I’m sick of being all pissy about free glutamates

i’m too tired to give much energy to being pissed off about the for-profit food industry’s poisoning of the food supply (their product) just so they can make a buck.

i eat too many free glutamates to have the energy to be pissed off. i’m too lethargic and have too little stamina to actually do anything about it, and i feel so depressed and hopeless that i don’t think my little self can do anything to solve the problem, except to just lay down and die. let them win.

after all, the great majority of humans seem to thrive on loads of free glutamate in their diet. let’s face it, even tho all these millions of many things are bad for you, humans, like dogs, seem to thrive on absolute, rotting, junk. like goats and plastic bags, we’ll eat anything. and the worse it is, the more we’ll consume.

so why do little i feel it is my duty to go up against absolutely everybody’s preference – people for junk food, corporations for market share – and try to force the food industry to stop giving us anything except good food grown in good soil with no pesticides, and to stop fucking with the food in various ways on its way from the dirt to our tables?

am i getting old? i remember thinking that old people always complain that the old days were better, the music these days is noise, and the old days were better. now i’m saying it, ipso facto.

why would i want to decry the poisoning of our food supply? how silly of me. nobody else cares. they prefer the junk in taste tests. dogs prefer the cheap dog food over the good stuff with actual meat in it. what am i thinking?

i have a new theory. it has to do with addiction. it’s a well known fact that with most substances people become dependent on, their tolerance for the substance increases over time. so you get a buzz off one beer at first, and then it takes two, and you slowly work your way up to four (it’s guinness i’m talking, and i’m only a little girl. 4 pints is a lot in one sitting. and i worked up to that over 2 years).

but with some substances, like marijuana, the tolerance decreases. the longer you smoke, the less it takes to get high. (not if you look at my friend gordon. after 30 years of smoking weed, he rolls them as thick as my thumb, and does it again an hour later. but perhaps that’s a different psychological indicator.)

this is how homeopathy works. the less of a substance you consume, the more it effects you.

a sensitivity to free glutamates (msg in all its forms) works in the same way . you react violently to even the hint of glutamates in your food and drink.

so you isolate. you stop going to restaurants, you prepare all your own food, you eat organic whenever possible, you have a very long list of must-never-haves.

but your food is sprayed in the field - dosed in the pen – with various kinds of chemicals, many of which break down strings of proteins into free glutamates. some on purpose. so it’s in all but the purest raw ingredients.

and the way you cook your food breaks down proteins and frees glutamates. a good slow-simmered stew or spaghetti sauce is full of glutamates.

and even if you eat raw food and nothing but, you’re marinating things to break up proteins and thus release glutamates.

so you end up with an even longer list of can’ts. and this is a bit too much like the princess and the pea thing.

so here’s my new theory. those of us who are too sensitive to eat normal food are just a bunch of whiny victims and should just stop being too delicate for this tough world.

i think we should use the other addictive mechanism, desensitization, and accustom our bodies to larger and larger doses, until we’re walking around numb to all the neurons expiring in our bodies.

so begin today. go out and have a plate of sushi, with loads of soy sauce and wasabi and buckets of water. come home, take an aspirin, and stumble into bed for two hours. then get up, and immediately drink a diet coke. by keeping a constant blood level of free glutamates, your body adjusts, and you can start building up a tolerance to it.

of course, to those sensitive to free glutamates, this advice is like being told to take a pinch of lye with your tea every day and just never mind the tummyache. or the rape-victim advice to just lay back and enjoy it.

the only disuturbing part of laying back is how many times my sky-is-falling things have been right.

cellphones do cause cancer

fluoride is bad for you

msg is a neurotoxin

it’s just that i’m so tired these days i don’t feel like i can take on the world. and these rants are getting weaker. i may be right, but they may win anyway. isn’t that just the way this planet is organized?

