Millions Hungry and Food Insecure in the US

Source

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger, food insecurity, and overall deprivation affect million of households in the world’s richest country USA.

Why? It’s because both right wings of its war party devote most of the nation’s discretionary income for militarism, maintaining the Pentagon’s global empire of bases, and endless aggression in multiple theaters — along with bailouts for and handouts to corporate America.

In the new millennium alone, countless trillions of dollars went for the above interests, combined with tax cuts for the rich, while food stamps and other social justice programs are fast eroding to help pay for them as the national debt soars by over $1 trillion annually.

Most US households with one or more working members have little or no savings — leaving them vulnerable to hunger and homelessness from one or more missed paychecks.

According to Feeding America, 79% of US households the organization aids rely on “inexpensive unhealthy food to feed their families,” 84% of households with children functioning this way.

The vast majority of Feeding America (FA) client households face unacceptable choices — 69% forced at times to choose between food and utilities, 66% between food and medical care, 31% between food and education.

Force-fed neoliberal harshness by Republicans and undemocratic Dems contributed to 58% of FA’s client households having one or more members with high blood pressure, 33% affected by diabetes — these numbers much higher among households with seniors, 77% and 47% respectively.

Nearly half of FA client households have one or members in “fair or poor health.”

Because of unemployment or poverty wages, one in six FA client households “experienced a foreclosure or eviction in the past five years.”

The vast majority of FA client households are food insecure (84%) — without access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food, at times going hungry.

Hunger in America

According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million Americans, including over 11 million children — the numbers likely way understated.

Feeding America explained that impoverished households and others above the poverty line experience food insecurity for inadequate ability to buy what’s needed, adding:

“Food insecurity does not exist in isolation, as low-income families are affected by multiple, overlapping issues like lack of affordable housing, social isolation, chronic or acute health problems, high medical costs, and low wages.”

“Taken together, these issues are important social determinants of health” and well-being — fast deteriorating in the United States of I Don’t Care, the world’s richest country with the greatest wealth disparity among developed nations.

The state of the nation is shameful, serving its privileged class exclusively, exploiting most others to benefit its well-off members.

Food insecurity and hunger impact virtually “every community in the United States,” said FA.

Do Something.org discussed “11 facts about hunger in the US,” saying the following:

Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually.

At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide problem.

Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate help.

“1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from.”

“22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at school, but as many as 3 million children still aren’t getting the breakfast they need.”

Food insecure children are at greater risk to develop physical and emotional health issues. They perform poorly academically and in physical activities.

Food insecurity affects both urban and rural areas nationwide.

People of color (Blacks and Latinos) are disproportionately affected by hunger and food insecurity.

The states with the highest rates of food insecurity are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, and Oklahoma.

“(H)ouseholds with children ha(ve) a substantially higher rate of food insecurity” and hunger, said Do Something.org.

US Census data show around half of US households are impoverished or bordering it — a permanent underclass in the world’s richest country, young children and the elderly most affected.

Poverty, homelessness, hunger, food insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, and overall deprivation affect countless millions of Americans.

It’s the shame of the nation — a let ‘em eat cake society, uncaring about the vast majority of its citizens.

*

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Stephen Lendman, Global Research, 2019

40 Million Americans Already Don’t Have Enough Food To Eat – And Here Is Why It Will Soon Get A Lot Worse

Source

theeconomiccollapseblog.com

by Michael Snyder

Oct 14, 2019

 

The things that I am going to share with you in this article are definitely very alarming.  But if you live in a wealthy neighborhood and are always surrounded by other wealthy individuals that never have to worry about missing a meal, then some of the numbers in this article may not ring true to you.  Today, the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the United States is larger than ever, and many wealthy Americans don’t have too much sympathy for the struggles that other people are going through.  But the truth is that most Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.  And when you are living right on the edge financially, there are times when it can be really tough to even afford the basic necessities.  If you have never had to miss a meal involuntarily, good for you.  Unfortunately, there are millions upon millions of Americans for which hunger is a very real problem.

If you had to guess, what would you say if someone asked you how many Americans struggle with food insecurity each year?

