Cows are pumped up on drugs

Wednesday, September 08, 2010 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

Natural News: Writing in the New York Times, former FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy warns that the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock is a major threat to human health.

“More than 30 years ago … we proposed eliminating the use of penicillin and two other antibiotics to promote growth in animals raised for food,” Kennedy writes. “When agribusiness interests persuaded Congress not to approve that regulation, we saw firsthand how strong politics can trump wise policy and good science.

Already in the 1980s, Kennedy notes, scientists knew that the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics to prevent infection in healthy animals and make them grow faster was leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria. To make matters worse, the antibiotics used in animals are largely the same as those used in humans, meaning that when these livestock-produced superbugs infect humans, doctors have few ways to deal with them.

An estimated 90,000 people die from hospital-acquired infections in the United States every year. Seventy percent of these infections are antibiotic resistant.

Cows On Drugs

(NY Times 4-17-10)    Op-Ed Contributor   By DONALD KENNEDY  Published: April 17, 2010  Stanford, Calif.

Donald Kennedy, a former commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, is a professor emeritus of environmental science at Stanford.

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NOW that Congress has pushed through its complicated legislation to reform the health insurance system, it could take one more simple step to protect the health of all Americans. This one wouldn’t raise any taxes or make any further changes to our health insurance system, so it could be quickly passed by Congress with an outpouring of bipartisan support. Or could it?

How to “Fool Mother Nature”: Recipe for Making Margarine

Posted by Tom Naughton in Bad Diets

Recipe for Making Margarine

How to “Fool Mother Nature”

Here’s how butter is made:

• Milk a cow.
• Skim off the cream.
• Add salt.
• Churn the cream until it’s thick and chunky and tastes awesome. 

Here’s one of the processes for making margarine:   

• Farmers grow seeds.
• The seeds are harvested.
• The seeds are crushed to extract some of the oil.
• The rest of the oil is extracted by mixing the seeds with hexane, a chemical solvent.
• The hexane is (supposedly) all removed.
• The oil is pumped full of hydrogen gas and nickel powder.
• The remaining oil is subjected to heat and high-pressure CO2 gas.
• The oil is mixed with sodium hydroxide and passed through a centrifuge.
• The oil is mixed with water and passed through another centrifuge.
• At this point, the margarine is a gray, speckled, oily mass that doesn’t smell so good.
• The oil is mixed with hydrated aluminum silicate that binds to and filters out the unwanted pigments.
• The mix is heated again and the oil is extracted.
• The oil is passed through a steam distillation chamber to remove unwanted odors.
• Yellow food coloring and artificial flavors are added.

http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2009/09/21/margarine-and-mother-nature/

Posted by Tom Naughton in Bad Diets