Big Food Goodguys

Again, from the appendix of Appetite for Profit – How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, by Michele Simon. Nation Books, 2006.
National Organizations – Nutrition and Children’s Advocacy

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

Center for Informed Food Choices

Center for Science in the Public Interest

CHOICE – Citizens for Healthy Options in Children’s Education

Commercial Alert

Community Food Security Coaliatioon

The Food Studies Institute

GRACE – Factory Farm Project

Health Care Without Harm

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Parents Against Junk Food

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Public Health Advocacy Institute

Organic Consumers Association

Small Planet Institute

State and Local Groups

California Center for Public Health Advocacy

California Food and Jusitice Coaliion

California Project LEAN

India Resource Center

International Food Policy Research Institute

Sustain – The alliance for Better Food and Farming

Tracking Legislation and Lobbying

Center for Media and Democracy

Center for Public Integrity

Center for Responsive Politics

Consumer Deception

Corporate Accountability Project

Freedom of Information Center

The Institute on Money in State Politics

National Conference of State Legislatures

National Restaurant Association

Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy

Reclaim Democracy

Big Food Badguys

This list comes from Appetite for Profit – How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, by Michele Simon. Nation Books, 2006.

Appendix 2 – Guide to Industry Groups and Spin Doctoring

Industry trade associations

• American Beverage Association
• Food Products Association
• Grocery Mnufacturers Association
• National Automatic Merchandising Association
• National Restaurant Association
• Snack Food Association

Industry Trade Associations – Advertising

• Alliance for American Advertising
• American Advertising Federation
• American Association of Advertising Agencies
• Association of National Advertisers
• Children’s Advertising Review Unit

Industry Trade Associations – Legal

• American Legislative Exchange Council
• American Tort Reform Association
• Washington Legal Foundation

Industry Front Groups

• American Council on Fitness ad Nutrition
• American Council on Science and Health
• Center for Consumer Freedom (restaurant industry)
  
• Council for Corporate and School Partnerships (Coke)
  
• International Food Infomation Council
• Whole Grains Council

Industry Science Institutes and Advisory Boards

• The Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition (General Mills)
• The Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness (Coke)
• Blue Ribbon Advisory Board (Pepsi)
• Campbell’s Center for Nutrition and Wellness (Campbell)
• Gatorade Sports Science Institute (Pepsi)
• Global Advisory Council on Balanced Lifestyles (McDonald’s)
• Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition (Hershey)
• International Life Sciences Institution (member corporations)
• Worldwide Health and Wellness Advisory Council (Kraft)

Corporate Educational Wellness Programs

• Balance First (Pepsi)
• Balanced for Life (Vending machines)
• Brand New You (General Mills)
• Get Active Stay Active (Pepsi)
• Girls on the Run (Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and New Balance Shoes)
• Get Fit Challenge (Kellogg)
• Kidnetic.com (various corporations and industry groups)
• Live-It!, Step With It, and Fit It In (Coke)
• Passport to Play (McDonald’s)
• S.M.A.R.T. Living (Pepsi)
• Salsa, Sabor y Salud (Kraft)
• Weekly Reader MyPyramid (Grocery Manufacturers Association)

Public-Private Partnerships

• America on the Move (Pepsi and Cargill)
• Champions for Healthy Kids (General Mills and American Dietetic Association)
• Coalition for a Healthy and Active America (Coke)
• Coalition for Healthy Children (Ad Council and others)
• Get Kids in Action (Pepsi and UNC Chapel Hill)
• President’s Challenge (General Mills)
• Shaping America’s Youth (Cadbury Schweppes, Campbells, Splenda)

Industry Newsletters

• The Food Institute Daily Update
• Smart Brief

From Appetite for Profit

“The idea is for healthy eating to be the default instead of constantly being the more challenging way to live.” p.43

“Today’s generation of children may be the first to have shorter lives than their parents. According to one prediction, nearly half the children in North and South America will be overweight by 2010. Especially troubling are the rising obestity trends in developing countries as Western foods are increasingly marketed overseas.” p.xiv