According to a CBS News article that was published a few months ago, “roughly 4o million people” struggle with not having enough food to eat…

The U.S. economy is enjoying nearly a decade of expansion since the Great Recession. Yet food insecurity — a lack of money or resources to secure enough to eat — still grips almost one in eight Americans. That’s roughly 40 million people. While slowly improving, that figure remains stubbornly higher than before the recession, when more than one in 10 U.S. residents had difficulty knowing when and how they might eat next, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Hungry people live in every county in America, according to the latest annual research from nonprofit relief organization Feeding America. It compiled federal and other data for 2017, its ninth year examining the issue, for a report called Map the Meal Gap. Feeding America serves 4 billion meals each year for one in eight Americans through 200 food banks and 60,000 meal programs and pantries.

We should be incredibly thankful for Feeding America and their vast network of food banks and pantries, but what happens when the need for food dramatically escalates and the food banks start running empty?

Just a few days ago I heard from a good friend in the middle of the country, and she told me that her local food bank is really pressing hard for donations right now because things are starting to get really, really right.

And we haven’t even officially entered the next recession yet.

Normally there wouldn’t be too much reason for concern, but this has definitely not been a normal year.  Crops have been failing across the globe, and African swine fever is killing millions upon millions of pigs all over the planet.

In fact, thanks to the horrific outbreak of African swine fever in China, pork prices over there are 69.3 percent higher than they were a year ago…

Pork prices in China jumped 69.3% in September from a year ago as the country continued to battle a shortage of the meat that followed an outbreak of African swine fever.

Last month’s surge in pork prices was higher compared to the 46.7% increase seen in August, according to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. That pushed up food prices in China by 11.2% in September, accelerating from the previous month’s 10% gain.

If that sounds really bad to you, that is because it is really bad.

And what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

One of the big reasons why the Chinese just agreed to buy billions of dollars worth of our agricultural products is because they have a desperate need for them.

Here in the United States, food prices have also been rising steadily and we were already going to be facing one of the worst years for Midwest farmers ever, and now an unprecedented October blizzard is going to cause widespread crop failures.

An absolutely massive storm just dumped very deep snow from Colorado to Minnesota, and it hit just as farmers were getting ready to harvest their corn and soybeans.

As I noted in a different article that I just posted, one lawmaker in North Dakota is telling the press that we should expect “massive crop losses – as devastating as we’ve ever seen”.

Millions of acres of corn and soybeans are going to be “a total loss”, and that means that all of us will soon be facing higher food prices at the supermarket.

If you are independently wealthy and food prices don’t really matter to you, then you are in good shape.

But for the rest of us, these higher prices are going to be quite painful.  I would encourage you to stock up ahead of time while you still can.

Earlier this year, I extensively documented the major problems that farmers in the Midwest were having with rain and flooding, and I warned that we were potentially facing a disastrous harvest season.

Well, now that this historic blizzard has wiped out millions of acres of crops, we are potentially facing a scenario that is far worse than anything that I originally warned about.

That means that soon far more than 40 million Americans will be dealing with food insecurity.  Much higher prices at the grocery store will make it much more difficult for most of us to afford the basic necessities, and those on the bottom rungs of the economic pyramid will suffer more than anyone else.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time. 

Some tea bags may shed billions of microplastics per cup

‘Silken’ bags for premium teas are made of PET or nylon, but it’s not known if that poses health risk

Source

http://www.cbc.ca

Emily Chung

Sep 25, 2019 

Many fancier teas now come in ‘silken’ bags instead of paper, and some of them are pyramid-shaped, which is billed as a way to make room for the large leaves in premium teas to expand. (Shutterstock / slawomir.gawryluk)

You may be swallowing billions of tiny plastic particles while sipping a cup of freshly brewed gourmet tea, a new study from McGill University in Montreal suggests.

Many fancier teas now come in “silken” bags instead of paper. Some of them are pyramid-shaped, which is billed as a way to make room for the large leaves in premium teas to expand.

Nathalie Tufenkji, a professor of chemical engineering at the Montreal university, was surprised to find one such bag in the tea she ordered from a coffee shop one morning.

It looked like plastic, she recalled. “I said, ‘Oh God, I’m sure if it’s plastic it’s, like, breaking down into the tea.'”

So when she got into the lab, she asked her graduate student, Laura Hernandez, to go out and buy a bunch from different brands.

The plastics are made of polyethylene terephthalate (found in plastic drink bottles) and nylon (used in many food bags and pouches) that are approved as food packaging. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)

Sure enough, Hernandez’s lab tests showed that when steeped in hot water, the tea bags released microplastic and even smaller nanoplastic particles — and not just the hundreds or thousands Tufenkji had been expecting.

“We were shocked when we saw billions of particles in a single cup of tea,” she said.

