Author: Danielle Moore (Page 2 of 2)

I follow a lot of health/environmental pages on Facebook (my favorite definitely being March Against Monsanto, it’s wonderful) and today I was scrolling and found this recipe for sustainable deodorant. While it’s a short article and I have a few weeks until I can try it (I have quite the supply of coconut oil at home, so I’m pretty pumped, it’s a wonderful butter substitute) it definitely made me think.

When we think about animal products, it’s typically in the form of food. Yet many of our day to day products especially beauty products originate from animals. This combined with the fact that people still use animal testing leads to a lot of harm towards our very own ecosystem. Using plant based materials rather than animal ones even in something as simple as deodorant allows us to solve human problems without ruining other lives.

Learn to Make Non-Toxic, Long-Lasting, Organic Deodorant

Over the past two days, I watched the documentary “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead”. It starts out with Joe Cross, a man who is 100 pounds overweight and struggling with an autoimmune disease. He notices how dependent he has become on medications and how poorly he eats, and realizes that a healthier diet could aid him with both his weight and disease. This jumpstarts his sixty day fast, whee he consumes nothing but juice made from natural fruits and vegetables. Not only does he lose over eighty pounds in that time, but he feels more energy and does not need to take his medications. This inspires him to spread the word of juicing, which leads into the story of Phil Staples.

Cross is traveling around the country sharing his success when he runs into Phil Staples. Staples is a 429 pound truck driver who has been living on fast food and living with the same rare disease as Cross. After years of knowing no one with this condition, it was incredible how the paths of these two men met. Staples tries some of Cross’s juice, and the two men exchange numbers with Cross offering to help Staples at any time. Months later, Cross is home in Australia when he receives a terrifying phone call from Staples, who is “one cheeseburger away from death”. Cross shows Staples the way in terms of regaining his health, and for the first time in years Staples is able to enjoy time with his son and have a regulated healthy diet.

This documentary was striking to me for several reasons. On a personal note, I have also used fruits and vegetables in order to “cure” a disease typically cared for by medications. For the last few years, I have suffered from asthma-like symptoms, which has made my athletic career rather difficult. After going on an inhaler and seeing improvement in my breathing, I wasn’t paticularlly worried about my health. Then my dad happened to hear over the radio that many people are misdiagnosed with asthma when truly they are suffering from too much acid in their diet. This forced me to reevaluate what I was eating and gave me the opportunity to cut out processed food and focus more on fruits and vegetables with some grains mixed in. This plus exercise led me to lose 15 pounds and feel healthier than I have in years. I also had mild stomach problems when I was very young, and I noticed that the foods I was supposed to eat were the same regardless of what health issue I was dealing with. This just shows how important fruits and vegetables are to the human diet and how much healthier and better off the human race would be if we all cut out the bad stuff and focused on foods made by the sun.

I remember reading this article over the summer, and since it was brought up in class I figured I’d revisit this awful chart of just how controlled America’s food supply is by corporations.

Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting Hershey Park, which reminded me of just how consolidated many food businesses are- for cheap, average quality chocolate, the American (and at this point, any) consumer has the choice between Hershey, Nestle, or Mars, which is controlled by Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Mars, all of which control far more than bars of candy. While marketing has allowed for there to seem like there are thousands of different “brands” it is in fact only ten to twelve massive companies duking it out for the billions of dollars exchanged in the market every day.

This market structure forces the consumer to surrender power in several different ways. First of all, the marketing strategy of creating sub brands makes the consumer think they have economic power at the shelves, when truly they are supporting the same company whether they decide to buy Skittles or Uncle Ben’s rice. Not only does this destroy true competition, but the consumer has no idea of what processes their food went through before ending up in the brightly colored bag or box shouting at them from the shelves. This is detrimental to the health and well being of the consumer, since the same companies are being forked over money to companies to continue to poison the people and the environment.

On a relevant topic to class, it’s shocking how many of these foods are driven by the existence of high fructose corn syrup (and in turn corn). If it weren’t for this thick, sticky product, most of these corporate giants would not have the economic muscles they are able to flex today. Without high fructose corn syrup, sodas, candies, and other products would not be the same, and would most likely be more expensive and therefore not a commodity with the rock-bottom prices the consumer is used to today.

Overall, it’s shocking on both an economic and environmental level how controlled the supermarket is by so few corporations. The patterns of horizontal and vertical integration have followed through on more than agriculture and are invasive to the market we’re used to today.

http://www.ryot.org/food-corporations-chart-all-your-food/756513