“Center for Consumer Freedom. Despite its populist name, this organization does not represent consumers at all. Rather, it’s a lobbying front for the restaurant, food, beverage, and alcohol industries. Employing attack dog-style tactics, CCF consistently portrays nutrition-policy advocates as ‘food cops’ and radicals.” p.xxi

“Big Food is facing a public relations nightmare. The United States is in the midst of a growing epidemic of diet-related health problems, including obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Experts have written extensively about our ‘toxic food evironment,’ caused in large part by overzealous corporate marketing strategies.” p.1

“Over the last century, the human diet has been radically altered. The foods we eat now bear little resemblance to those that sustained our ancestors for millennia. In their ceaseless pursuit of profits and new markets, a small number of multinational corporations are running roughshod across the globe in flagrant disregard for public health, the environment, and the welfare of workers and farm animals. We have to stop dancing around the issue and admit this simple truth. In recent years, the privatization of water has spurred global activists to mount passionate and inspiring campaigns againts the takeover of another substane essential to human survival. Why aren’t those of us concerned with food raising similar demands? Like water (and unlike most other commodities, such as toys or electonics), food is indispensable and a basic human right. Why have we turned its production over to private interests? Shouldn’t at least some aspects of society remain off-limits to corporate control?” p.318

Quotes taken from Appetite for Profit – How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, by Michele Simon. Nation Books, 2006

Recovering from MSG poisoning

Someone hit my blog while searching for ideas about detoxing from MSG. Wow, I thought, what a great idea. A cure. So let’s see what I can come up with.

Personally, I go to bed, drink lots of water, swallow an aspirin, and wait until it wears off. Like a hangover. But there’s got to be something that counteracts it, right?

Well, first off, MSG is a poison, not an allergen, so strictly speaking, nobody is allergic to it, they’re reacting to it as a toxin. It gets in the bloodstream and causes many toxic reactions that your body only slowly heals from. Its effects are cumulative, like mercury poisoning. Its effects may also be triggered; that is, once you get a reaction to MSG in your food, you will forever after experience a reaction to it.

The only sure way I know to avoid MSG is to cook all your own food, and cook it as little as possible to prevent forming free glutamates. The reason to cook your own food is that MSG is hidden in practically all processed and packaged foods. But this method isn’t foolproof, because there are now crop sprays consisting of MSG, and  some of the ingredients in vaccines and flu shots contain MSG. Et ecetera.

As an antidote, some physicians recommend cafergot, which is a blend of ergotamine and caffeine, and acts to prevent headaches by vasoconstriction. Its side effects include coldness of the extremities and angina pectoris. Ergotamine – from the nasty fngus that grows on rye, one of the precursors of LSD. Perhaps they should rethink. It’s kind of like curing morning sickness with thalidomide.

Some sources, including Dr. Weil, advises that people who have severe reactions to MSG are deficient in vitamin B6, so you can try supplements. But that’s not the same as detoxifying.
There is a homeopathic MSG detox on the market, but I can’t vouch for its efficacy, because I have never tried it.

There are glutamate-blocking drugs out there, but since glutamate is an enzyme that acts in the brain, to block glutamate is to stop your ability to think. And other things. So that’s not good.

You might try taking Benadryl and Ibuprofin, and going to bed. That’s similar to what I do, but I wash it out with plenty of water and skip the Benadryl. Whatever works for you. But, keep in mind, nothing will work, because MSG is a poison, with no antidote, and you’re wearing your body out fighting it.

Hope this helps.

A scientific study ‘proving’ hog farming is clean

Yep, the scientists at Guelph University in Canada have done a study examining hog farms in the field, and simulated real-life conditions in the laboratory, and they’ve decided that we could increase the levels of antibiotics many times before there would be a problem with antibiotics running off into our water supply.