One cup from a single tea bag could contain 11.6 billion microplastic and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles, the researchers estimated from their results, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The bits are so tiny — on average, the size of grains of dust or pollen — that the amount in one cup is about 16 micrograms or one-sixtieth of a milligram of plastic.

But that’s still much more than has been found in other foods and beverages, including tap and bottled water, beer, honey, fish and shellfish, chicken and salt. Tufekji said that’s partly because her study included and counted smaller particles than most other studies. But it’s also because, for most foods and beverages, the plastic is an accidental contaminant. With tea “you’re literally adding plastic into the beverage.”

That may sound unappetizing, but is it a health risk? After all, the plastics are made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate, found in plastic drink bottles) and nylon (used in many food bags and pouches) that are approved as food packaging. And the World Health Organization has said the risk from microplastics in drinking water is low, especially if the particles are relatively large.

So far, scientists don’t know what, if any, risks there might be.

“There’s really no research. But this really points to the need to do those studies,” Tufenkji said. “Think of people who drink one or two or three cups of tea a day, every day.”

Collectively, Canadians drink about 10 billion cups of tea a year.

Tufenkji says the potential health risk isn’t the only reason to stick to paper tea bags and loose leaf tea.

“Personally, I would say avoid the plastic tea bags because it’s just another single-use plastic” — something many governments, including Canada’s, are trying to reduce due to the impact on oceans and the challenges of recycling it.

• Study sheds light on human consumption of microplastics

• Microplastics in drinking water are ‘low risk’ to human health: WHO

The researchers counted the plastic particles by cutting open bags of tea, removing the tea, rinsing off any pieces that might have come off during cutting, and then steeping the bags in distilled water at 95 C. They then took a sample, let the water evaporate, and counted the plastic particles under an electron microscope, then extrapolated to get the amount in one cup. They also used other instruments to identify the type of plastic in each bag.

The researchers also repeated the experiment with uncut bags that still contained tea to make sure the cutting didn’t cause the bags to shed, and with loose tea leaves, confirming that uncut bags shed microplastics too (although they were harder to count) and the plastic didn’t originate from the tea itself.

In a preliminary experiment, water fleas exposed to the microplastics from the tea bags ‘ballooned’ and showed behavioural changes that suggested they were stressed. ((Paul D.N. Hebert, University of Guelph))

Finally, they did a preliminary study where they exposed water fleas — tiny freshwater animals distantly related to shrimp — to the microplastics from the tea bags, which are similar in size to their food.

The water fleas didn’t die, but swam “crazily,” Tufenkji said. “It really stresses them out.”

• Microplastics found in supermarket fish, shellfish

They also changed shape, revealed CT scans performed by McGill researcher Hans Larsson. The study described the exposed water fleas as having a “ballooned” carapace.

Tufenkji said the results point to the need for more studies with other animals.

It also motivates her research group to see if other plastic packaging might be releasing particles into food and beverages.

The study was funded by the Canada Research Chairs program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and McGill University.

Here are the takeaways

Matthew Hoffman, a researcher who studies freshwater plastic pollution at the Rochester Institute of Technology but wasn’t involved in the new study, said the experiments seemed well designed and robust.

“One of the big takeaways,” he wrote in an email, “is that the humans would be exposed to orders of magnitude more plastic particles than has been reported from previous food and drink studies.”

His colleague, Christy Tyler, an aquatic ecologist who was also not involved in the newly released research, noted the small size of the particles in the study.

“We’re getting a clearer understanding that nanoscale plastics (like other nano-scale particles) can cross into cells,” she wrote.

While it wasn’t clear exactly how the microplastics were causing changes in the water fleas, and we don’t know the effects on humans, she added, “it’s still cause for caution in how we approach widespread use of these materials in our everyday products.”

Climate Catastrophe Comes for Europe

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

dispatchesfromtheedgeblog

Conn M. HALLINAN

September 19, 2019

• On Aug. 18, several dozen people gathered around a patch of snow in Iceland to commemorate the demise of the Okjokull glacier, a victim of climate change. Further to the west, Greenland shed 217 billion tons of ice in the month of July alone.
• Paris reached 108.7 degrees on July 25, and normally cold, blustery Normandy registered 102 degrees. Worldwide, July 2019 was the hottest month on record.
• Melting Russian permafrost—which makes up two-thirds of the country—is buckling roads, collapsing buildings, and releasing massive amounts of methane, a gas with the ten times the climate-warming potential of carbon dioxide,
• Some 1.500 residents of Whaley Bridge were recently evacuated when a dam—overwhelmed by intense rainfall that pummeled northern England—threatened to break. The rains washed out roads and rail lines and swamped homes and business.

