Sickening Profits — The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth

Via Off-Guardian

The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.

It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. For them, it’s a win-win situation.

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JUST PADDLING WHILE THE EMPIRE BURNS

The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” is an intriguing idiom, referencing the great fire which ravaged Rome for six days in 64 A.D. and the legend that Nero, one of the most sadistic, decadent, and cruel rulers of all-time, instead of taking action to stop the fire, played his lyre while composing a song about Rome’s destruction. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Nero was rumored to have sung about the destruction of Rome while watching the city burn but it’s likely this was just a myth.

The fire destroyed seventy percent of the city and left half the population homeless. There are those who believe Nero set the fire on purpose, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. Being a soulless autocrat at heart, Nero did what all feckless politicians do, he blamed the Christians (an obscure religious sect at the time) for the fire and had many arrested and executed.

Bill Kristol on Twitter: "1952 years ago: Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Today: GOP bigs fiddle while the Republican Party burns. https://t.co/gnFUu1MoaJ" / Twitter

Whether this story is true or just a parable, the messages are pertinent throughout history, and never more so than now. Occupying one’s time doing inconsequential things while a catastrophic event is underway is the ultimate in leadership failure. Focusing on trivial matters while your people are suffering during a time of crisis is the mark of an ineffectual irresponsible leader or one whose true purpose is to burn down society so it can be “built back better” in the form of a communist totalitarian state ruled by a globalist elite cabal.

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ARE YOU FATTER THAN A 5TH GRADER?

After viewing these charts and the data presented, it is clear the obesity epidemic has been purposely created by the mega-corporation purveyors of toxic processed food, with the cooperation and support of the mega-corporation media/advertising/propaganda entities, and the silent consent of parents across the nation. Parents are so frightened their little cherubs will be killed, molested, or abducted (taught to fear by the government control freaks), they don’t allow them to venture out of their houses (tombs) into their suburban paradises. Kids don’t ride bikes, play in the woods, dam up creeks, play hide and go seek, or start their own pick-up games of baseball, basketball, football or street hockey. Riding your bike to school is unheard of. Parents drive their kids five houses down to the bus stop in their monster leased SUVs.

Letting TV raise your children, letting fast food mega-corporations and mega-corporation food companies poison your children with toxic processed crap peddled on TV, locking your children in all-day holding pens with minimum wage workers, and shuttling them around in one of your three leased vehicles to organized sports events where they receive trophies for finishing in 6th place, is the ultimate in failing them.

Look around. Failure is everywhere. We are a failed nation, but we think we’re winners. How pathetic.

Via Marketwatch

There’s no question that America’s youth is fatter than ever: Obesity rates have more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But what’s behind this supersizing of our kids? And what can be done to stop it? One of the latest targets is the school bake sale — yes, the tradition of selling cookies and cakes to support any number of school programs. As the Michelle Obama-inspired Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act goes into effect, it’s prompting some school authorities to curb bake sales to comply with the tighter rules regarding food in educational settings. But to hear obesity experts tell it, selling treats to benefit the band program may not be the only issue at hand. Here are six charts and tables that speak to what experts say could be the real culprit.

Charles Passy

Americans are now consuming more than 30 times the amount of sugar they did three centuries ago — some 132 pounds per person per year. And children are no exception. In fact, the Mayo Clinic reports that 16% of the total calories in kids’ diets comes from added sugar — well beyond the recommended 5% to 15% range. The problem, says the Mayo Clinic, is that “added sugar means empty calories (no nutrients beyond calories) that put kids at risk of obesity.” Even more worrisome, says James Greenblatt, chief medical officer at Walden Behavioral Care, a group of treatment centers that specialize in eating disorders, is that sugar is essentially addictive. That’s especially true of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup, Greenblatt adds: “The more you consume, the more you want.”

Having a sweet tooth is one thing. But having an appetite for processed and fast foods may be the bigger problem. These days, children are getting the majority of their calories from items like pizza and burgers, not from healthier fare that can help keep their weight down. Even worse, says Wendy Scinta, a board-certified bariatric physician, is that lists like this show that kids are not eating many of their meals at home in a family setting. “We eat in our cars, in front of the TV, while texting, etc.,” she says. Such social isolation, says Scinta, only contributes to the obesity problem.

American households are watching more than eight hours of TV a day — a sizable increase from a couple of generations ago. (In the early 1960s, viewership averaged five hours a day.) The issue is that more time in front of the TV means less time engaging in physical activities, say obesity experts. Caroline Cederquist, http://www.bistromd.com/our-story/meet-the-foodie-and-the-md co-founder and medical director of bistroMD, a weight-loss meal plan, points to research that shows that adolescent boys who watch several shows per day are twice as likely to have insulin resistance, which is correlated with weight gain and can lead to a host of serious medical problems, including diabetes. Look at the household viewing numbers and Cederquist points to a further troubling reality: “The American child spends more time watching TV than he or she does in school.”

It’s one thing that children may not be getting enough exercise. But apparently, even how they get to school could be contributing to the obesity epidemic, say researchers. They point to the fact that over the past 40 years, kids are far less likely to take their bikes or walk and far more likely to hop into the backseat of the mom (or dad)-mobile. And even that little bit of daily exercise counts for something, says Claudia Borzutzky, medical director of the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Empower Weight Management Clinic. In turn, the math becomes simple: “More calories in + less calories out = greater accumulation of weight,” says Borzutzky.

If it sometimes seems as if our kids’ eyes are too big for their stomachs, perhaps it’s not their fault. The fact remains portion sizes have dramatically increased since the 1950s — a situation the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dubbed “The new (ab)normal” , saying the connection between serving size and our expanding waistline can’t be overlooked. The CDC goes so far as to encourage diners to “ask the managers at…restaurants to offer smaller meals.”

Aside from being confronted with larger portion sizes, children are also being confronted with advertising for fast-food chains — lots and lots of it. And the numbers keep growing — up 8% to $4.63 billion in 2012 versus 2009, according to Nielsen. Critics of the fast-food industry argue that all this promotion leads to more poundage . There is “the need for continued concern about potential negative effects of fast food marketing on the diets of children and teens,” says the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity in a recent report.