal for 90 days. To view and comment on the proposal, go to the Regulations.gov search engine, enter "FDA-2007-0189-0001" in the Keyword or ID field (the other fields can be left as they are) and click Submit. In the two right-hand columns of the search results, you can click on icons to download a pdf of the document, view it online and make comments.
Editors note: Finding the pages for readers to view and comment on this proposal provided some interesting insights. I first went to fda.gov, where I couldn't find any mention of the proposed changes or how to comment on them. The search term "irradiation" returned 5440 results, the top three ("sorted by relevance") being 1)"Food Irradiation--A Safe Measure" (subheaded "Food Irradiation is a safe measure."), 2) "FDA/CFSAN Is food irradiation safe?" an excerpt from "Food Irradiation--A Safe Measure") and 3) "Irradiation: A Safe Measure For Safer Food." The A-Z index has one item under irradiation: "Food Irradiation--A Safe Measure." Through a series of less-than-intuitive links, I eventually found my way to www.regulations.gov and was able to track down the proposal and page for commenting.
###
Original story can be found here.
April 6 2007
The Food and Drug Administration Tuesday suggested allowing the use of the term "pasteurized" to describe irradiated foods as part of its proposed easing of the rules on labeling of irradiated foods.
The proposed new rules would require irradiated food to be labeled only when the radiation treatment caused a material change to the product, such as changes to the taste, texture, smell or shelf life. In order to use the term "pasteurized" for irradiated products, companies would be required to show the FDA that the radiation kills germs as effectively as conventional pasteurization. Companies would also be able to petition the agency to use additional alternate terms other than "irradiated."
Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said, "This move by the FDA would deny consumers clear information about whether they are buying food that has been exposed to high doses of ionizing radiation." The FDA seemed to acknowledge that allowing alternative ways of describing irradiation would confuse consumers in their proposal: "Research indicates that many consumers regard substitute terms for irradiation to be misleading," but were not available for further comment.
The FDA posted the proposed rule changes on its Web site and will accept public comments on the proposal for 90 days. To view and comment on the proposal, go to the Regulations.gov search engine, enter "FDA-2007-0189-0001" in the Keyword or ID field (the other fields can be left as they are) and click Submit. In the two right-hand columns of the search results, you can click on icons to download a pdf of the document, view it online and make comments.
Editors note: Finding the pages for readers to view and comment on this proposal provided some interesting insights. I first went to fda.gov, where I couldn't find any mention of the proposed changes or how to comment on them. The search term "irradiation" returned 5440 results, the top three ("sorted by relevance") being 1)"Food Irradiation--A Safe Measure" (subheaded "Food Irradiation is a safe measure."), 2) "FDA/CFSAN Is food irradiation safe?" an excerpt from "Food Irradiation--A Safe Measure") and 3) "Irradiation: A Safe Measure For Safer Food." The A-Z index has one item under irradiation: "Food Irradiation--A Safe Measure." Through a series of less-than-intuitive links, I eventually found my way to www.regulations.gov and was able to track down the proposal and page for commenting.
###
Original story can be found here.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
A Measure of Vindication for Wyeth
Unfortunately I just don't trust studies that seem to back a pharmaceutical company who has been trying to get the FDA to remove natural (bio-identical) hormones from being purchased without a prescription. These pharmaceutical giants have a lot of pull and it wouldn't be the first time that a study was skewed in their favor. While, seemingly, the WHI study now says that using synthetic hormones after menopause will not cause heart concerns, the biggest concern, like is said below, is the breast cancer issue. Our body does not get sick from a lack of pharmaceutical drugs.
It is concerning that the sales of synthetic hormones seem to be on the incline, if we can believe the figures. Most women are already on toxic over-load from all the chemicals in our food and water, not to mention the estrogenic effects from plastics and the environment. I suspect that since Wyeth was slapped in the face with the first results of the WHI, they have talked doctors into carrying on their mantra of "all you need is some estrogen and you will feel fine" by one-on-one contact with their patients.
Somehow, I just don't think that God intended that horse urine would help women with hormonal imbalance without causing other health concerns. But then Big Pharma usually thinks they know more than God.
by Jacob Goldstein - Wall Street Journal
All along, drug maker Wyeth has been the Big Pharma face of hormone replacement therapy. The companys drug Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, was used in one arm of the large study known as WHI that was halted because the drug increased the risk of heart attacks. The findings, published in 2002, rang a loud alarm over use of the drugs to ease the symptoms of menopause.
The WHI report crushed what had been the cornerstone of Wyeths pharmaceutical franchise. Even with a recent rebound, sales of Premarin, an estrogen-only pill, and Prempro are a far cry from their peak before the first results of the WHI study came out. In 2001, sales of the drugs topped $2.07 billion. By 2003, sales had fallen to $1.28 billion and declined in later years to less than $1 billion annually.
