Showing posts with label Autism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Autism. Show all posts

Our Intimate Relationship with Food - and 10 Things You Can Do to Protect Your Family

A famous French political thinker once said that the public would rather believe a simple lie than a complex truth.

The truth behind genetic engineering is extremely complex. It has been used for decades, but it is only in the last ten years that neurotoxins have been engineered into our food supply.

No one has studied the long term health implications of children consuming foods containing neurotoxins, novel proteins and allergens.

Though to look back over the last ten years, you quickly remember that ten years ago, we didn¹t have to worry about sending a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into school with our children; we didn¹t have to medicate our eight year olds to get them through the school day; and the movie, Rain Man, was all we knew of autism.

Allergy Kids - Gene TransferringToday, at least 1 out of every 17 children under the age of three has a food allergy with at least 5 million American children suffering from this condition (though these statistics underestimate the problem since they are from 2002, over five years old).

Autism, diabetes and obesity are often referred to as American epidemics.

So what has changed?

In 1996, the United States adopted widespread use of genetically modified crops due to growing public concern over the health risks associated with the industrial spraying of insecticidal and pesiticidal toxins.

In an effort to reduce the spraying of these toxins, scientists began using biotechnology to engineer these pesticides and insecticides into the plants themselves.

As these ingredients were introduced around the world ten years ago, government agencies in Europe, Asia, Australia, Japan, Russia and 45 developed countries required them to be listed on food labels, so that consumers could make informed choices when it came to feeding their families.

In the United States, our regulatory agencies do not require these genetically engineered ingredients to be labeled.

So, unlike other developed countries, we have not been informed that almost 70% of our corn, 90% of our soy and 75% of our processed food now contain neurotoxins, novel proteins and allergens.

Today one out of every three children suffers from allergies, asthma, autism or ADHD. It appears that we have unknowingly and without informed consent engaged our children in one of the largest human trials in history.

Ten years into this human trial, our children are trying to tell us something.
Shouldn't we listen?
10 Steps You Can Take to Protect Your Family:
  1. Reduce your family's exposure to processed foods
  2. Eat food with ingredients that your grandmother would have used
  3. Purchase organic eggs, as they are not from chickens fed corn engineered to produce its own insecticides
  4. Cook with olive oil instead of butter, margarine or vegetable oil
  5. Avoid conventional soy and corn products (vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup) since most are genetically engineered
  6. Look for meat and poultry that not injected with antibiotics and additional hormones
  7. As recommended by the British Dietetic Association, avoid exposing infants under the age of 12 months to conventional soy
  8. Consume organic foods for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in order to reduce your exposure to pesticides (recently linked to autism and gestational diabetes)
  9. Look for "rBGH-free" milk. rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone) is a genetically engineered, synthetic chemical hormone that is not allowed in milk in most developed countries given its link to breast and prostate cancers
  10. When discussing vaccines with your child's pediatrician, especially vaccines grown in eggs, request the informational leaflets that accompany the vaccines as they discuss autoimmune conditions like food allergies in detail
SIGN OUR LETTER TO CONGRESS and Help Us Educate Our Lawmakers about the Risk that these Unlabeled Allergens in Our Foods Appear to Present to Children (and All of Us!).
For more information, please visit AllergyKids' Resources Page where additional research is available as well as information disclosing corporate funding ties of leading pediatric allergists.

From Allergykids.com
http://www.allergykids.com/index.php?id=33


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The movie "Killer at Large" mentions why policy makers do not want us to know that they are using these modified seeds because they feel we are not smart enough to understand it as well as that it might hinder sales before they product has a chance to be tested and marketed correctly. I want to know what's in our food... but people with allergies need to "know" what's in their food. It's a matter of life or death. Please be sure to sign the letter to Congress...
~nancy

HBO's Temple Grandin Movie

"Through mentoring and sheer will a young autistic woman succeeds against all odds."

Temple's story is very touching on so many levels for me.... 1)a child overcoming a very difficult neurological disorder with help from very strong women that didnt take the experts advice. 2)That autism was what made Temple see different from everyone else. It's what made her special.. it was her gift that she learned how to share with the world...and finally 3)she helped defenseless creatures that we breed for our food die a more humane death. How more accomplished can you be!


HBO did an amazing job with Temple's story. Claire Danes is an amazing actress so much so that you forget you are watching an actress portraying an autistic woman.

The perseverance that Templ had was astounding and it was because of the strong structured parenting that she recieved from her mother and aunt then her mentoring teachers that helped her overcome the difficult social barriors of autism. And because of her special gift of being autistic... yes gift! she was able to revolutionize the treatment of cattle in this country. A must see to all the mother's that have faced a difficult diagnosis.

http://www.hbo.com/#/movies/temple-grandin/index.html




NPR has interviews of Temple Grandin discussing how she thinks and visualizes the world as well as the books she's written.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123383699


Here's a breif interview with Temple and Melisa Silvertein talking about the movie.

Temple Grandin spent a couple of minutes on the phone with me talking about the film, her work and her life.

W&H: First I want to talk a little bit about your mother. The film shows how your mother never gave up on you. And it's almost a love story between the two of you. What was your father's role?

Temple Grandin: Mother was the one who kept me out of an institution. My father, like a lot of dads, had very little input. He would have gone along with the doctors. Back in the 50's you sort of did what the doctors did. In a lot of families where they have a severely handicapped kid, it's the mothers that take care of it. I go and do a talk and autism meeting and there are a few dads there. But for every dad there are ten mothers.

W&H: What was so magical for me was your relationship with animals.
TG: When I was in high school I thought everybody thought in pictures like I did. The movie showed how I thought in pictures brilliantly. The other thing that I really liked about the movie was that all my projects that were in the movie. They were all actually done and they were all made. The squeeze machines were built off the drawing. Those were all built exactly the way I did them.