Only at the bottom of the article, it reveals that the study was financed by the food industry, specifically the Canadian Pork Council and the Canadian Cattleman’s Association.

This report will be used as an argument for less oversight and fewer laws, even tho it’s as flawed a piece of research as money can buy.

Here’s how it really works:

Antibiotics in animal feed, used as growth enhancers rather than to treat existing medical conditions, are causing increased antibiotic resistance in the humans who eat them. This is a big problem, and you can find more information here.

Antibiotics fed to animals, especially in factory farms, do re-emerge into the environment in the pee and shit these overcrowded animals excrete. These nasty fluids are collected in huge ponds and allowed to evaporate, which is a much ‘better’ solution than letting them simply run off into our streams and rivers.

Why are we exposed at all? But of course, the laws favor the producers, and don’t give a shit about the consumers.

MSG – insidious poison, food industry conspiracy

What is MSG – Monosodium Glutamate – and why is it bad for you? Proponents will tell you that it’s been used in the Orient for thousands of years (in the form of soy sauce and seaweed); the FDA has it on the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) list with no limit on dosage; you’ll find it in everything from ramen noodle flavor packets to toothpaste. It’s even been approved as a crop spray that will remain on your fruits, vegetables, and coffee beans, never appear on any label, and won’t wash off. So how could anything that ubiquitous be bad for you? Hah. Two tablespoons of MSG on a piece of bread will kill a dog in a matter of minutes.

MSG is a flavor enhancer first developed in the early 1900s, and introduced to the west in 1948. Since then, its use has doubled every ten years, until now, in America, we’re exposed to 300 million pounds of it a year.

How does it enhance flavors? It’s a neurotransmitter. It’s an excitotoxin. It swells the nerve endings in your tongue. And then it crosses the blood-brain barrier to excite neurons in your brain. To swell neurons in your brain. To cause cellular death in neurons in your brain.

In many tests on rats, MSG has caused disturbing, sometimes horrifying abnormalities. These effects include obesity, growth retardation, short stature, diabetes, hormone deficiencies, brain lesions, and more. And rats are less sensitive to MSG than humans are, and their bodies get rid of it faster.

What are some of the physical effects people experience after exposure to MSG? As for myself, the first symptom comes while eating – the food tastes yummy and I feel an overwhelming desire to eat it all up. Then I feel flushed in the face, my hands and feet tingle, and I get rapidly exhausted, so that I really need to lie down and take a nap – now. If I was doing something before I ate, then I have to stop and become unconscious for awhile. This is troublesome when I’m driving. When I wake up, it’s with stiff joints, a headache, and an intensely dry mouth. My face and the skin around my eyes are puffy, and my feet and hands are swollen. Sometimes I’m groggy for hours, only really recovering the next day. Every time I get a reaction to MSG, it’s worse than the time before, a cumulative effect.

What happens to other people? Tingling and numbness and the sensation of tightness or pressure in the tongue, the face, the hands and feet, headaches and migraines, fatigue, asthma, chest pains, heartbeat irregularities, nausea, skin rashes, seizures, depression.

It gets worse. MSG is a suspected link in such different pathological conditions as stroke, epilepsy, brain lesions, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. See this article for a long list of effects of exposure to MSG.

People have been complaining about MSG for many years. It’s been called “Chinese restaurant syndrome” in the literature, and it’s so effective in causing obesity that there is a subspecies of laboratory rat called MSG rats. Its effects are minimized and its opponents are demonized using badly-faulted research paid for by the food industry, and any objection to it at government levels is quashed by well-funded lobbyists whose professional loyalty is to the bottom line, rather than the public health.

The food industry is so intent on spreading the use of MSG throughout our diets that they’ve invented a fifth taste to justify it. They call it umami. Added to the traditional four types of taste – bitter, salty, sweet, sour – it is quite simply the aftertaste of MSG. Here’s a food industry article about the “inexplicable taste sensation that can help food technologists increase consumer acceptance and preference.”