Still, Wyeth stood by the medicines. And demand has begun to creep up. World-wide sales of Premarin and Prempro medicines were $1.05 billion last year, a 16% increase from $909 million in 2005. Sales of Prempro alone were $239 million in 2006, down 1% from $242 million the year before.
Today, Wyeth said in a statement that the results should be reassuring about heart-attack risks for newly menopausal women.
So what does the new finding that HRT does not appear to raise the risk of heart disease for women in their 50s mean for the company? We asked Tara Parker-Pope, the Journals HRT maven, and author of the recently published book The Hormone Decision.
Here Is what she told us:
What is tricky here for Wyeth is that even if the pendulum is starting to swing back in favor of hormones, there remains a bit of a backlash against Premarin and Prempro. Both are made from horse urine, and a lot of women just do not want that. And Suzanne Somers crusade in favor of bioidentical hormones, custom-mixed hormones made from plants, has really had an effect on womens thinking.
In general, this latest finding is good news for Wyeth. It may be that finally the company does not have to hide from the Womens Health Initiative anymore; it can proudly declare that its products are the most-studied hormone drugs in history and now the government is saying that for most women who use them they are safe. After all, this latest data showed that 50 to 59 year old women had a 30% lower risk of dying if they used Premarin or Prempro and that finding was statistically significant. Wyeth has stayed the course amidst all its hormone troubles, but now I think the question is whether they can leverage this into better sales.
The biggest stumbling block may be the breast cancer issue. Most of the litigation over Prempro does not have to do with heart health, but instead relates to breast cancer. That is a harder battle to fight, because the data do show a link between combination hormone use and a slightly higher risk for breast cancer.
It is concerning that the sales of synthetic hormones seem to be on the incline, if we can believe the figures. Most women are already on toxic over-load from all the chemicals in our food and water, not to mention the estrogenic effects from plastics and the environment. I suspect that since Wyeth was slapped in the face with the first results of the WHI, they have talked doctors into carrying on their mantra of "all you need is some estrogen and you will feel fine" by one-on-one contact with their patients.
Somehow, I just don't think that God intended that horse urine would help women with hormonal imbalance without causing other health concerns. But then Big Pharma usually thinks they know more than God.
by Jacob Goldstein - Wall Street Journal
All along, drug maker Wyeth has been the Big Pharma face of hormone replacement therapy. The companys drug Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, was used in one arm of the large study known as WHI that was halted because the drug increased the risk of heart attacks. The findings, published in 2002, rang a loud alarm over use of the drugs to ease the symptoms of menopause.
The WHI report crushed what had been the cornerstone of Wyeths pharmaceutical franchise. Even with a recent rebound, sales of Premarin, an estrogen-only pill, and Prempro are a far cry from their peak before the first results of the WHI study came out. In 2001, sales of the drugs topped $2.07 billion. By 2003, sales had fallen to $1.28 billion and declined in later years to less than $1 billion annually.
Still, Wyeth stood by the medicines. And demand has begun to creep up. World-wide sales of Premarin and Prempro medicines were $1.05 billion last year, a 16% increase from $909 million in 2005. Sales of Prempro alone were $239 million in 2006, down 1% from $242 million the year before.
Today, Wyeth said in a statement that the results should be reassuring about heart-attack risks for newly menopausal women.
So what does the new finding that HRT does not appear to raise the risk of heart disease for women in their 50s mean for the company? We asked Tara Parker-Pope, the Journals HRT maven, and author of the recently published book The Hormone Decision.
Here Is what she told us:
What is tricky here for Wyeth is that even if the pendulum is starting to swing back in favor of hormones, there remains a bit of a backlash against Premarin and Prempro. Both are made from horse urine, and a lot of women just do not want that. And Suzanne Somers crusade in favor of bioidentical hormones, custom-mixed hormones made from plants, has really had an effect on womens thinking.
In general, this latest finding is good news for Wyeth. It may be that finally the company does not have to hide from the Womens Health Initiative anymore; it can proudly declare that its products are the most-studied hormone drugs in history and now the government is saying that for most women who use them they are safe. After all, this latest data showed that 50 to 59 year old women had a 30% lower risk of dying if they used Premarin or Prempro and that finding was statistically significant. Wyeth has stayed the course amidst all its hormone troubles, but now I think the question is whether they can leverage this into better sales.