Ever since coal was partnered with water to generate steam and launch the industrial revolution, Europeans have been pouring billions of tons of atmospheric warming compounds into the planet’s atmosphere. While scientists were aware of the climate-altering potential of burning hydrocarbons as early as 1896, the wealth generated by spinning jennies, power looms and drop forges was seductive, as was the power it gave countries to build colonial empires and subjugate populations across the globe.

But the bill is finally coming due.

Swedish fires 2019

When most people think of climate change, what come to mind are the poles, Asia’s fast vanishing glaciers, or Australia, where punishing droughts are drying up the sub-continent’s longest river, the Murray. But climate change is an equal opportunity disrupter, and Europe is facing a one-two punch of too much water in the north and center and not enough in the south.

According to recent projections, drought regions in Europe will expand from 13 percent of the continent to 26 percent and last four times as long, affecting upwards of 400 million people. Southern France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece will be particularly hard hit, though how hard will depend on whether the planet’s temperature hike is kept to 1.5 degrees centigrade or rises to 3 degrees centigrade.

Northern and Central Europe, on the other hand, will experience more precipitation and consequent flooding. Upward of a million people would be effected and damage would run into the hundreds of billions of Euros. While weather is battering away at Europe, sea rises of from four to six feet over the next century would inundate Copenhagen, the Netherlands, many French and German ports and London. If the Greenland ice sheet actually melted, the oceans would come up 24 feet.

Food production will be another casualty. According to David Wallace-Wells in “The Uninhabitable Earth,” cereal crops will decline 10 percent for every degree the temperature goes up. When crops fail, people will move and the logical place to go is north. It is not just war and unrest that is driving refugees toward Europe, but widespread crop failures brought about by too little or too much water.

The warming climate also allows insects, like the bark beetle, to attack Europe’s forests. The beetles are increasingly active in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Norway and, particularly, Russia, which host the largest temperate forests in the world.

Each tree that dies is one less carbon sink to transmute CO2 to oxygen. And dead trees are also more susceptible to forest fires, which can pump yet more of the climate warming gas into the atmosphere. Fires are not only increasing in countries like Spain, Greece and Portugal, but also in Sweden and Finland.

Black Forest fires

For many years climate change deniers—funded by hydrocarbon industry think tanks and sophisticated media campaigns—managed to inject a certain amount of doubt concerning global warming, but a rash of devastating hurricanes and last year’s wildfires in California have begun to shift public opinion. Last spring’s European elections saw Green parties all over the continent do well, and polls indicate growing alarm among the public.

A number of different European parties, including the British Labour Party, are pushing a “Green New Deal For Europe” based on a call by the United Nations to reduce green house gas emissions to zero by 2050.

The European Green Deal proposes using public investment banks to fund much of the plan, which is aimed at keeping rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees centigrade. While the price for rolling back emissions will certainly be high, the costs for not doing so are far greater, including the possibility that worldwide temperatures could go by as much as 5 degrees centigrade, a level that might make much of the world unlivable for human beings.

A jump of that magnitude would be similar to the kind of temperature rise the world experienced at the end of the Permian Era, 250 million years ago. Called the “Great Extinction,” it killed 96 percent of life in the sea and 70 percent on land.

A major reason for the Permian die off was the expansion of cynobacteria, which produce a toxic cocktail that can kill almost anything they comes in contact with. Such cynobacteria blooms are already underway in more than 400 places throughout the world, including a large dead zone in the Baltic Sea. Some New York lakes have become so toxic that the water is fatal to pets that drink from them.

The major fuel for cynobacteria is warm water coupled with higher rainfall—one of the consequences of climate change—that washes nutrients into lakes and rivers.

Of the 195 countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords, only seven are close to fulfilling their carbon emission pledges. And one of the world’s biggest sources of global warming gasses, the US, has withdrawn. If all 195 countries met their goals, however, the climate is still on target to reach 3 degrees Celsius. Even if the rise can be kept to 2 degrees, it will likely melt the Greenland ice cap and possibly the Antarctic ice sheets. Greenland’s melt would raise ocean levels by 24 feet, the Antarctic by hundreds of feet.

