Liberation Wellness

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Posts Tagged ‘disease’

Join Us!

Posted by Kevin Brown on April 13, 2012

Join us at Turkey Hill Farm for these engaging and enriching upcoming events!

A New Season, A New Roster of Great Events!

At Turkey Hill Farm, we look at each season as an opportunity to learn and engage with our world in a new way. This spring, we’re exploring how the farm and field can sustain our bodies, how the natural world provides bounty for the eyes and souls, and how our changing times offer us new opportunities to engage with each other and the planet. We hope you’ll join us for a shared experience that will enrich us all. Pre-registration is required for all events, and space is limited. For more information or to register, please call Stuart and Margaret at 802-728-7064 or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you.

Broth Making, Crème Fraiche and Grain Preparation for Optimal Nutrition and Digestion
Sat April 14th, 10:00 am – 1:30 pm

Join Margaret in The Farmer’s Kitchen to learn the art of making a delicious chicken broth that will heal the body and soul, as well as a simple technique for cooking the most succulent chicken imaginable.  We’ll complement this by creating the European-style sour cream called creme fraiche and utilize the whey from the process to soak and prepare grains for optimal nutrition and digestion. The result? A delicious, nutrition-packed lunch enjoyed by us all. Tuition is $60 and includes all ingredients, lunch, take home recipes, and a packet of culture.

Living Resiliently in Turbulent Times
A Presentation/Workshop with
Carolyn Baker

Sun April 29th, 3-5 pm with a Potluck to follow

We are living in uncertain, turbulent times. Many of us are anxious about how we will navigate through increasingly unstable economic and social structures, or how we’ll prepare for an era unlike anything we have ever experienced. Through a combination of mythical storytelling, discussion, mindfulness practices in nature, and practical tools for cultivating resilience, you’ll learn strategies to empower yourself to feel resourceful and grounded in an uncertain future, create a sense of inner peace, forge a contemplative relationship with nature, and connect with other like-minded people who share your concerns and passions. Carolyn’s visits to Turkey Hill Farm are always popular, and space is limited. The cost of attendance is $10. We suggest you get in touch as soon as possible to reserve your space.

Wild Foods: Gathering and Preparing an In-Season, Wild-Crafted Lunch
Sat May 12th, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

This popular class focuses on what is in season in the forest, on the farm, and in the garden. We introduce how to safely identify and respectfully harvest wild foods, talk about the health benefits of these plants as ingredients, and prepare a delicious and creative lunch from the bounty that the edible landscape has to offer. Get back to your culinary roots (literally)! This class is held rain or shine, so please dress for the elements. Tuition is $65 per person. If, however, you’d like to register with your mom as a Mother’s Day outing, we’ll be happy to reduce the registration cost to $55 for each of you. Please register early, as class size is smaller than usual for this active and engaging class.

In Other News

Unfortunately, our May 6th gathering of the Weston A. Price Foundation needs to be canceled. Instead, join Margaret that day for a fantastic workshop at City Market in Burlington – she’ll be creating an appetizer, main course, and dessert made with wild-crafted ingredients. Visit City Market for all the details. We’ll keep you updated on future Weston A. Price Foundation meetings as they are scheduled.

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Low Fat Diet May Have Killed Danny Gans

Posted by Kevin Brown on June 20, 2011

Las Vegas entertainer Danny Gans, an impressionist who sold more tickets on the Strip than the Rat Pack or Elvis Presley, died early Friday, his manager said. He was 52.

Las Vegas entertainer Danny Gans, an impressionist who sold more tickets on the Strip than the Rat Pack or Elvis Presley,died early Friday, his manager said. He was 52.

Gans, best known for his touching impersonation of entertainer George Burns, began a five-year headline gig at tycoon Steve Wynn’s Wynn Las Vegas hotel in February. Prior to that, he spent 11 years at the Mirage.

Gans earned Las Vegas Entertainer of the Year honors 11 years in a row in the reader poll conducted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal but was not well known beyond Las Vegas.

The cause of death was unknown. Gans’s manager Chip Lightman expressed his shock at the impressionist’s passing.

“The guy was healthy as an ox,” Lightman said. “I spoke to Steve Wynn several times this morning and both of us were shocked. I was with Danny the day before yesterday. Healthy as an ox. I mean, all he ate was egg whites and spinach and worked out religiously.”

Gans was a former minor league baseball player who turned to performing after a career-ending injury.

He appeared as a player in the film “Bull Durham” and found success in his 1995 one-man show in New York before moving the next year to Las Vegas.

He is survived by a wife and three children.

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George Burns, often imitated by Danny Gans, lives to 100 years, eating eggs, regular fasting, smoking cigars, and occasional drinks.

Mr Burns reported that he ate eggs and fasted 1 day a week- sounds like the Liberation Diet-

According to George BurnsI like eggs because they’re so versatile. They can be poached, fried, scrambled, boiled-soft-boiled, hard-boiled, medium-boiled-shirred, and Benedicted. It’s amazing how many things you can do with an egg after a chicken gets through with it.

Also he said – Sunday I eat nothing. I may have a martini or two… or three… but NO food…

 

 

Kevin Brown is President of Liberation Wellness and co-author of the Liberation Diet. He serves as a Fellow on the National Board of Fitness Examiners, and is president of Visionary Trainers. Kevin and his wife Tracy are Chapter leaders for the Weston A. Price foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping restore real food to its rightful place in the American diet.
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The Tide Is Turning

Posted by John Chisholm on February 8, 2011

My impression has been that when Reader’s Digest starts carrying articles about a topic, it’s no longer of interest to just a few people on the fringe.  When I ran across the February 2011 article on Gary Taube’s book, Why We Get Fat—and What to Do About It, I saw that the cogent and traditional way of eating is really gaining traction against the low-fat and high-carb conventions.

Parts of the messages of Kevin Brown and the Weston A. Price Foundation are starting to penetrate mainstream awareness.  It’s encouraging, even though awareness by the mainstream press is still incomplete and still lags behind the more knowledgeable champions of healthy eating.  Jimmy Moore posted an article on Gary Taube’s book months ago.  (Jimmy  also provided a convenient link to a podcast of his interesting interview of Gary Taube— good stuff.)