Even health conscious organic-food enthusiasts are being subjected to MSG all over the place. You’d expect organic and health food to be pure and simple, but since the food industry has sunk its claws into organic, they’ve just gotten more sneaky. If you buy organic chicken broth, hoping to avoid the MSG that is constant in every regular brand of broth, and you don’t notice the yeast extract, or the natural chicken flavor, the autolyzed yeast, the hydrolyzed soy protein, then you might think you’re eating something that won’t swell your tongue. but you’d be wrong. These non-MSG ingredients contain from 20-60% MSG each, and they add up fast, so some foods contain enough MSG to poison a dog, with five or six different ingredients each containing MSG.

With all this evidence, why doesn’t the FDA do something about the MSG in our food? Because the chemical, agriculture and food industries own the FDA. Duh.

A food industry lie: “Clean Labels”

Ever since consumers started complaining about the rising use of MSG and other adulterants in processed foods, the food industry has sought to hide its presence.

Now they’ve started using ‘clean labels‘, ingredient labels that don’t mention MSG and other undesirable food additives, so that the consumer will think (mistakenly) that their food is made from ‘real ingredients’.

This is an attempt by traditional food industry manufacturers to jump on the natural and organic food bandwagons, where customers expect minimally processed, no-pesticide, no-antibiotic, no-chemical food, just like you’d grow in your garden.

In the words of one food-industry website (foodnavigator.com)

“This is significant because functional foods are more appealing when terms that consumers already perceive to be good for them are used. Natural-sounding ingredients carry more clout than scientific-sounding ingredients that may not yet have entered consumer consciousness.”

Because processing food reduces its nutritional content, as well as its taste and texture, manufacturers struggle constantly to reintroduce things like nutrition and taste into what otherwise might resemble gruel rather than something you’d pay good money to eat. So there is a lot of pressure to shortcut the traditional cooking methods you use in your home kitchen.

To do this, they have to add things, change things, make raw materials strong enough to survive industrial processing methods, industrial baking, freezing, canning, packaging without turning to goo or paste or crumbs.
Because food manufacturers are in business to make money, not food, they take other shortcuts, like using cheaper ingredients and covering them with chemical flavors and flavor enhancers, texturizers and other chemical ingredients to make the food taste like your mom made it. But really, only if your mom is named Jekyll.

They use terms like:

“sumptuous eating qualities consumers crave and the processing advantages food manufacturers require,” “chef-inspired appeal, a simplified ingredients statement and excellent shelf life stability,” and talk about how the product’s “exceptionally clean flavor characteristics also offer manufacturers opportunities for reducing costly ingredients,” and how the product’s “enhanced mouthfeel may enable foodmanufacturers to reduce cream or butter while maintaining acceptability.”

So when you see a so-called “clean label” on the back of a food item, don’t be fooled into thinking the manufacturer is concerned that you eat a healthy, natural, minimally processed product. They’re doing business as usual, with the same shortcuts, but they’ve gone the extra mile to hide it from you.

Plot thoughts

what if? just a slight exaggeration here -

what if mcdonald’s owned all the meat and potato processing plants in america, and what if they exerted control over all the ranchers and all the potato growers in america, and turned them into contractors, forcing them to grow a specific monsanto-owned genetically-modified potato, and a particular cloned cow, and this had the consequence of destroying genetic diversity in these two species? and what if it became against the law to raise beef on grass, and corn feedlots became the only legal way to prepare meat?

what if it became illegal to grow your own food, and there was a roundup of people with gardens, who were prosecuted for growing food without a license, and specifically, for growing seeds that had been patented by a chemical company?

what if there was a new law passed in congress to roll back the labelling requirements in foods? from that point forward, it would not be the public’s business to know what was in their food. also, this would lead to a further regulationn that all foods, processed and fresh, have flavor enhancers, spoilage retardants, anti-microbial additives, and antibiotics and growth hormones in meat and milk.