As overwhelming as the problem seems, it can be tackled, but only if the world mobilizes the kind of force it did to fight World War II. It will, however, take a profound re-thinking of national policy and the economy.

The US organization most focused on climate change these days is the Pentagon, which is gearing up to fight the consequences. But our enormous defense apparatus is a major part of the problem, because military spending is carbon heavy. According to Brown University’s “Cost Of War” project, the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of hydrocarbons on the planet. Yet a number of European countries—under pressure from the Trump administration—are increasing their military spending, exactly the wrong strategy to combat the climate threat.

The world will need to agree that keeping hydrocarbons in the ground is essential. Fracking, tar sands and opening yet new sources for oil and gas in the arctic will have to halt. Solar, hydro and wind power will need to be expanded, and some very basic parts of the economy re-examined.

This will hardly be pain free.

For instance, it takes 1,857 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, compared to 469 gallons for a pound of chicken. Yogurt uses 138 gallons. While beef production uses 60 percent of agricultural land, it only provides 2 percent of human caloric intake.

It is unlikely that people will give up meat—although growing economic inequality has already removed meat from the diet of many—but what we eat and how we produce it will have to be part of any solution. For instance, a major source of green house gases is industrial agriculture with its heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, close to 30 percent of food production goes to waste, most of it in wealthy countries. A fair distribution of food supplies would not only feed more people, it would use less land, thus cutting green house gasses up to 10 percent. Add to that curbing beef production, and hundreds of millions of square miles of grange land would be freed up to plant carbon absorbing trees.

Can this be done incrementally? It may have to be, but not for long. Climate change is upon us. What that future will be is up to the current generation to figure out, and while there is no question that concerted action can make a difference, the clock is ticking. When next the bell tolls, it tolls for us all.

 

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

How WHOLE Turmeric Heals The Damaged Brain

Source

http://www.greenmedinfo.com

Sunday, August 18th 2019

Sayer Ji, Founder

This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2019

Brain regeneration: long considered a feat impossible to accomplish, compelling research now reveals how a simple spice might contribute to stimulating the stem-cell mediated repair of the damaged brain.

Turmeric is hands down one of the, if not the, most versatile healing spice in the world with over 800 experimentally confirmed health benefits, and an ancient history filled with deep reverence for its seemingly compassionate power to alleviate human suffering. It may also represent the pharmaceutical industry’s single most existential threat, given that the preliminary science signals turmeric is at least as effective as 14 drugs, and orders of magnitude safer as far as toxicological risk.

That said, most of the focus of turmeric research over the past decade has been centered on only one of its many hundreds of phytocompounds: namely, the primary polyphenol in turmeric known as curcumin which gives the spice its richly golden hue.  This curcumin-centric focus has lead to the development of some very good products, such as phospholipid bound curcumin concentrate (e.g. Meriva, BCM-95) which greatly helps to increase the absorption and bio-activity of curcumin. But, curcumin isolates are only capable of conferring a part of turmeric’s therapeutic power – and therein lies the limitation and hubris of the dominant model where the focus is on isolating the presumably primary “magic bullet ingredient.”

Indeed, it has become typical within the so-called nutraceutical industry to emulate the pharmaceutical model, which focuses on identifying a particular “monochemical” tree within the forest of complexity represented by each botanical agent, striving to standardize the delivery of each purported ‘active ingredient’ with each serving, as if it were a pharmaceutical drug. These extraction and isolation processes also generates proprietary formulas which are what manufacturers want to differentiate their product from all others and henceforth capture a larger part of the market share; a value proposition that serves the manufacturer and not the consumer/patient.

Truth be told, there is no singular ‘magic bullet’ in foods and herbs responsible for reproducing the whole plant’s healing power.  There are, in fact, in most healing plants or foods hundreds of compounds orchestrated by the intelligent ‘invisible hand’ of God or ‘Nature,’ or whatever you wish to call it, and which can never be reduced to the activity of a singularly quantifiable phytocompound or chemical.

Beyond The Curcumin ‘Magic Bullet’ Meme

Not long ago, a highly compelling study published in the journal Stem Cell Research & Therapy provided additional support for the concept that curcumin alone is not enough to explain the healing power of turmeric as a whole plant. The study found that a little known, fat-soluble component within turmeric – Ar-tumerone – may make “a promising candidate to support regeneration in neurologic disease.”