Conventional Wisdom Is Not Holding Up
Taube’s book echoes what Kevin Brown has been saying for years, in Kevin’s own book, in his lectures, and on his website: the standard American diet has been making the population overweight, obese and prone to disease.  These observations challenge the simplistic thinking that says calories are calories no matter where they come from.  In fact, the body responds to different types of dietary calories in different ways, and the low-fat, high-carb diet upsets the body’s ability to regulate fat tissue properly.  Eating fat doesn’t lead to more fat storage in the body; eating high amounts of carbs leads to the insulin resistance that increases fat storage.  The high-carb diet also correlates to increased incidence in a multitude of diseases, from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and even gum disease.

The mounting evidence of researchers and mainstream publications who report on the failure of the standard American diet is like the proverbial handwriting on the wall.  Animal-produced foods are eventually going to lose their demonization.  So now what?  Do we turn to the supermarket aisles for the cheapest and most readily available animal-produced foods?  Not unless we want to trade in one set of health problems (obesity, diabetes) with another set (degenerative diseases such as arthritis and cancers).

Bad food Affects Us.  Bad Food Also Affects Our Animals
We humans do get all kinds of health problems from eating foods that our ancestors never ate and that we weren’t designed for, such as highly-refined grains, sugars and fake oils (care for cottonseed, anyone?).  Similarly, the livestock animals that produce our meat, eggs and milk get all kinds of health problems if forced to eat feeds that they weren’t designed for.  In agribusiness’s factory farms, the food that the animals were designed for, such as natural pasture grass, is replaced by commercial feeds that are both cheaper and cause quicker weight gain, for bigger profits.  The only thing that suffers is the health of the animals, and of the people who eat the unhealthful animals.

A mainstay of feeds for rapid weight gain is GMO corn, which has been shown to cause organ failure in animals, mostly in the kidneys and liver, but also in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and blood.  Another important constituent of feed is cheap protein in the form of animal renderings, which is all the animal byproducts scraped up and thrown out by the factory slaughterhouses, such as bone, feathers, eyeballs, offal, hair, hooves, diseased organs and the occasional bits of metal (from animal-ID-tags), plastic, and some restaurant grease.  Many rendering factories also accept roadkills  and carcasses from animal shelters, and add them to the mix.  To replace the mineral and chlorophyll of natural grass, the feeds for cows usually incorporate ground-up corn stalks and corn plant leaves that are left over after the crop of corn has been harvested; they can make up more than half the feed.

The feeds’ formulas are then topped off with hormones, to force rapid weight gain, and antibiotics, to combat the pathogenic infections that are bound to assail the animals.  The animals on factory farms are kept in pens whose floors (of dirt or concrete) are covered with the animals’ feces and urine, which become an ideal breeding ground for pathogenic bacteria.

It’s Not Smart to Subvert Nature
Grazing animals that are designed to eat grass (e.g., with multiple stomachs) and that were never meat eaters have been forced to eat feed that their systems can’t handle, including bits of animals of their own species.  Mad cow disease is just the most severe outcome so far of these unnatural farming practices.  Other more common diseases and organ failures are inevitable for the animals subjected to modern factory farming.  But agribusiness has figured out how to adjust feeds and hormones so skillfully that they can bring the animals up to harvest weight quickly enough to be killed just weeks before organ failure would debilitate the animals.

The result of all this tinkering with Mother Nature is to produce the most meat (or eggs or milk) for the cheapest cost.  But it’s not really a healthful practice to keep eating food produced by animals pumped up on hormones and antibiotics and on the verge of disease.

The Right Food Raised Right
The truly healthful alternative to an ineffectual diet that’s low-fat and high-carb is to get our food from traditional farming, that raises livestock by having them graze (literally eat living grass).  The animals are healthy because they’ve spent their whole lives feeding on their traditional diet in their natural environment: sunlit pastures where they absorb vitamin-D and the living enzymes and minerals from the grass.  As a bonus, grazing in pastures is much better for the environment than force-feeding artificial diets in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).  The grazing keeps alive the native species of grasses as well as the food chain of animals that dwell there, from insects to small mammals to top predators.   Grazing also does not lead to the concentrations of fecal and urine waste that typically pollute the land around the CAFOs.

Cheap, fake foods that look the same as real are not “just as good” as traditional foods.  People are starting to question whether they’re eating the right things.  Let’s keep going to make sure we’ll all have access to the right food raised in the right way.  Let’s support our natural farmers and buy real food that’s been raised by them.

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.

Posted in Big Agriculture, diabetes, Food Safety, gmo, grains, grass fed beef, health, heart disease, insulin, jimmy moore, kevin brown, liberation diet, liberation wellness, obesity, Vitamin D, wellness, Weston A. Price Foundation | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

An Inheritance Squandered

Posted by Lauren Snyder Grosz on December 29, 2010

gwyneth paltrow Pictures, Images and PhotosRecently Raine Irving Saudners invited me to do a guest post on her blog Agriculturesociety.  It was such a thrill for me because I admire Raine’s work; she does an excellent job of making complicated topics very readable without sacrificing the details.

I admire the Guests the way some people admire the Kennedys.  My daughter is named Charlotte Catherine because I wanted to be able to call her C.C. as a way of paying homage to C.Z. Guest; horsewoman, fashion icon, and gardener.  In the Spring of 2002, I had a chance to attend a lecture she was giving at The Chicago Botanic Garden.  She was 83 at the time and appeared to be in excellent health.  A year and a half later C.Z. Guest died of ovarian cancer.

In the November issue of Harper’s Bazaar, I was saddened to learn that C.Z.’s daughter Cornelia is a vegan.  A quick Google search revealed that she has made this decision for health reasons.  Congestive Heart Failure turned my father, who had been an exceptional high school and collegiate athlete into the equivalent of an invalid when I was 16 years old.  Two years later, I became a vegetarian as a way of steering clear of my dad’s fate.  Occasionally, I’d lapse, but it wasn’t until I became pregnant that I permanently ditched vegetarianism.  Cornelia is almost 47, so it’s not likely that pregnancy will rescue her from her vegan wasteland.  Discipline will also make it harder to turn away from something she perceives as providing a payoff.  As a young socialite in 80′s, the article emphasizes how her equestrian habit saved her from the other popular habits of the era.  Even if she was out late, there were horses to ride the next morning.