The biggest stumbling block may be the breast cancer issue. Most of the litigation over Prempro does not have to do with heart health, but instead relates to breast cancer. That is a harder battle to fight, because the data do show a link between combination hormone use and a slightly higher risk for breast cancer.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Organic Consumers Association's Ronnie Cummins Tells The Truth About Organic Milk That Isn't
For those of us who were concerned when Wal-Mart announced their dive into the organic food industry, the situation has now played out to warrant that concern. The equation of Wal-Mart + organics just doesn't set right with me. What Wal-Mart didn't prepare for is that people who buy organic have usually done their homework. It is very difficult to pull-the-wool-over-the-eyes of organic consumers by cutting corners in order to make a profit. This very week Wal-Mart has decided to get out of the organic business. To that, I say Hooray! The big food conglomerates are trying very hard to smudge the meaning of organic. Why? Because they realize that they cannot make the money they are used to making by offering healthy food. And they realize that Americans are beginning to wake up to the toxic chemicals and junk that is being included in processed food--we are not consuming food, we are consuming chemicals. As the article states below more and more Americans prefer unadulterated food and why shouldn't we? Organic milk is just the beginning--
By: Mike Adams
http://www.newstarget.com/021763.html
Monday, April 02, 2007
With consumer demand for organic products continuing to grow, more large corporations are entering the organic market. To maximize profits, some of these companies don't follow organic standards but still label products as organic.
For example, Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic, sold by Wal-Mart and other retailers, continue to produce "organic" milk under factory-farm conditions that few reasonable people would consider truly organic.
According to the Organic Consumers Association, half of Horizon's "organic" milk today comes from what can only be considered "factory" dairy feedlots -- and much of Aurora's organic milk does as well. Rather than buy organic calves that have been raised from birth on organic farms, these companies seemed to have discovered it's cheaper to buy conventional calves that have been raised on conventional farms, install them in factory feedlots, then milk them and call it organic.
The situation has become so alarming that the Organic Consumers Association ultimately called for a boycott, and many knowledgeable consumers are now avoiding the Horizon brand entirely.
The organic milk controversy extends to organic soy milk as well. Horizon Organic's parent company, Dean Foods, also bought out Silk, the leading organic soy milk brand in the United States. Dean Foods has pushed for lower organic standards in the United States and to allow industrial-style production to be called "organic."
Meanwhile, major grocery chains import cheap, so-called "organic" soybeans from China, where the workers are treated much like slaves and organic standards are dubious. They are also imported from Brazil where the Amazon rainforest is being bulldozed in order to create more acreage for growing soybeans.
To gain more insight on the details of this emerging battle over organic standards, NewsTarget editor Mike Adams sat down with Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association for some straight talk on organic milk. What follows is the full interview.
Mike:
I am here today talking with Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association. That is at www.OrganicConsumers.org. What's the overview of the situation on organic milk, Ronnie?
Ronnie:
Well, the good news is, there is such a huge demand for organic products across the United States and North America that there is a serious shortage of supply. One of the types of products that are in serious short supply is organic milk. This is already more than a $1-billion-a-year industry in the United States, out of the $15 billion in organic food sales last year.
The problem is that our government - specifically the U. S. Department of Agriculture - takes about $90 billion of our tax money every year, and they give subsidies to all of these factory farms to go organic, but they give no subsidies to help family-scale dairies make the transition to organic. We literally do not have enough family farmers with the wherewithal to achieve organic certification and make the product.
At the same time, we have these giant retail giants like Wal-Mart who have noticed that the public wants organic food and they are willing to pay a premium price for it, so they and the other retail chain stores have moved with a vengeance to dominate the organic market. Wal-Mart is now the number-one seller of organic milk in the country. The problem is that the milk they are selling - Horizon Organic - is not really organic. It is coming from the factory-style dairy farms where the animals are kept in intensive confinement and have been imported from conventional farms as calves. They simply label it organic, and the USDA lets them get away with it.
Mike:
Let us get into more detail on that, because I want people to understand how they do an end-run around this organic label. First, do you agree that there is some degree of success in the fact that consumer demand for organic products is now so strong? Is that not a success by itself?
Ronnie:
It is a tremendous success. It is attributed to the fact that a lot of us spent the last 30 years building up an alternative food and farming system in the United States. This alternative system has proved to be much better than industrial agriculture, and so now the latest polls show 75 percent of Americans say they are shopping for healthier food. If you look at the statistics, about 12 cents of every grocery store dollar are going for foods that are labeled as either natural or organic.
Mike:
Well, that is a substantial sum. That is growing at, what, about 20 percent a year or something?
Ronnie:
Growing at 20 percent a year, whereas conventional food sales tend to grow about 2 percent a year. This 20 percent-a-year growth has been steady ever since 1991. It appears that it will continue through the end of this decade, so by then most food sold in grocery stores will have a label that says 'natural' or 'organic'.
The question is: If we let these gigantic corporations like Horizon and Wal-Mart take over the industry, will it really be organic?
How the USDA enables big business to corrupt organic standards for profit
Mike:
Let's talk about the definition of organic, then. What should organic really mean in terms of, not only the treatment of the cows, but also what chemicals are not in the milk, for example? What is the real definition?
