Food Fight

I had the idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then kill it and eat it.

(The true definition of Food Fight!)

Watching the FDA trip over its own clumsy self while groping for answers on Salmonella is a sad affair. Following the FDA-encouraged destruction of tens of millions of dollars of perfectly good tomatoes, this confused, bewildered agency admits that tomatoes may not have been the problem after all, and it has now set its sights on destroying the peppers industry. Is there no vegetable safe from the destruction of the FDA?

The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?

Before we take a look at some of the best and worst foods for your heart, let's make one point clear: a healthy heart is useless without several other well functioning organ systems.  Assuming that all these components in your body are functional, here are some of the best foods for your heart and blood vessels.

The United Nations recently announced a task force to tackle the global food crisis and avoid what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called “social unrest on an unprecedented scale.” Are you hopeful or do you feel that it is too little, too late?

I decided to share my opinions on vegetarianism because in my career I have worked with many unhealthy vegetarians. Often my vegetarian patients were in need of animal nutrition yet, for the above reasons were initially resistant to my suggested inclusion of animal foods for regaining their health.

Despite advances in technology and medicine, and our high quality of life, Americans’ life expectancy has fallen to over 20 years behind other developed countries. And with U.S. obesity rates on a steady incline, it’s only going to get worse. In fact, it’s reaching epidemic proportions. If this catastrophic trend is not reversed quickly, you will, for the first time in history, see children with normal life spans lower than their parents.

At the University of Minnesota, epidemiologist David R. Jacobs has found that those who ate whole-grain products daily had about a 15 percent to 25 percent reduction in death from all causes, including heart disease and cancer (The Washington Post: 8-4-99). This finding is in keeping with guidelines by the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, who would all like to see an increased consumption of whole-grain foods to at least three servings per day.

The cold hard truth is consuming pork and shellfish regularly can guarantee you an early trip to the grave. Pork and shellfish rank near the top of the list as some of the worst foods you can put into your body right along with trans fats, refined sugar, and artificial sweeteners.

The scandal of imported products from Communist China has accelerated to a level that the public should demand "China-free" labels on anything that goes into a mouth. This includes not only food, vitamins and medicines but toothpaste and toys which, as all parents know, go into children's mouths.