Once, I made the acquaintance of a pro football player, who had started drinking soy and was a vegetarian during the week.  When I began inquiring as to why he was doing this, what I learned was interesting, disturbing really.  He felt this way of eating required discipline, hard work, and persistence, all of the things that helped him to be a starter in the NFL.  He was a physical specimen to behold, but was unable to credit his grandmother’s  and mother’s love of traditional southern food for his stature and strength.  This inability to give credit where credit is due is also what led Cornelia Guest to ban all animal products from her life.  The saying in their house was, “a pound of butter a day keeps the doctor away” and still she banishes the food!  It isn’t enough that her mother enjoyed robust health until she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Surly butter, cream, eggs, and meat must be to blame.

Certainly, this is what I thought because butter was king in our house and from my vantage point it had caused nothing but trouble.  My mom died at the ripe old age of 64.  Yes.  She smoked, but everybody knows food plays a part.  I’ve already mentioned that my dad lived like an invalid, who survived until he was 72 because he slept about fifteen hours a day, and swallowed prescription pills that could only be held by a giant shoe box.  Somehow, it never occurred to me that my family’s health woes could have anything to do with the bank of cabinets devoted to snack foods or that my mom liked to start her day with dessert and a glass of Folgers  Crystals.  She was very particular and always insisted on Heinemann’s Coffee Cakes.  A cursory glance at their ingredient list fails to turn up anything that belongs in a Bavarian coffee cake or any other food for that matter.  Now blaming sugar even seems far fetched because unless we were making sugar cookies from scratch, it seems highly unlikely that any of our favorite companies used anything other than High Fructose Corn Syrup and soybean oil.  My dietary choices were also hampered by my mom’s fabulous figure, never weighing more than 125 pounds, she was of the opinion that only peasants couldn’t wear their normal clothes home from the hospital after giving birth!  How could sugar, even if it was fake, be to blame?  She was thin, strong, and enjoyed incredibly robust health, until diagnosed with cancer.  Within a year, we had lost her.

That very same year, I serendipitously came across the life changing work of Sally Fallon Morrell, President of The Weston A Price Foundation.  While I hadn’t been a vegetarian for many years, it wasn’t until then that I understood the importance of having animal fat in my diet.  Fortunately, there was enough real food in our house; my mom frequently cooked from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, that I instantly knew which foods were the culprits of disease in my family.  The drive to be healthy seems incredibly strong in children who’ve lost a parent at a young age.  Gwyneth Paltrow provides a window into the extremes someone, with means, will go to in order to avoid getting cancer.  She was very close to her father and to have lost him when she was only 30 obviously took a toll.  In her new cookbook she reminisces about cooking with him and notes that health food was not the priority, hence her obsession with Veganese, a concoction made entirely from fake vegetable oils.  In addition, the starlet avoids dairy and only eats animals with two legs.  I can’t help but wonder how on earth her mother  Blythe Danner allows her lovely daughter to carry on with this warped destructive food philosophy.  Not surprisingly , Gwyneth announced that she has osteopenia a precursor to osteoporosis.  She is unable to connect the dots between her diet that is devoid of Vitamin A and D and having a disease commonly reserved for old women.  Her remedy for this which was urged by her doctors is to take prescription strength Vitamin D.  What is most disturbing is that she has enormous influence, just as Cornelia Guest has in her circle, and hordes of young girls will blindly follow their advice!

Lastly, it’s important to add that many people already understand the importance of eliminating junk food, such as sugar laden cereals and soda.  Dr. Price showed that this is only part of what is responsible for radiant health and wholeness.  Unless the all important fat soluble activators are given their due people will still experience compromised health.  Madonna’s daughter Lola is proof of this: the Material Girl’s family is on a strict organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic diet and yet the poor girl still was not spared orthodontics and additionally required a back brace for scoliosis.

Living long and living well depends on eating high-fat high-cholesterol foods. Yes.  We all have to die sometime, but that doesn’t mean it has to be via a massive heart attack, cancer,  or spending the winter of one’s life in an Alzheimer’s facility.  Traditional diets provide the antidote to these grim scenarios.  The second arrow in our quiver is that an infrastructure for excellent sanitization exists – hot water, stainless steel tanks, electrification – that should allow us to all live to a ripe old age (barring accidents).  Yet,  instead of flourishing, the diseases of civilization have never had a stronger hold on us.  It’s simply not enough to know something is bad.  While we do not need to turn our children into small nutritionists, they must be able to discern between what is true and false, and why certain principles must not be abandoned in the kitchen.

Lauren Snyder Grosz is a Certified Nutrition and Wellness Educator. She writes for LiberationWellnessBlog.com. As a student on a lifelong quest for exceptional health and happiness, her mission is to empower people to take complete responsibility for their own health by rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true and rediscovering what truly works based on accurate science.

Posted in Butter, fitness, Nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Dr. Erik Von Kiel D.O. – Weston Price Medical Doctor

Posted by Kevin Brown on September 13, 2010

Total Health is the moniker of this rare medical doctor who believes in holistic health and the constitution of the United States.

Hear this remarkable man on the Liberation Wellness Hour!


Posted in Fear, Food freedom, god, government, kevin brown, liberation wellness, liberation wellness hour, Weight Loss, weston price | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Oral Health for Bodily Health

Posted by John Chisholm on September 7, 2010

Contrary to popular belief, it’s very clear what’s behind the epidemic of gum problems in America and the rest of the developed world, and it’s not lack of dental care.  In our mouth, the carefully designed equilibrium among the strains of normally beneficial bacterial flora has gotten completely out of balance in response to humanity’s shift in diet from one that’s healthy-fat centric to one that’s refined-carbohydrate centric.  For thousands of years, technologically primitive people on the earlier diet had excellent teeth and gums without brushing, flossing, or having any dentists.  We won’t be returning completely to the diets of our primitive ancestors anytime soon, but we can take measures to reform our diet and make up the difference with a careful augmentation of behavioral habits using herbs, vitamins, and natural cleansers to keep gum disease, tooth decay, and associated bodily ailments at bay.