Ronnie:
There are organic farmers all over the world - in about 100 countries - who are certified organic nowadays. Traditionally, organic has always meant that you raise crops without chemical pesticides or chemical fertilizers and that you raise animals without drugging them up with hormones or antibiotics. You cannot take sewage sludge and put it on farmlands. You cannot feed animals things like blood, slaughterhouse waste, manure and municipal garbage, and you cannot use untested and hazardous technologies like genetic engineering or fruit irradiation. The animals have to be raised on pasture - which is their natural behavior - where every day of the growing season, weather permitting, they are out on pasture eating grass and foraging as they have evolved to do.
What has happened recently is that Wal-Mart was buying their organic milk from genuine organic dairy farmers that pastured their animals, and then they turned around to that company - Organic Valley - and they said, "Hey, we want a lower price," just as Wal-Mart always does. Organic Valley said no, so Wal-Mart then turned to Dean Foods, the largest dairy conglomerate in the world - which had bought out Horizon Organic - and said, "Would you sell to us?" To which Horizon said, "We will sell you the cheapest organic milk you have ever seen."
Horizon conveniently took advantage of the fact that Federal Organic standards say the cows must have access to pasture, and they said, "Oh well, I guess theoretical access to pasture is good enough. We are going to chain up our cows and milk them three times a day, and they will never get out pasturing unless there is a news organization coming to the farm that day. We will still call it organic." They have been doing this for four years, and there have been complaints from the Organic Consumers Association and organic farmers all over the country.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has completely ignored these complaints for four years. However, now this controversy has reached such a state, with the mass media covering it and retail stores across the country starting to drop Horizon and Aurora Organic, that the USDA is finally making noises that they will clear up this situation and promulgate federal regulations that actually require the animals to be pastured.
They will make sure that the animals were not imported from some conventional dairy farm where they were weaned on blood, fed antibiotics, slaughterhouse waste and chicken manure and then called "organic." The animals must be raised from birth as organic, and they must be pastured every day during the growing season - a minimum of 120 days a year. This is what organic has always meant in terms of raising cows, and it is what it should mean now.
Mike:
Now, these are pretty serious accusations of Horizon Milk or Dean Foods' behavior. How are you able to support this? Do you have an insider taking pictures, or how did you become aware of this behavior on their part?
Ronnie:
It was called to our attention by a watchdog organization called The Cornucopia Institute, which actually visited some of these factory-style dairy farms that Horizon and Aurora call organic. They witnessed first-hand things like a farm where there are 4,000 animals, but only a few hundred acres of pasture. You cannot possibly pasture animals on that little pasture, especially when they are in semi-arid parts of Idaho, Colorado and West Texas.
Then beyond that, workers on these farms started coming forth as whistleblowers. There was a story in the Chicago Tribune about one of these whistleblowers who pointed out that these cows are not put out to pasture. The only time they are put out to pasture is when there is a media organization or an important person coming out.
Yes, it is first-hand information. It is a look at the terrain that these factory-style dairy feedlots are set on. Look at the size of their pasture, and then the fact that there was a national survey of organic dairy farms that came out March 22 - which the unethical dairies did not respond to or they got really low ranks - whereas, the ethical producers were happy to be transparent about their practices.
The good news is, almost all the organic farmers in the country are actually practicing real organic standards. The bad news is that the market leader, Horizon Organic, and their junior partner, Aurora Organic, are flagrantly violating organic standards to the point where we, the Organic Consumers Association, had to call for a boycott. We have never called for a boycott against an organic product before. This was going too far, so starting in early April, we called on consumers across the country to start boycotting the products of Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic, and to boycott the brand names that the leading retailers are selling from Horizon and Aurora at Wal-Mart, Costco, Safeway, Giant, Publix and Wild Oats.
Mike:
Well, this seems like a clear case in which big business is now seeing dollar signs whenever the word "organic" appears, so they are doing the minimum necessary or even just blatantly violating the rules in order to put that word on their products, regardless of the spirit of the law or the original intent of organics. Is this just corporate greed?
Ronnie:
This is, and the sad thing is, how easy it would be to help 5,000 or 10,000 conventional family farmers make the transition in their dairies to organic. It would not be that hard. It would not cost that much money, and this way we could still have organic standards that were real, animals treated humanely and not damage the environment.
Of course, we have not even mentioned that one of the reasons you want organic animals to be outdoors and pastured is because the quality of the meat and milk is much higher if the animals are raised naturally on grass. The other organic requirements mean that the end product is going to be healthier as well.
They are not going to have antibiotic residues or genetically engineered hormones. They are not going to be spreading mad cow disease and so on. We, right now in the United States, have an excess of milk being produced by family-scale dairy farmers who are not yet organic. It would be very simple to help those who want to make the transition do so if we were to force the government to give us a fair share of our subsidies to help these farmers do that.
