Food In Your Poison

Article #3: Food In Your Poison by Viktoras H. Kulvinskas

Although Americans are eating more, (in spite of high food prices), they are receiving less nourishment. Real food, for the most part, is virtually unknown. Most Americans don’t care. Their attachment to food is emotional and induced by advertisement. They load their shopping carts with a variety of colorful, unnutritious, plastic foods, saturated with synthetic ingredients. “Oh! But it tastes so good,” they exclaim as they endlessly cram their stomachs, but remain unsatisfied.

More and more people are becoming conscious that both shelved and perishable products in the supermarkets do contain a wide array of poisons. The mass media, even as they glorify such products, announce that they are embalmed with over 3,000 questionable chemicals.

The average consumer as defined by scientific literature and popular publications is a phenomenon of the 20th century, with no antecedent in history. There was a time when no one dined on poisons and called it lunch. Food producers are deliberately supplementing the diet with food additives of a toxic nature at the rate of over three pounds per year for every person in America.

A stranger in our land, reading labels, might wonder whether American food is too “fresh.” Almost every package has something added to preserve “freshness”: BHT, sodium proprionate and a host of other preservatives. After a “fresh” imitation dinner, a dizzy spell, difficulty in breathing, or a peculiar feeling in the stomach is very common. Some even think it is love when the pulse rate increases and they become feverish. Others turn to the “imitation life box” for relief from their distress. Every other commercial, served at the rate of 60 doses per hour, encourages food habits that lead to disease or prescribes a potion to alleviate food-induced illness. They lull us into the belief that it is all right to sin as long as we turn to the right product for forgiveness.

Most shoppers in 1970 anticipated the removal of cyclamates from the market. They may instead discover that the fine print on the label warns that the additive may be dangerous to one’s health. Yet this chemical is capable of inducing cancer, and recent tests show that calcium and sodium cyclamate can induce chromosome breakage in the human leucocyte in vitro and in rat spermatogonial cells in vito. Its effects are very similar to a type of chromosome damage reported for LSD as well as caffeine when used in large doses.

An article headlined: “Are Cancerous Chickens Edible?” Yes! People will eat anything. “If tumors are detected on the wing of a bird, the wing could be cut off and used in products like hot dogs and the rest of the bird sold as cut-up chicken—all supposedly without posing a threat to human health.”

It is well known to chemists that subjecting organic compounds to high temperatures produces complex polycyclic compounds by pyrolysis. Several carcinogens are included in this group of compounds. A benzopyrine (carcinogenic) content, as high as 50 micrograms per kg was found in some instances. It seems to arise from pyrolysis of fat when cooking food. The amount produced increases with increased fat content and longer and closer exposure of the food to the flame. Benzopyrine is found also in all smoked foods. The relatively higher incidence of gastric cancer in Northern Russia and Iceland has been related to the large quantity of smoked fish eaten by the inhabitants of these regions. In a review of cancer-causing properties of benzopyrine, it was found to be quite high in salami, salmon, bacon and provola.

Eating heated fats may be deadly. Animals fed cooked fat die prematurely said Dr. R. Kurkella, University of Helsinki. Research has discovered that the more fat a person eats, the shorter will be the life span.

Meat, the most perishable (and most expensive) of all foods is also one of the most tampered with. To see exactly how meat is produced one should read the Animal Machine by Ruth Harrison. It is the story of animal factories, where animals may live out their lives in darkness, immobile in steaming pens from birth to death, fed by conveyers containing drugs, antibiotics, tranquilizers, pesticides and hormones.

After an animal is slaughtered, or dies from disease, it is shipped off to the processing house. The meat is doctored up, for the benefit of the gullible public, with aesthetic beautifiers, stink reducers, taste accentuators, color additives, drug camouflagers, nutritive “enhancers,” bleaching agents and death certificate. No corpse gets such a face lift by the embalmers and with good reason, for the corpse is soon buried, whereas salami, hotdogs, bologna, and chicken may sit on the shelves for months.

Meat is colored red with sodium nicotinate, otherwise it would turn yellow-gray. Uneven or excessive application can result in severe sickness, even death. However, when such incidents occur, they are seldom diagnosed correctly. At the Congressional Hearing on Meat Inspection it was reported that the sausages, ham, hamburgers, and the hot dogs you eat may be filled with hog blood, cereals, lungs, niacin, water, detergents and/or sodium sulfide.

The FDA refuses to recognize tests conducted by Dr. Patrick Riley at a London Medical School, where it was shown that BHA, a widely used preservative, is carcinogenic.

This preservative appears in luncheon meats, such as salami, bologna, and pressed ham, canned meats, peanut butter, canned chicken and other foods. Senator Alan Cranston commented in 1970 that “perhaps they (FDA) consider food processors’ interests more than people’s interests.”

A typical associated press release occurred around Thanksgiving 1969: “U.S. finds pesticide in 90,000 turkeys in toxic levels.” A few years ago cranberries were found to be unfit companions to the turkey. In Massachusetts alone during a more active month for health inspectors, 250 tons of meat were seized because it was contaminated. Such meat is quite often resold as 4-D meat: dead, dying, disabled or diseased. The winter of 1969, Boston had a month long scandal over the pollution of the slaughter houses of Massachusetts. Someday we are going to be civilized enough to be concerned over the killing and torture that goes on in the same slaughter houses.

ONLY TEN PERCENT of the meat adulterated with pesticides and chemicals, or contaminated with filth and diseased organs is condemned by food inspectors. The other 90 percent gets through to the unsuspecting consumer, so claims Leray Houser of the Health Education and Welfare Department.

“In 1965, a total of 711 firms suspected of producing harmful or contaminated consumer products refused to let the FDA conduct inspection…the FDA does not have subpoena authority either to summon witnesses, or authority to require firms to divulge pertinent records.”

A very striking observation about the quality of animal products comes from the lips of the Health, Education and Welfare Secretary, Robert H. Finch, who FEARED THAT WE WOULD BECOME “A NATION OF VEGETARIANS” if there were strict enforcement of pesticide residues in red meat, dairy produce, eggs, fowl and fish.

Today we are faced with an external environmental crisis. We can control the inner body environment through good diet, pure water and joyful, positive thoughts. To procure good organic food economically, cooperation is a must.