Where Oral Problems Come From
It’s a safe bet that, having lived most of our lives so far on a conventional diet, our mouths all contain similar monuments to a past of poor oral health: either fillings, crowns, implants, root canals, gum pockets, receding gums, or in extreme cases, loose teeth.  All of these are the result of bacterial infection brought about by our modern diet.  Because bacteria (both the beneficial and the harmful) are too small to observe directly, we don’t notice when a few strains of previously benign bacteria begin reproducing at such a terrific rate as to displace other beneficial strains that would otherwise keep them in check and harmless.  Under the influence of refined carbohydrates and sugars, the population explosion of a few bacterial strains and the displacement of many becomes significant in just a few hours.  (It’s not due just to direct exposure to the teeth; Dr. Weston Price demonstrated that dental problems occurred even after the ingestion of sugars through a tube, without direct contact with the teeth.)

The earliest signs of trouble are the formation of plaque, a colorless, sticky biofilm of bacteria, bacteria-by-products, yeasts, viruses, white blood cells, protozoa and mycoplasmas.  Plaque takes hold on the substrate of the teeth, especially in the margin between teeth and gums.  As a biofilm, the bacteria acquire abilities that free-floating (planktonic) individual bacteria cannot perform, excreting substances that are both adhesive and protective.  While it can’t be seen, its stickiness can sometimes be felt with the tongue.  In as little as 24 hours after attaching itself to the teeth, plaque have absorbed enough minerals from the saliva to start forming a hardened crystalline calcification (called tartar or calculus), which can be both felt and seen.  The rough surface of calculus serves as an ideal substrate for additional plaque, and is so hard and so adhered to teeth that brushing and flossing usually won’t dislodge it.

Both the soft plaque and the hardened calculus excrete acids that irritate the gums and cause microscopic lesions in the gum’s epithelial lining, through which plaque-forming bacteria can invade and infect the interior gum tissue.  The acids also dissolve molecules from tooth enamel, especially under the protective armor of the calculus, so that eventually there’s a pathway through which bacteria can enter and infect the soft interior of a tooth (a cavity).

The Immune Response

When bacteria infect the gums, the immune system goes to work to absorb or destroy the invaders, and any swelling, tenderness and redness are indicative of the battle between immune cells and the bacteria infecting the gums (acute inflammation).  When gum tissue is infected but the cells are still alive, the condition is called gingivitis.  If the immune system destroys the bacteria, and the lesions in the gum’s lining heal, then the temporary inflammation passes as merely a brief episode of gingivitis.

But often the bacterial reproductive rate is so rampant (under the influence of the modern diet) that the immune system is overwhelmed, and the infection proceeds to where cells of soft oral tissue start to die off, a condition called periodontal disease.  The immune system’s response to unrelenting infection is to shift to chronic inflammation, an attempt to isolate the infecting agent from healthy tissue.  Immune system cells identify the gum cells that are badly infected, and attach themselves to mark them for destruction.  Other immune cells seek out the gum cells that have been marked, and either devour them or destroy them.  This “amputation” of infected cells contributes to the death of a lot of the gum cells, but the tactic does not resolve the infection as long as the refined carbohydrate diet keeps sustaining the onslaught of additional bacteria.

Sometimes the infection and inflammation proceed fairly uniformly from the surface inward.  As the cells near the surface die, the gums visibly recede.  Sometimes, the infection follows a narrower path along the cells that attach the gums to a tooth; as these cells die a gum pocket forms between a tooth’s root and the gum tissue lying against it.  In that pocket, anaerobic bacteria set up shop, and the infection aggressively continues down alongside the tooth’s root, eventually killing some of the thousands of ligaments that hold the tooth to the jaw (causing loose teeth), or even killing some jawbone cells.  The common denominator of periodontal disease is some oral cell death, and it currently affects over three-fourths of the people over the age of forty.

Oral Issues Affect the Body
The damage caused by oral infection is not limited to the mouth.  Bacteria that have infected gum tissue get picked up by the circulatory system and transported by blood vessels throughout the body.  The same strains of plaque that are found in the mouth are also found in the blood vessels, and a very strong correlation between gum disease and cardiovascular disease has been found, where 91% of those patients had moderate to severe periodontitis.  Immune system cells, particularly the cytokines that mark infected gum cells for destruction, are also spread by the blood vessels, and they tend to attach themselves to tissue anywhere in the body that is already somewhat weak, making them targets for destruction as well.

This is the mechanism postulated behind the proven correlations between infected gums and the increased incidence of bodily diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, arthritis, and even pancreatic cancer.  The discoveries of these details by 21st century science confirm the observations made in the 1930’s by Dr. Weston A. Price that many instances of modern degenerative diseases can trace their origins to focal infections in the mouth.  Oral health is not just a cosmetic concern, but is central to our bodily health.

What We Can Do

The most important help for oral health is to keep improving our diet.  As pointed out by Kevin Brown, the essential nutrients necessary for human health include fats (essential fatty acids) and proteins (essential amino acids), but there are no essential carbohydrates.  We can thrive quite well without consuming them, and in terms of oral health we could probably dispense with any additional oral care practices if we did.  But a diet without carbohydrates might be too primitive to be feasible in the modern world, so we will have to deal with some bacterial response to our carbohydrate intake.

There are five related ways by which we can further help our body restore oral health: (1) Help control the overpopulated colonies of oral bacteria; (2) stop using products with toxins and irritants that make things worse; (3) remove bacterial plaque while it’s still soft and vulnerable; (4) help the body fight any infection already in the gums, and (5) help the oral tissues heal themselves.

Controlling overpopulated colonies of oral bacteria does not involve killing all the bacteria in the mouth, as many mouthwashes try to do.  Bacterial flora is necessary in the mouth to start the digestive process, and the moist, warm mouth is an environment so inviting for bacteria that it can’t remain sterile.  The idea here is just to take some of the edge off the huge numbers of oral bacteria in our mouths whose populations have exploded under modern foods.  Gentle antiseptic action can be provided by some naturally antimicrobial herbs, such as peppermint, cranberry, cinnamon, and tea tree leaf.

(Note that it’s the highly pulverized whole leaf of the tea tree that’s recommended, instead of the very concentrated essential oil.  The properties of tea tree are in the leaf, and have been used as an antiseptic for centuries by the Bunjalung aboriginal people of Australia.  But the steam-distilled essential oil is relatively recent industrially produced concentrate that’s many times more intense than the leaf, and can be too intense for some people.)