Lax standards of corporate manufacturers and retailers affect both organic milk and soymilk products
Mike:
Now, you mentioned that pasture-fed cows are healthier cows. This gets back to something you mentioned earlier that needs to be emphasized, because most people simply do not believe this is happening. Conventional cows, in fact, are being fed chicken litter and other animals.
Ronnie:
Yes, they take it from birth. Cows were traditionally weaned on their mother's milk, but industrial agriculture figured out that it's pretty expensive to wean the calves on milk, so they decided to wean them on blood. That is common practice nowadays on a conventional dairy farm. Then, you feed them primarily grains that are genetically engineered, but mixed in with those grains are things that make the animals grow faster and put on weight, like slaughterhouse waste - basically ground up pigs, chickens, dogs, cats and everything else are
fed to them.
They found out all these factory poultry farms around the country were producing billions of pounds of manure that pollute the environment. What can we do with all this manure? Presto, they feed it back to cows. They sweep up the manure, the feathers and the dropped bits of cattle that are fed to chickens in their feed. They sweep that all up, turn around and feed it back to cows.
Most people in the United States are shocked when they hear that 80 percent of the drugs and antibiotics made in this country are not fed to humans to cure them of some illness, but fed to animals in their feed every day to make them grow faster. Scientists do not totally understand why, but they do know that if you cram thousands of animals together in unsanitary or unhygienic - not to mention inhumane - conditions, they all get sick and die.
The only way to keep them alive is to constantly feed them antibiotics. Of course, what that means is you turn around and drink a glass of dairy milk from a conventional farm, and you are getting residues of antibiotics in every drink. They also figured out, "We could use our genetically engineered hormone to shoot up these cows with this hormone produced by Monsanto, even though it is banned in just about every industrialized country in the world except for the United States." If you shoot up dairy cows with this hormone, you can force them to give more milk, and you can keep milking them even past their lactation period. You can actually milk a cow not for a year, but for up to a thousand days. Of course, the cow will drop dead after that, but they do not care.
For all these reasons, there is a huge movement on the part of American consumers and especially concerned parents and concerned grandparents - if they drink milk and if their kids and grandparents drink - to switch to organic.
Mike:
Is it fair to say, Ronnie, that the organic-labeled Horizon Milk on the shelves in Wal-Mart right now comes, at least in part, from cows that were at one point in their lives fed blood, manure, chicken litter and some other things you mentioned? Is that accurate?
Ronnie:
Yes, half of Horizon Organic's milk today comes from these factory dairy feedlots. One hundred percent of Aurora Organic's milk comes from these factory dairy feedlots. It is cheaper to not buy organic calves that have been raised from birth on an organic farm, but to buy conventional calves that have been raised as cheaply as possible on a conventional farm. The routine practice today on a conventional farm is feeding the animals blood plasma as a milk replacer.
You feed them genetically engineered grains, slaughterhouse waste and chicken manure. That is industry standard. Why? You can make more money doing it that way.
Mike:
Okay, so for those reading this, take a closer look at that bowl of cereal next time. If you are pouring cow's milk in there, you might want to buy genuine organic and not the cheap stuff.
Ronnie:
Here is another point that you might think about: for those people who do not drink dairy milk, but who buy organic soy milk, the leading organic soy milk brand in the United States is Silk. Many consumers have no idea that Silk - just like Horizon Organic Milk - was bought out by this giant conglomerate, Dean Foods.
Silk used to buy their organic soybeans from U.S. and Canadian organic soybean farmers, and they paid them a decent price - $16 to $21 a bushel - for these organic soybeans. Well, now that Dean Foods has bought out Silk, they are starting to import cheap, so-called organic soybeans from China, where the workers are treated like slaves and organic standards are dubious. Or, they are importing soybeans from Brazil where there is a huge uproar over the fact that
people are whacking down the Amazon - the lungs of the planet - in order to plant export crops, specifically soybeans, to export.
Even if we think this does not affect us, because we do not eat meat or we do not eat dairy, we have to see the effect of these big corporations like Dean Foods coming into organic. Wal-Mart wants to sell you stuff that is cheaper than their competitors, and the only way they can do that is to outsource it from overseas - places like China and Brazil - where worker rights and
environmental standards are routinely violated, or else lower standards in the United States and allow industrial-style production to call itself organic.
Mike:
Now, this is obviously a very important story for consumers to follow. How can they continue to get updates from you on this story?
Ronnie:
Every day on our news site, www.OrganicConsumers.org you will find updates. We have a whole section of our website called "Safeguard Organic Standards," where you can take action and send a message to what we are calling the "Shameless Seven." These are the large corporations trying to defraud consumers and put ethical organic farmers out of business by labeling factory farm production - and slave labor production, in the case of China - as organic.