Titled, “Aromatic-turmerone induces neural stem cell proliferation in vitroand in vivo,” German researchers evaluated the effects of this turmeric-derived compound on neural stem cells (NSCs) – the subgroup of brain cells capable of continuous self-renewal required for brain repair.

The study found that when brain cells were exposed to ar-tumerone, neural stem cells increased in number through enhanced proliferation. Moreover, these newly formed neural stem cells also increased the number of fully differentiated neuronal cells, indicating a healing effect was taking place. This effect was also observed in a live animal model, showing that rats injected with ar-tumerone into their brains experienced increases in neural stem cell proliferation and the creation of newly formed healthy brain cells.

This study did not go unnoticed by major medical news channels. Here are some good reviews if you wish to explore the implications in greater depth:

• Newsweek: Curry Power: Turmeric Compound Boosts Growth of Brain’s Stem Cells
• Guardian Liberty Voice: Turmeric Cure Evidence Grows
• Monthly Prescribing Reference: Turmeric May Help Regenerate Brain Cells
• Times of Malta: Turmeric Link to Brain Cell Repair
• Medical Daily: Turmeric Helps Your Brain Heal Itself: Spice Up Your Brain

The GreenMedInfo.com Turmeric Database Confirms It’s Brain-Saving Power!

As you may already know, our database is the world’s most extensive open access natural medical database on over 1,600 different natural substances, with over 2700 study abstracts on turmeric’s healing properties indexed thus far: view the Turmeric research page here to view!  (Watch the video below for more details about our public resource).

If you take a look at the laundry list of over 800 diseases that this spice (or its components, e.g. curcumin) has been studied for to prevent and/or treat, the sheer volume of supportive literature is astounding. Amazingly, we have identified over 270 physiological pathways – according to their conventional pharmacological characterization, e.g. COX-2 inhibitor, Interleukin 6 down-regulator – by which turmeric or its components heals the human body.  In addition, you will find over 217 articles on turmeric’s neuroprotective properties on this page: Turmeric as a Neuroprotective agent. (Find out how we generate these results in the video below)

The research clearly indicates that turmeric is a great brain supportive plant. For a more layperson oriented review, read the following articles:

• How Turmeric Can Save the Aging Brain From Dementia
• Turmeric Produces ‘Remarkable’ Recovery in Alzheimer’s Patients
• The Spice That Prevents Fluoride From Destroying Your Brain

How To Get The Most Out of Your Turmeric

One of the most frequent questions we field is ‘what is the best type of turmeric or curcumin to use’? Obviously, given the aforementioned research, the whole plant is going to carry a wider range of therapeutic compounds than curcumin alone. And yet, most have been heavily enculturated to focus entirely on the ‘how much’ question, opting to identify the molecular weight (i.e. how many milligrams in a serving) of a particular compound as more important than the qualitative dimensions (e.g. is it organic? It is delivered within its natural context as food or a whole plant?) which reflect the type of nutrigenomic information the substance contains, and therefore the ‘intelligence’ it embodies.

And really, there is no generic answer to a generic question about the best way to take turmeric/curcumin. The question always comes from an individual with a particular need, and so, recommendations must be bio-individualized.

For instance, if you have colonic inflammation or polyps, and you are trying to use turmeric to reduce inflammation there or regress precancerous growths, then using the whole plant is best versus a highly bioavailable form of curcumin in capsule form (e.g. Meriva), for instance, which will likely be absorbed by the small intestine and mostly pass through the liver never getting adequate quantities to the large intestine. So, in this person’s case taking a teaspoon of relatively difficult to absorb turmeric may result in painting the diseased surfaces of that person’s intestinal or colonic lumen with exactly the form needed to reverse disease.

But what if you have someone who wants to experience a systemic effect, say, for arthritis or for brain cancer? In these instances, getting turmeric compounds such as curcumin through the glucuronidation barrier in the liver with a phospholipid-bound or black pepper (piperine) combination could be ideal. There is certainly a place for the ‘nutraceutical’ model when properly applied, especially when provided as an adjuvant to the pharmaceutical model within an integrative medical setting.

Ultimately, the goal is not to wait to have such a serious health problem that you have to force yourself to take a ‘heroic dose’ of any herb or food extract. Better is to use small amounts in culinary doses in combination with ingredients that synergize on a physiochemical/informational and sensual basis (producing the all important vitamin P [pleasure] as well!). Recently we actually featured a study that showed culinary doses of rosemary helped improve memory whereas higher ‘heroic’ doses impaired it!