Brushing With Natural Assistance

Replacing standard synthetic oral care products with natural ingredients is important because the toxins in standard products adversely affect both the mouth and organs throughout the body.  Fluoride, a byproduct of the aluminum and chemical-fertilizer industries, is so highly toxic that each tube of toothpaste contains enough to kill a child.  Fluoride also disrupts enzyme activity in the mouth, leading to increased gum disease.  SLS is an irritant in toothpaste that’s a type of detergent de-greaser used on engines and added to make toothpaste look sudsy.  Even the glycerin, while not directly toxic and while giving toothpaste its convenient paste consistency, prevents enamel repair by coating the teeth to stop saliva re-enamelization, a natural process that restores tooth enamel.  Toothpastes rely on abrasives to clean teeth, but the amount that effectively cleans also scratches the enamel.  None of the artificial or toxic ingredients are necessary for oral health, and all are detrimental.

The third strategy is to remove bacterial plaque while still soft and vulnerable to disruption.  The intention is not necessarily to eradicate the bacteria, but to stop the plaque from calcifying into hardened calculus by mechanically breaking up the organization of plaque bacteria.  This will only be a temporary setback to the bacteria, and they will start to regroup into a sticky biofilm again.  But until reorganization, they’ve lost the ability to excrete the sticky and acidy substances that modify their surroundings for even faster bacterial reproduction, and also lost the ability to form calculus from saliva minerals.  For most people the actions of brushing twice a day and flossing daily are frequent enough to stymie the formation of calculus.

Brushing with toothpaste is not recommended, but effective, natural tooth cleaners can certainly make brushing more effective.  The traditional combination of baking soda and salt is a tried and true natural dentifrice, with the added bonus of baking soda’s ability to neutralize the acids produced by plaque.  The salt crystals should be pulverized into an extremely small mesh size, to ensure the salt dissolves quickly and completely.  The inclusion of cranberry and tea tree leaf powder will add an extra dimension, because they have the characteristic of countering the stickiness property of plaque, helping to loosen both plaque and calculus.  There are some natural dental soaps that can be helpful, especially if the teeth and gums are already in pristine condition, if a brushing schedule is diligently followed, and no active help will be needed either to dislodge plaque and calculus or to support the gum tissues in trying to fight infection and heal themselves.

Fighting Infection and Helping Healing

The fourth strategy involves helping to fight infection already in the gums, and we can again turn to the antimicrobial herbs of peppermint, cranberry, cinnamon, and tea tree leaf.  But bacteria within tissue aren’t as easily exposed as are the bacteria free-floating in the mouth.  However, help is available in the form of the salt (used above as part of the tooth cleanser), if it’s full-mineral sea salt.  High-mineral sea salt, such as French grey sea salt that’s harvested in clay-lined ponds, has nearly the same mineral composition and ratios as human blood and fluids, and the resulting compatible ion balance helps fluids move more easily through cells walls.

The fifth strategy is to help the gum tissues to heal themselves, and the greatest help of all is from vitamin-C with a bioflavonoid complex to help the body absorb and retain the vitamin-C.  Vitamin-C is required for the growth of connective tissue, and the gums are made almost entirely of connective tissue.  For someone with gum issues, no dentifrice should be considered unless it contains a healthy amount of vitamin-C.  Another excellent source of healing help is myrrh, which has been famous since biblical times as one of the most effective natural soothers and healing agents.

There’s a tendency to think of oral health as being totally independent from bodily health, but they are intimately connected, each side having influences on and showing the effects of the other.  A traditional, nourishing, “primitive” diet is the foundation of both oral and bodily health, and nothing will surpass its influence or make up for its lack.   But upon that foundation, natural support is helpful and available.

The carefully selected combination of the herbs, vitamins, and natural cleansers described above are all incorporated into a powdered dentifrice called Good-Gums to augment the body’s mechanisms for oral health.  Whether you use Good-Gums or mix your own dentifrice of natural ingredients, your body will respond well to its application through the conscientious exercise of oral care habits (which will be detailed in another article due in Sept. 2010).

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.

Posted in Artherosclerosis, cancer, good gums, health, heart disease, immune system, john chisholm, kevin brown, liberation diet, liberation wellness, oral health, sugar, Uncategorized, weston price | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Bacteria– Our Capricious Allies

Posted by John Chisholm on August 31, 2010

There’s a natural equilibrium involved in staying healthy, and an outstanding example can be observed in how well the body is designed for maintaining our eating apparatus: healthy teeth and gums.

Helpful Allies
Besides the obvious mechanical action of the jaws, teeth and tongue, there are biochemical processes going on in the mouth.  Enzymes from the food we eat and from our saliva are required for digestion and their presence is provided for by our biology and our diet.  In addition, bacteria that live in our mouth also play a crucial role in digestion, and are ultimately necessary for our survival.  Bacteria are so pervasive and abundant on Earth that they insinuate themselves into the survival mechanisms of all complex life forms.  A few infamous pathogenic strains have tarnished all bacteria with a bad rap, but instead of going to war against them all, let’s see and appreciate how well our bodies are designed to cooperate with our little allies.

We can’t avoid bacteria.  People used to think that most of the Earth’s biomass was in the form of forest trees, but recent discoveries of additional habitats for bacteria are leading to the re-evaluation that most of the biomass is actually in the form of bacteria.  Even in our own bodies, up to 10% of our weight is actually the weight of bacteria.  There are many times more of these single cell creatures living in and on each of us than there are human cells that comprise our body.  It’s estimated that 99% of bacteria on the planet are either benign or helpful, some indirectly, such as “fixing” nitrogen from the atmosphere to the nodules of food-plant roots, and some more directly, such as protecting us from pathogenic microbes.  We could not live without the services of our bacterial occupants.

By occupying the moist, hospitable environments of our mouth, nose, and throat, colonies of beneficial bacterial flora crowd out any harmful microbes that may attempt to take up residence.  Some strains of beneficial bacteria actively destroy pathogenic microbes as well.  Aside from keeping us healthy from pathogens, beneficial bacteria also are critical to our absorption of food.  Bacteria throughout the digestive tract, from the mouth to the stomach and the intestines, help in the process of breaking down the chemicals of food into molecules small enough for the body to absorb.