Mike:
I want to thank you, Ronnie, for taking the time to give us all of this shocking information today.
Ronnie:
Thank you.
Related Resources
Organic Consumers Association ( www.organicconsumers.org )
The Cornucopia Institute ( www.cornucopia.org )
USDA's National Organic Program ( http://www.ams.usda.gov/NOP )
By: Mike Adams
http://www.newstarget.com/021763.html
Monday, April 02, 2007
With consumer demand for organic products continuing to grow, more large corporations are entering the organic market. To maximize profits, some of these companies don't follow organic standards but still label products as organic.
For example, Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic, sold by Wal-Mart and other retailers, continue to produce "organic" milk under factory-farm conditions that few reasonable people would consider truly organic.
According to the Organic Consumers Association, half of Horizon's "organic" milk today comes from what can only be considered "factory" dairy feedlots -- and much of Aurora's organic milk does as well. Rather than buy organic calves that have been raised from birth on organic farms, these companies seemed to have discovered it's cheaper to buy conventional calves that have been raised on conventional farms, install them in factory feedlots, then milk them and call it organic.
The situation has become so alarming that the Organic Consumers Association ultimately called for a boycott, and many knowledgeable consumers are now avoiding the Horizon brand entirely.
The organic milk controversy extends to organic soy milk as well. Horizon Organic's parent company, Dean Foods, also bought out Silk, the leading organic soy milk brand in the United States. Dean Foods has pushed for lower organic standards in the United States and to allow industrial-style production to be called "organic."
Meanwhile, major grocery chains import cheap, so-called "organic" soybeans from China, where the workers are treated much like slaves and organic standards are dubious. They are also imported from Brazil where the Amazon rainforest is being bulldozed in order to create more acreage for growing soybeans.
To gain more insight on the details of this emerging battle over organic standards, NewsTarget editor Mike Adams sat down with Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association for some straight talk on organic milk. What follows is the full interview.
Mike:
I am here today talking with Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association. That is at www.OrganicConsumers.org. What's the overview of the situation on organic milk, Ronnie?
Ronnie:
Well, the good news is, there is such a huge demand for organic products across the United States and North America that there is a serious shortage of supply. One of the types of products that are in serious short supply is organic milk. This is already more than a $1-billion-a-year industry in the United States, out of the $15 billion in organic food sales last year.
The problem is that our government - specifically the U. S. Department of Agriculture - takes about $90 billion of our tax money every year, and they give subsidies to all of these factory farms to go organic, but they give no subsidies to help family-scale dairies make the transition to organic. We literally do not have enough family farmers with the wherewithal to achieve organic certification and make the product.
At the same time, we have these giant retail giants like Wal-Mart who have noticed that the public wants organic food and they are willing to pay a premium price for it, so they and the other retail chain stores have moved with a vengeance to dominate the organic market. Wal-Mart is now the number-one seller of organic milk in the country. The problem is that the milk they are selling - Horizon Organic - is not really organic. It is coming from the factory-style dairy farms where the animals are kept in intensive confinement and have been imported from conventional farms as calves. They simply label it organic, and the USDA lets them get away with it.
Mike:
Let us get into more detail on that, because I want people to understand how they do an end-run around this organic label. First, do you agree that there is some degree of success in the fact that consumer demand for organic products is now so strong? Is that not a success by itself?
Ronnie:
It is a tremendous success. It is attributed to the fact that a lot of us spent the last 30 years building up an alternative food and farming system in the United States. This alternative system has proved to be much better than industrial agriculture, and so now the latest polls show 75 percent of Americans say they are shopping for healthier food. If you look at the statistics, about 12 cents of every grocery store dollar are going for foods that are labeled as either natural or organic.
Mike:
Well, that is a substantial sum. That is growing at, what, about 20 percent a year or something?
Ronnie:
Growing at 20 percent a year, whereas conventional food sales tend to grow about 2 percent a year. This 20 percent-a-year growth has been steady ever since 1991. It appears that it will continue through the end of this decade, so by then most food sold in grocery stores will have a label that says 'natural' or 'organic'.
The question is: If we let these gigantic corporations like Horizon and Wal-Mart take over the industry, will it really be organic?
How the USDA enables big business to corrupt organic standards for profit
Mike:
Let's talk about the definition of organic, then. What should organic really mean in terms of, not only the treatment of the cows, but also what chemicals are not in the milk, for example? What is the real definition?
Ronnie:
There are organic farmers all over the world - in about 100 countries - who are certified organic nowadays. Traditionally, organic has always meant that you raise crops without chemical pesticides or chemical fertilizers and that you raise animals without drugging them up with hormones or antibiotics. You cannot take sewage sludge and put it on farmlands. You cannot feed animals things like blood, slaughterhouse waste, manure and municipal garbage, and you cannot use untested and hazardous technologies like genetic engineering or fruit irradiation. The animals have to be raised on pasture - which is their natural behavior - where every day of the growing season, weather permitting, they are out on pasture eating grass and foraging as they have evolved to do.