This is why exploring the use of turmeric in curries, or by adding a pinch in a smoothie, may be an ideal daily supplementation approach, versus capsules, whose questionably ‘natural’ capsules and excipients all can add up to cause some stress on the liver you are trying to protect with these natural interventions.  Just remember quality is everything and less can be more!

Originally published: 2018-11-20

Article updated: 2019-08-18

Sayer Ji is founder of Greenmedinfo.com, a reviewer at the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, Co-founder and CEO of Systome Biomed, Vice Chairman of the Board of the National Health Federation, Steering Committee Member of the Global Non-GMO Foundation.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Let’s talk about fruits, sugar, and their confusing connection

Source

Natural News

by: Rex Carter

Monday, August 12, 2019 

Most people know that fruit is nutritious, but is it a good choice for those who are trying to lose weight? It’s not something that everyone agrees on: Some believe that most fruits are loaded with sugar – which, of course, is not good when you’re trying to slim down. That said, the effect of sugar on your health depends on what kind and how much you consume.

The dose makes the poison

Paracelsus, one of the first modern medical professors, said: “The dose makes the poison.” This also applies to sugar. At its most basic, your body breaks down the food you eat into glucose (also known as blood sugar) and other simple sugars. The body then uses these for energy.

Of course, that’s not to say that all types of sugar benefit the body. For one, having excess amounts of sugar in your body is harmful and is often a precursor to chronic diseases. Fructose, in particular, is a type of sugar that’s often misunderstood – since it’s found in fruit and is often seen on ingredient labels as an added sugar.

Indeed, fruit does contain fructose, but it also contains vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that provide nutrition. Most fruits are also loaded with fiber and water, which help with portion control.

However, when fructose is found in added sugars like high fructose corn syrup, it’s a different story. For one, it stands out from other sugars since the body cannot utilize it directly. The liver converts fructose to glucose first, so it can be used by the body as a source of energy. When the body gets too much of it and too quickly – like in the case of sweet juices and soda – the liver gets overloaded and instead converts fructose to fat, causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

This has led to some diet purists claiming that fruit, by virtue of its fructose content, is harmful as well. This claim is inaccurate, however, as it’s not the sugar itself that’s bad, but the amount. Adding sweeteners to your diet, however, can lead to excessive fructose consumption, which can lead to the following effects.

• An imbalance in your blood lipid profile by raising VLDL (very low-density lipoprotein)levels, also known as “bad cholesterol.” This leads to fat deposition in the organs, particularly the heart, and makes you a candidate for cardiovascular disease;
• Increased insulin resistance which in turn increases risk of Type 2 diabetes;
• Increased leptin resistance, the hormone that regulates satiety, which effects how body fat is stored and causes you to overeat;
• Increased risk of colorectal cancer by accelerating the growth of tumors; and
• Increased levels of uric acid in the blood, leading to hypertension and gout.

The positive effects of eating fruit

Aside from fructose, most fruits are also loaded with important nutrients which can help the body feel fuller for longer and prevent cell damage.

Vitamins and minerals

Many fruits possess a lot of vitamins and minerals that you may otherwise overlook in your diet, and it’s easy to get these nutrients from fruit because “nature’s fast food” can be eaten as snacks or while you’re on the go. Most fruit, especially those eaten with the skin, are rich in vitamin C and antioxidants, which help prevent premature cell aging and damage. Fruit is also a great source of vitamin A, which helps protect your eyesight from age-related decline. You can also find electrolytes like potassium and magnesium — minerals that facilitate the functions of the nervous system — in most fruit. Folate, also called vitamin B9, is also present in citrus fruits. A large orange, for example, contains up to 55 micrograms or 14 percent of the recommended daily intake.

Fiber

Most fruit is packed with fiber and water, so you take time to eat and digest it. As a consequence, foods rich in fiber make you feel fuller for longer. By contrast, processed foods and sweets contain similar or higher amounts of fructose but have less nutritional value and satiety. Moreover, insoluble fiber maintains regular bowel movement, while soluble fiber plays a role in weight management, cholesterol regulation, and blood sugar stability. (Related: Learn which carbs are actually good for you in moderate amounts.)

Adding a variety of fruit to your diet is always a great idea. While many may contain sugar, the benefits far outweigh whatever negatives the fructose content brings.