Designed for Equilibrium
In a typical mouth, over 300 strains of oral bacteria have been identified.  Under the conditions in which primitive humans have lived for thousands of years, all of these strains coexisted among themselves and with the human body in a healthful equilibrium.  Under modern conditions, the equilibrium has been upset, leading to a few strains of bacteria getting so out of hand that they infect gums and teeth.  The repercussions are an epidemic of gingivitis, periodontitis, tooth decay, and over time a host of bodily ailments.

But when in balance, the equilibrium worked so well that the skeletal and teeth remains of early humans show that they had excellent oral health.  As recently as the 1930’s, there were still isolated populations who lived and ate like our ancient ancestors and also had excellent oral and bodily health (as documented by Dr. Weston A. Price).  Before turning our attention to what upset the equilibrium, let’s look at how well this beautifully balanced system worked.

As mentioned above, the 300+ strains of oral bacteria lived in equilibrium and the digestion-aiding bacteria were allowed to grow just populous enough to work on the food that the humans ate.  Part of this equilibrium was the interplay between a person’s diet and the four-phase life cycle of bacteria.  At the (first) lag phase, bacteria adjust to their environment and make the vitamins and amino acids necessary to reproduce.  At the exponential phase, the bacteria multiply by having each bacterium split into two daughter cells, doubling in population from a few days to as little as a few minutes, the maximum rate differing according to the strain.  How well the different strains of bacteria are supplied with their specific nutrients also affect how quickly the first two phases progress.  When a person’s diet was such that the slower-replicating bacteria were fed nutrients that allowed them to keep pace with the faster-replicating strains (which received less of their favorite nutrients), then the bacterial habitat became so fully populated by the varieties of bacteria that they went into the (third) stationary phase, in which their growth declined.  With all niches in the mouth occupied, equilibrium among the bacterial strains prevailed.  Finally, for any single bacterium cell, the final phase is the death phase, where reproduction no longer takes place and the cell is absorbed for its nutrients and replaced by another cell.

After thousands of years and many generations of humans eating in a way to keep their bacterial flora in equilibrium, humans started developing and eating refined carbohydrates and sugars that turned out to be high-octane fuel for a few select strains of oral bacteria.  These particular nutrients, never before seen in nature and some pharmaceutically pure, jolted a couple dozen strains of bacteria out of their stationary phase and back into a runaway exponential phase.  Their out of control bacterial population could then displace fellow strains that normally would have kept them in check, and the overpopulated strains would overwhelm the gums’ defenses, leading to an infection of gums and eventually of teeth.

Safety Net
Prior to refined carbohydrates, when a hunter-and-gatherer or neolithic person’s diet temporarily got out of balance, bacterial populations would also fluctuate somewhat, but the body used its built-in safety systems to contain the resulting problems until a healthy diet returned the bacterial flora back to a normal equilibrium.  The gums are especially set up for efficient immune system response in times of temporary infection.

The connective tissue beneath the gum lining funnels specialized cells to the infection site that devour the invading microorganisms (phagocytes, mostly in the gum lining) or that kill them (lymphocyte white blood cells, mostly in the gum’s deeper connective tissue). As other live cells react to the toxins of the bacteria and to the microscopic battle taking place between immune system cells and bacteria, and as dead cells accumulate, the gum tissue at the infection site swells up. When the source of the irritation is removed and the bacteria population is brought under control, the immune system can handle the occasional invader and the entire episode is experienced merely as a temporary and reversible flare up of gingivitis—inflamed gums.

Besides fighting the invading bacteria, gums are also set up for fast healing.  Gum cells are among the quickest to be replaced and have extremely short lifetimes compared to other types of cells.  The lifespan of a healthy gum cell typically ranges from only two to seven days, and is usually replaced in four or five days.  Fast cell replacement rates make for fast healing, once proper nutrients are once again being ingested and after the varieties of bacterial strains once again find their relative balance.

Losing Our Way
After people started eating refined carbohydrates, sugars and denatured foods as a permanent part of their diet, there would be no return to the diet-induced healthy equilibrium.  The few problematical strains of bacteria develop in ways our ancient ancestors hardly ever saw.  An individual free-floating (planktonic) bacterium forms its own hard but tiny mineral shell, but it can’t do any real damage in that form. The bacterium biochemically attracts the minerals of like bacteria, until chains and then clusters form. These are still not too threatening. The clusters join together to form colonies, and the colonies form an even stronger attraction for each other. Eventually there’s a continuous, delicate mat of bacteria and other microscopic material covering the gum and tooth margin, called plaque. The bacteria in plaque thrive on an acid environment, and as they feed and multiply, the by-products of their feeding actually add to the acidity under the mat of plaque. If left undisturbed, this mat steadily builds a hard protective shell of calcified minerals, called calculus. Under the hardened calculus, the colonies of bacteria multiply even more rapidly.  The acids dissolve away enamel, eventually exposing the softer interior of the tooth, which can then be infected.

The immune system tries to fight off the invading bacteria, but the unnatural foods fuel the exponential phase of bacterial growth so much that new bacteria more than replace the casualties that were killed by the immune system.  Eventually the immune system changes tactics from trying to rid the body of the infectious agents (acute inflammation) to trying to isolate the infectious agents from healthy tissue in the body (chronic inflammation).  The immune system will “amputate” infected cells, and this process can be observed as receding gums, deepening gum pockets, and loose teeth (as periodontal ligaments are severed).  These deteriorated conditions that once were very rare are now so commonplace as to be considered a normal part of getting older.

But all is not lost.  Once the problem and its root causes have been understood, there are things that can be done to correct the problem and to return our teeth and gums to health.  First and foremost is learning and following the principles of healthy nutrition.  From this foundation, we can then take measures to reverse teeth and gum problems (the topic of another article due in Sept. 2010).  And in the process of improving our oral health, we’ll also improve our prospects for bodily health (another article due in Sept. 2010).

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.

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Posted in good gums, health, kevin brown, liberation diet, Nutrition, oral health, real food, weston price | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

John Chisolm – GOOD Gums – Liberation Wellness Hour

Posted by Kevin Brown on August 30, 2010

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums a toothpaste-replacement that supports the bodys ability to heal its gums.

When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown of Liberation Wellness

Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed full-fat pasture-raised foods.


