The Good Food Guide: A Handbook For Healthy Eating

Today, in America, we congratulate ourselves for enjoying what we believe to be abundance and good fortune.  We live relatively long lives, food is inexpensive and plentiful and resources of every imaginable kind are available to us on every corner.  Certainly we are the envy of all our world neighbors – or are we?

While we no longer fall ill from the deadly effects of smallpox – or even the inconvenience of chicken pox, for that matter – we are grotesquely obese, and suffering from all manner of autoimmune disorders and degenerative disease.  Diabetes, heart disease, asthma, autism, infertility and allergies have reached epidemic proportions.  Yet we continue to demand drugs to treat the symptoms of these illnesses without stopping to consider their underlying causes – many of which are as plain as the type on our food labels. 

Meanwhile, we shuttle our kids from one activity to another all the while feeding them an abundance of processed food that yields nominal nutritional value and contains excessive sweeteners, fillers and trans fats without even realizing it.  Yet the experts continue to tell us that as long as we follow the food pyramid guidelines, our diets are healthy.  They also have argued repeatedly that organic food is no healthier than conventionally processed food.  That’s interesting . . . food made without pesticides, chemical preservatives, dyes, and hormones that is also missing those key ingredients, partially hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup, is not considered “healthier”.  Which standard would they be applying?  I am afraid I am not familiar with it. 

Furthermore, the FDA has failed us miserably in favoring the interests of large business.  Today, produce, meats and dairy products continue to be farmed with casual disregard to the cumulative effects of pesticides, feed fertilizers, hormones and antibiotics.  Our children are being exposed to these toxic substances every time they consume a food or drink, yet the FDA has only just begun to require safety data of any kind with respect to kids in the last year.  This is despite legislation in 1998 demanding it.  In fact, the Environmental Working Group found an average of 2.4 pesticides present in commercially grown apples as part of its analysis of over 100,000 tests for pesticides on fresh produce, conducted from 1992 - 2001 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the FDA (see www.foodnews.org).   According to Environmental Working Group’s February 25, 1999 report How ‘Bout Them Apples,

• More than a quarter million American children ages one through five ingest a combination of 20 different pesticides every day. More than 1 million preschoolers eat at least 15 pesticides on a given day. Overall, 20 million American children five and under eat an average of eight pesticides every day.
• Every day, 610,000 children ages one through five -- equal to all the kids of that age in the states of Washington and Oregon combined -- consume a dose of neurotoxic organophosphate insecticides (OPs) that the government deems unsafe.