What has happened recently is that Wal-Mart was buying their organic milk from genuine organic dairy farmers that pastured their animals, and then they turned around to that company - Organic Valley - and they said, "Hey, we want a lower price," just as Wal-Mart always does. Organic Valley said no, so Wal-Mart then turned to Dean Foods, the largest dairy conglomerate in the world - which had bought out Horizon Organic - and said, "Would you sell to us?" To which Horizon said, "We will sell you the cheapest organic milk you have ever seen."
Horizon conveniently took advantage of the fact that Federal Organic standards say the cows must have access to pasture, and they said, "Oh well, I guess theoretical access to pasture is good enough. We are going to chain up our cows and milk them three times a day, and they will never get out pasturing unless there is a news organization coming to the farm that day. We will still call it organic." They have been doing this for four years, and there have been complaints from the Organic Consumers Association and organic farmers all over the country.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has completely ignored these complaints for four years. However, now this controversy has reached such a state, with the mass media covering it and retail stores across the country starting to drop Horizon and Aurora Organic, that the USDA is finally making noises that they will clear up this situation and promulgate federal regulations that actually require the animals to be pastured.
They will make sure that the animals were not imported from some conventional dairy farm where they were weaned on blood, fed antibiotics, slaughterhouse waste and chicken manure and then called "organic." The animals must be raised from birth as organic, and they must be pastured every day during the growing season - a minimum of 120 days a year. This is what organic has always meant in terms of raising cows, and it is what it should mean now.
Mike:
Now, these are pretty serious accusations of Horizon Milk or Dean Foods' behavior. How are you able to support this? Do you have an insider taking pictures, or how did you become aware of this behavior on their part?
Ronnie:
It was called to our attention by a watchdog organization called The Cornucopia Institute, which actually visited some of these factory-style dairy farms that Horizon and Aurora call organic. They witnessed first-hand things like a farm where there are 4,000 animals, but only a few hundred acres of pasture. You cannot possibly pasture animals on that little pasture, especially when they are in semi-arid parts of Idaho, Colorado and West Texas.
Then beyond that, workers on these farms started coming forth as whistleblowers. There was a story in the Chicago Tribune about one of these whistleblowers who pointed out that these cows are not put out to pasture. The only time they are put out to pasture is when there is a media organization or an important person coming out.
Yes, it is first-hand information. It is a look at the terrain that these factory-style dairy feedlots are set on. Look at the size of their pasture, and then the fact that there was a national survey of organic dairy farms that came out March 22 - which the unethical dairies did not respond to or they got really low ranks - whereas, the ethical producers were happy to be transparent about their practices.
The good news is, almost all the organic farmers in the country are actually practicing real organic standards. The bad news is that the market leader, Horizon Organic, and their junior partner, Aurora Organic, are flagrantly violating organic standards to the point where we, the Organic Consumers Association, had to call for a boycott. We have never called for a boycott against an organic product before. This was going too far, so starting in early April, we called on consumers across the country to start boycotting the products of Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic, and to boycott the brand names that the leading retailers are selling from Horizon and Aurora at Wal-Mart, Costco, Safeway, Giant, Publix and Wild Oats.
Mike:
Well, this seems like a clear case in which big business is now seeing dollar signs whenever the word "organic" appears, so they are doing the minimum necessary or even just blatantly violating the rules in order to put that word on their products, regardless of the spirit of the law or the original intent of organics. Is this just corporate greed?
Ronnie:
This is, and the sad thing is, how easy it would be to help 5,000 or 10,000 conventional family farmers make the transition in their dairies to organic. It would not be that hard. It would not cost that much money, and this way we could still have organic standards that were real, animals treated humanely and not damage the environment.
Of course, we have not even mentioned that one of the reasons you want organic animals to be outdoors and pastured is because the quality of the meat and milk is much higher if the animals are raised naturally on grass. The other organic requirements mean that the end product is going to be healthier as well.
They are not going to have antibiotic residues or genetically engineered hormones. They are not going to be spreading mad cow disease and so on. We, right now in the United States, have an excess of milk being produced by family-scale dairy farmers who are not yet organic. It would be very simple to help those who want to make the transition do so if we were to force the government to give us a fair share of our subsidies to help these farmers do that.
Lax standards of corporate manufacturers and retailers affect both organic milk and soymilk products
Mike:
Now, you mentioned that pasture-fed cows are healthier cows. This gets back to something you mentioned earlier that needs to be emphasized, because most people simply do not believe this is happening. Conventional cows, in fact, are being fed chicken litter and other animals.