Kevin Brown is President of Liberation Wellness and co-author of the Liberation Diet. He serves as a Fellow on the National Board of Fitness Examiners, and is president of Visionary Trainers. Kevin and his wife Tracy are Chapter leaders for the Weston A. Price foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping restore real food to its rightful place in the American diet.

Posted in good gums, health, john chisolm, kevin brown, liberation diet, liberation wellness | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Posted by John Chisholm on August 25, 2010

In school, we were sometimes presented with an example or case study which described all the salient facts and where the people of that time made the (obviously) wrong choice.  The outcome, depending on the subject matter of the class, could have been families suffering, companies losing money, or countries being conquered.  The correct choices seemed to be so hard to discern for the people in the examples, but seem so obvious in hindsight.  During my school years, the general reaction to these examples was to adopt a vague sense of superiority over the “dumb” people who couldn’t see the obvious.

Even though case studies have been presented to generations of students, the lessons don’t prevent new episodes of breakdown that will take their turn as future examples.  (In economics, lessons from the tulip-mania bubble of the 1630’s didn’t prevent the railway bubble of the 1840”s, the Florida land bubble of the 1920’s, or the dot-com bubble of the late 1990’s)  Obviously the participants weren’t “dumb,” but they couldn’t accurately perceive reality until the resulting situation became quite dire.  Because the pattern is so widespread and persistent in human history, perhaps we should quickly check to see if there is anything like that going on in our lives today.

Our Current “Case Study”

A likely candidate involves our current dire epidemic of chronic and degenerative diseases.  A century ago, fewer than one in twenty Americans contracted cancer in their lifetimes; now the figure is about half the men and nearly two-thirds the women.  Diabetes has likewise been on an explosive growth, with the percentage of those inflicted expected to double between the years 2000 and 2030; one third of Americans born after year 2000 are expected to contract diabetes in their lifetime.  Heart disease and strokes have become scourges of the modern developed world.  Even asthma has been growing tremendously since the 1960’s; in the 30 years since 1980 the rate has grown 250%.  The growth of tooth decay and gum disease, noticed by Dr. Weston Price in the 1930’s, has become endemic, giving rise to a booming business today in crowns, root canals and implants.  Obesity has grown from a tiny portion of the population a century ago to over a third; obesity rates have tripled in the last 30 years.  Having so many degenerative chronic diseases increase at the same time is more than a coincidence.

What could be bringing this on?  The worldwide increase in diabetes follows the adoption of a “Western-style” diet.  The prevalence of asthma is growing worldwide, even though it varies from place to place, with some countries having up to 60 times the rate as others; the highest are the developed Western countries whose populations ingest the most antibiotics as children, such as given to food animals by modern agribusiness.  The increase in heart disease and strokes follows precisely the dietary change in fats from those originating from pasture-raised animals to those artificially manufactured from hydrogenated plant oils.  The rise in cancer mirrors the increase in sugar (from 5 lbs. per person per year a century ago to 135 lbs.), which has been found to feed cancer cells and suppress the immune system.  Our diet has changed more in the last 75 years than in all the thousands of years that preceded it.

Objectively, it seems so obvious. Every correlation between dietary changes on the one hand and many degenerative diseases on the other has been documented.  And yet, it’s still hard to accept that the denatured and artificial foods that dominate the American diet can be at the root of so much detriment to our bodies.  What one day will be considered self-evident seems so controversial and hard to accept today.  Why do we respond so much like the people in the case studies we had read about in school?

Why It’s Hard to Discern

Back in school, the historical case studies were presented to us with all their salient facts, but not all the background noise of obfuscation and half-truths that the people of that time also had to contend with.  In hindsight, it’s easy to sort out the germane from the irrelevant.  Not so easy when people with a vested interest pursue a hidden agenda of obfuscation.   When it comes to our food supply, there’s a lot of motivation for confusion and deception: big money.

It used to be that our food supply came from many independent, decentralized farmers, all pursuing organic farm practices, the only kind of farming that existed at the time.  When farmers made up half the population (around 1880), or 30% of the population (in 1920), control of agriculture’s income was diluted.  By 1990, the situation had completely changed.  All but 2% of the population had been driven off their farms, and even among the remaining farms there was tremendous concentration.  Agribusiness applied the industrial manufacturing model to farming, and no longer did farmers raise many different types of crops and animals on the same farm, with the wastes from one operation becoming the inputs for another one.  Monoculture and single species animal-raising allowed for dominance by the few.  Just 3% of the remaining hog farms produce the majority of the hogs; 2% of cattle feed operations produce 40% of the cattle.  Consolidation, uniformity, and cheap chemical inputs allowed a few to take control of our food supply.

The seven biggest agribusiness corporations, which pretty much dictate the food supply by controlling seeds, grains, animal feeds, fertilizers and herbicides, have annual revenues of over $250 billion.  (To give some perspective on how large and influential such an amount is, it exceeds the annual federal budgets for the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Energy, Interior, EPA and NASA combined).  That’s the revenue of just seven companies, not of the whole agricultural sector.  The small incomes of the many farmers who work at or close to breakeven are not included, but they are continually squeezed into a smaller share of agriculture revenue, while the giant agribusinesses take an ever larger share.  Because food is not a discretionary purchase, the billions in current annual revenue are the anticipated trillions in future revenue stream.  That’s a lot of motivation for obfuscation.

And obfuscation is necessary because the very agricultural practices that reduce costs and increase profits are the same practices that denature our food to the point of ruining our health.  These practices include: chemical pesticides that are designed to poison living cells; chemical fertilizers that act like amphetamines for plants; CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) that continually expose animals to their own feces; artificial fats that humans were never meant to ingest; pasteurization to make dangerously contaminated milk safe (in the short term) but devoid of critical nutrients; artificial hormones given to milk-bearing and meat-bearing animals; a flood of antibiotics given to CAFO animals; animal feeds comprising waste by-products from other industries instead of the natural food they were designed to eat.  Newer practices that further denature food are continually adopted in the search for lower costs and higher profits, such as irradiation of food and the displacement of natural plants with GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

Obfuscation Tactics

With an ugly truth to hide, and with a strong motivation and plentiful resources, agribusiness has hired some of the brightest minds to figure out how to shape our perceptions of food so that we’ll docilely keep ingesting denatured food that makes us sick, while convincing ourselves that it’s all okay.