Sources include:

Healthline.com 1

Healthline.com 2

Healthline.com 3

Livestrong.com

QuickAndDirtyTips.com

MedicalNewsToday.com

ScientificAmerican.com

Is China Hoarding Food, Gold And Other Commodities In Anticipation Of A Global Collapse?

Source

endoftheamericandream.com

by Michael Snyder

Aug 8, 2019

Does China believe that we are on the verge of a major global crisis?  The communist Chinese government has always been very big into planning, and it appears that they have decided that now is the time to hoard food, gold, and other commodities.  Of course, in recent days the fact that China is completely cutting off U.S. agricultural imports has made headlines all over the globe, but at the same time, China is dramatically increasing the amount of food that it is importing from the rest of the world.  The end result is actually a substantial surge in Chinese imports, and this is starting to show up in the official numbers.  For example, we just learned that Chinese soybean imports in July were actually up 8 percent compared to last year…

China’s soybean imports in July rose 8% from a year earlier, to their highest level in almost a year, customs data showed on Thursday, as importers increased their purchases of Brazilian beans on higher crush margins.

As I discussed the other day, China had already been drastically reducing soybean imports from the United States even before this recent announcement that U.S. agricultural imports were being cut off completely.  So American farmers were definitely not benefiting from this Chinese import boom, and now that China has decided not to buy any of our crops it is going to be a  “devastating blow” for our farmers…

With China officially pulling out of buying U.S. agricultural products, American farmers are losing one of their biggest customers. It could be a devastating blow in an already tough year for crops and commodity prices. It may also dent U.S. gross domestic product and hurt companies like Deere, whose business is directly tied to farming in the Heartland.

“Sales have already been lower this crop year because of the existing tariffs. If we went all the way to no China exports whatsoever, that would of course result in even larger market and price impacts,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “Cutting China completely out of the market would be a very big deal.”

Needless to say, China has had to turn to other sources to supply their needs, and last month we learned that China had decided to substantially increase wheat and soybean imports from Russia…

China has approved wheat imports from the Russian region of Kurgan, the Chinese customs office said on Friday, bringing Russia a step closer to its goal of dramatically increasing grain exports.

It also approved soybean imports from all parts of Russia, the General Administration of Customs said in a separate statement on its website, having all but halted U.S. soy imports as the trade dispute between Beijing and Washington deepened.

This is yet another sign that Russia and China are drawing closer, and this is something that we have been anticipating.

Meanwhile, China is also hoarding gold.  In fact, July was the eighth month in a row in which the Chinese increased their reserves…

China bought nearly 10 tons of gold in July, marking the eighth consecutive month the country increased its reserves, Bloomberg reported Wednesday morning.

The purchase is another signal from China that it’s gearing up for a prolonged trade conflict with the US. Gold serves as a historic safe-haven investment, and its price typically rises when markets and other currencies see increased volatility or prolonged weakness.

In addition, Bloomberg is reporting that Chinese commodity purchases of all types were very, very strong in July…

Commodity purchases by China rebounded strongly in July. Imports of soy to coal and crude oil gained, signaling demand in the world’s biggest buyer remains solid even as a trade spat with the U.S. escalates.

So why are the Chinese suddenly stocking up on everything?

Well, the truth is that the answer to that question is quite obvious.  The trade war between the United States and China is rapidly escalating, war in the Middle East could erupt at any time, the global economy has been steadily slowing down, crops are failing all over the planet, and everywhere we look we seem to see rising political instability.

In fact, we even see it in China’s own backyard.  After weeks of unprecedented political protests in Hong Kong, it looks like we could be right on the verge of a brutal crackdown.  The following comes from the New York Post…

After eight weeks of huge Hong Kong street protests against Beijing’s rule, the People’s Republic is massing police and soldiers just across the border. Message: If the protesters don’t quit, a bloodbath is coming.

Beijing has also started denouncing the protests as the work of American provocateurs. That’s so the regime can paint its Tiananmen Square-style crackdown as a battle against “foreign influence,” not a smashing of Chinese people who decided all on their own that they’d rather be free.

The relative stability that we have been enjoying for the past several years is ending, and it appears that the months ahead could potentially be quite chaotic.

Normally I would never suggest that anyone should emulate the Chinese government, but in this case they appear to be doing the wise thing.  Now is the time to get prepared for what is coming, because the road ahead promises to be quite tumultuous.

Most people don’t realize it, but U.S. relations with China have already passed the point of no return.  Things are going to become increasingly tense between our two nations, and that is going to have very serious implications for all of us.

 

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.