Ronnie:
Yes, they take it from birth. Cows were traditionally weaned on their mother's milk, but industrial agriculture figured out that it's pretty expensive to wean the calves on milk, so they decided to wean them on blood. That is common practice nowadays on a conventional dairy farm. Then, you feed them primarily grains that are genetically engineered, but mixed in with those grains are things that make the animals grow faster and put on weight, like slaughterhouse waste - basically ground up pigs, chickens, dogs, cats and everything else are
fed to them.
They found out all these factory poultry farms around the country were producing billions of pounds of manure that pollute the environment. What can we do with all this manure? Presto, they feed it back to cows. They sweep up the manure, the feathers and the dropped bits of cattle that are fed to chickens in their feed. They sweep that all up, turn around and feed it back to cows.
Most people in the United States are shocked when they hear that 80 percent of the drugs and antibiotics made in this country are not fed to humans to cure them of some illness, but fed to animals in their feed every day to make them grow faster. Scientists do not totally understand why, but they do know that if you cram thousands of animals together in unsanitary or unhygienic - not to mention inhumane - conditions, they all get sick and die.
The only way to keep them alive is to constantly feed them antibiotics. Of course, what that means is you turn around and drink a glass of dairy milk from a conventional farm, and you are getting residues of antibiotics in every drink. They also figured out, "We could use our genetically engineered hormone to shoot up these cows with this hormone produced by Monsanto, even though it is banned in just about every industrialized country in the world except for the United States." If you shoot up dairy cows with this hormone, you can force them to give more milk, and you can keep milking them even past their lactation period. You can actually milk a cow not for a year, but for up to a thousand days. Of course, the cow will drop dead after that, but they do not care.
For all these reasons, there is a huge movement on the part of American consumers and especially concerned parents and concerned grandparents - if they drink milk and if their kids and grandparents drink - to switch to organic.
Mike:
Is it fair to say, Ronnie, that the organic-labeled Horizon Milk on the shelves in Wal-Mart right now comes, at least in part, from cows that were at one point in their lives fed blood, manure, chicken litter and some other things you mentioned? Is that accurate?
Ronnie:
Yes, half of Horizon Organic's milk today comes from these factory dairy feedlots. One hundred percent of Aurora Organic's milk comes from these factory dairy feedlots. It is cheaper to not buy organic calves that have been raised from birth on an organic farm, but to buy conventional calves that have been raised as cheaply as possible on a conventional farm. The routine practice today on a conventional farm is feeding the animals blood plasma as a milk replacer.
You feed them genetically engineered grains, slaughterhouse waste and chicken manure. That is industry standard. Why? You can make more money doing it that way.
Mike:
Okay, so for those reading this, take a closer look at that bowl of cereal next time. If you are pouring cow's milk in there, you might want to buy genuine organic and not the cheap stuff.
Ronnie:
Here is another point that you might think about: for those people who do not drink dairy milk, but who buy organic soy milk, the leading organic soy milk brand in the United States is Silk. Many consumers have no idea that Silk - just like Horizon Organic Milk - was bought out by this giant conglomerate, Dean Foods.
Silk used to buy their organic soybeans from U.S. and Canadian organic soybean farmers, and they paid them a decent price - $16 to $21 a bushel - for these organic soybeans. Well, now that Dean Foods has bought out Silk, they are starting to import cheap, so-called organic soybeans from China, where the workers are treated like slaves and organic standards are dubious. Or, they are importing soybeans from Brazil where there is a huge uproar over the fact that
people are whacking down the Amazon - the lungs of the planet - in order to plant export crops, specifically soybeans, to export.
Even if we think this does not affect us, because we do not eat meat or we do not eat dairy, we have to see the effect of these big corporations like Dean Foods coming into organic. Wal-Mart wants to sell you stuff that is cheaper than their competitors, and the only way they can do that is to outsource it from overseas - places like China and Brazil - where worker rights and
environmental standards are routinely violated, or else lower standards in the United States and allow industrial-style production to call itself organic.
Mike:
Now, this is obviously a very important story for consumers to follow. How can they continue to get updates from you on this story?
Ronnie:
Every day on our news site, www.OrganicConsumers.org you will find updates. We have a whole section of our website called "Safeguard Organic Standards," where you can take action and send a message to what we are calling the "Shameless Seven." These are the large corporations trying to defraud consumers and put ethical organic farmers out of business by labeling factory farm production - and slave labor production, in the case of China - as organic.
Mike:
I want to thank you, Ronnie, for taking the time to give us all of this shocking information today.
Ronnie:
Thank you.
Related Resources
Organic Consumers Association ( www.organicconsumers.org )
The Cornucopia Institute ( www.cornucopia.org )
USDA's National Organic Program ( http://www.ams.usda.gov/NOP )
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