First and foremost is to make sure that denatured food looks quite a lot like real natural food.  Everyone is busy with so many demands on time and energy, that agribusiness can expect most of the denaturing practices to slip right past us if it doesn’t change the appearance of the food too much.  Can we really tell if the milk has rBGH in it, or if the corn sweetener that’s in all the convenience foods is GMO?  Especially if the politicians can be convinced (with campaign contributions) that labeling should be dismissed.

Another important requirement is that denatured foods cause only long-term degenerative or chronic diseases that will take years to manifest.  Milk from cows raised in filthy CAFOs is all right as long as the fecal bacteria can be killed by heating the milk; no one will get sick immediately after drinking it, and the destruction of critical enzymes and vitamins from the heating will affect only long-term health.

In obfuscating the attributes of denatured foods, it’s also important for the producers to make the foods as convenient as possible to prepare and use.  People don’t want their lives to be more complicated, so stressing convenience makes people more likely to snap up the immediate benefit while delaying or dismissing the effort it takes to become educated about the long-term implications.

Other tactics include claiming that any denatured foods that can’t be disguised are better than the natural foods they’re replacing.  (Kevin Brown’s book “Liberation Diet” ISBN: 978-1439207390 has a good explanation and examples of this tactic.)  Advertising and PR can really help sell denatured foods by claiming they have health benefits.  Even if people don’t buy the idea of being better than what nature provides, many will buy the idea that it’s just as good—and cheaper to boot.

As the foundation of our food supply falls into the control of fewer and fewer people, the choices available through grocery stores get reduced to only the denatured foods that yield the lowest cost and highest profits.  Retail chains can easily be convinced to dedicate their shelf space to products with the highest profit margins, the longest shelf life (further reducing costs), and the largest advertising budgets.  As one grocery chain after falls in line, almost everyone winds up eating the same things and suffering the same repercussions.

When everyone suffers from the same maladies, it doesn’t take long before they’re accepted as being unavoidable and the new norm.  I live near the Everglades, and I’ve read that the bird population has been reduced by 90% over the past century; but the reduction happened so slowly and steadily that everyone thinks the bird population there is fine.  On the West coast, where 96% of the redwood forests have been cut down and won’t grow back, the majority of what’s left remains outside park protection and available for logging, because few people miss the grandeur of bygone years.  The same phenomenon can be exploited here as well.  “Of course everyone knows someone who has died of cancer,” or “…has diabetes” or “…we all have gum disease.”  There’s comfort in having the same perceptions as the crowd.  It seems to validate what we think, even if those ideas were fed to us by advertising and manipulation.  It’s a rare person who can buck the trend.

Part of obfuscation is hiring “experts” to proclaim alternative explanations for all the degenerative ills that have arisen alongside the rise of denatured foods.  “It’s not our diet; it’s a lack of willpower, …the lack of exercise due to videogames, …” etc, etc.

Seeing Clearly and Acting Wisely

All of these tactics clutter the landscape of our perception, making it hard for us to discern what’s best for us.  There’s a common expression called “blowing smoke,” and we’re the recipients of a lot of it.  Unfortunately it takes some effort to see through the smoke to discern what’s real and what the good choices really are.  This is not an academic exercise like the case studies we saw in school.  Being sick with degenerative diseases can affect every aspect of our lives, as well as those who’d have to become our caretakers.  There are few things more important than learning to avoid or remove the underlying causes of degenerative diseases, and to maintain a solid foundation for health.   Our choices will influence how long we and our loved ones will live and affect the quality of our lives while we live, so it’s an effort worth making.  There is help available, in the form of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Liberation Wellness programs, such as 30 Days to Wellness.  We don’t have to be so blinded by smoke that we become examples of people acting “dumb.”

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.

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Posted in Big Agriculture, cancer, diabetes, farm fresh, gmo, government, health, heart disease, kevin brown, liberation diet, Nutrition, obesity, oral health, processed food, raw milk, real food, real foods, saturated fat, sugar, wapf, wellness, weston price | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Action Alert! Real Food Needs Your Assistance…

Posted by Kevin Brown on August 14, 2010

Although USDA has backtracked on its plans for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), the fight is not over yet!

As announced in February, USDA is working on a “new framework” for animal traceability. USDA has stated that this new framework will apply only to animals that cross interstate borders and will emphasize low-cost identification methods. But Big Ag and Big Tech are pushing for a more expansive–and expensive–federal program, even as they also make plans to re-create NAIS at the state level.

The USDA is holding a series of public meetings on its new framework, and has announced three more during August: Madison, Wisconsin; Atlanta, Georgia; and Pasco, Washington.

TAKE ACTION

Come to the meeting and make your voice heard!

Wednesday, August 18

Crowne Plaza Madison

4402 East Washington Avenue

Madison, WI 53704

Friday, August 20

Doubletree Hotel Atlanta Airport

3400 Norman Berry Drive

Atlanta, GA 30344

Tuesday, August 24

Red Lion Hotel

2525 N 20th Avenue

Pasco, WA 99301

The meetings will take place between 8 am and 4 pm, and the USDA has more information posted at http://www.aphis.usda.gov/traceability/meetings/index.shtml

The morning will consist of presentations by government officials, followed by breakout sessions at tables based on species groups. After the small groups have reported back to the full audience, a USDA official will respond to written questions, and there may be an opportunity at the very end for oral questions or comments.

Below are a couple of suggestions to help you be effective:

1) Plan your written questions ahead of time. When the USDA official goes through the questions in the afternoon, if he doesn’t actually answer your question, stand up and politely insist on an answer.

2) At the small group discussion, be prepared to be an advocate for your views and to politely disagree with the facilitator(s). If they claim that a “consensus” has been reached with an answer that you don’t agree with, say so. At the end, one person from the table will report back to the full group. Let the spokesperson give his or her report, and then politely speak up to add any points that were covered by the group that were skipped.

For more information on the previous public meetings and USDA’s proposed framework, visit the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance: http://farmandranchfreedom.org/action-6-6-10

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Kevin Brown is President of Liberation Wellness and co-author of the Liberation Diet. He serves as a Fellow on the National Board of Fitness Examiners, and is president of Visionary Trainers. Kevin and his wife Tracy are Chapter leaders for the Weston A. Price foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping restore real food to its rightful place in the American diet.

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