Recently in Pesticides Category

In our quest to live "germ free" we have eliminated many of the beneficial organisms our bodies use to maintain health. Some believe this is contributing to a variety of health issues. From The Maker's Diet:

Years ago, the food we harvested from the field was covered with beneficial microorganisms that "became part of us" when we ate the produce. Today, America's soil is essentially sterile. Pesticides and herbicides are believed to be the "total solution" in the natural world. They kill virtually every microorganism they touch, much as our overuse of medical antibiotics has...

...our overly sterile environment, which has virtually severed our healthy relationship to the earth, is seriously weakening our immune system...The intestine of a healthy child or adult normally contains billions of bacteria...Ideally, the beneficial or benign bacteria in your body should outnumber the cells of your body...The beneficial bacteria in the environment and your gut serve as your first line of immune defense against the unfriendly bacteria and fungi...

-D

Winter is mostly over. When the snow melts, I get disgusted with all the litter I see laying about. So part one of the challenge is:

1. Walk to the end of your driveway, look both ways, and commit to at least keeping that area free of garbage.

This is also the time of year that people start spreading herbicides and pesticides all over the place. Part two of the challenge is:

2. Don't use any herbicides (try eating those extremely healthy dandelions ) and use pesticides only when there's no other choice (and try natural methods first). Same goes with fertilizers.

-D

Never thought about it much until I learned about how beef production has become much like an industrial production line. The growing movement to returning to grass-fed cows (rather than grain-fed-antibiotic-laced in stalls) has many reasons:

Doing so would have many benefits. It would give us a more humane livestock system, a healthier human diet, less deadly E. coli, elimination of feedlots, a bonanza of wildlife habitat nationwide, enormous savings in energy, virtual elimination of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on those lands, elimination of catastrophic flooding that periodically plagues the Mississippi Basin, and most intriguingly, a dramatic reduction in global warming gases.

Read more in Richard Manning's detailed article. Even addresses cow farting. -D

More from From Dr. Don Colbert's Eat This and Live! :

Almost all nonorganically grown produce may be tainted by pesticides, herbicides, parasites and chemicals...Pesticides are absorbed in the intestinal tract froam an animal's feed...When you eat meat, it eventually goes into your fatty tissues - including your brain. If you eat processed foods, you welcome a host of chemicals into your body, including synthetic dyes, flavoring agents, chemical preservatives...Chemical food additives are usually made from...petroleum or coal tar products.

Basically, the same kind of chemicals that poison our environment, also poison your body. So even if you aren't concerned much about the environment, how about your health? The government always asks "How can we pay for everyone's health care?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: "How can we reduce sickness and in turn the resulting costs?" The simplest, and most obvious way, is by living healthier. Which, as we have seen, is closely related to eco-concerns. -D.

From Dr. Don Colbert's Eat This and Live! :

I used to recommend fish much more heartily than I do now, but new studies keep emerging about the high mercury content in fish...Because the oceans, lakes and rivers have suffered from the toxic onslaught of chemicals...fish are no longer free of toxins...But if you are careful about which fish you eat, they can be your best source of healthy omega-3 oils...

What fish does the Dr. recommend as being safer? Wild Alaskan or Pacific salmon, sardines, Tongol tuna, Mahimahi (from Florida), tilapia, halibut, grouper and striped sea bass. Avoid shark and swordfish as "they have some of the highest levels of mercury and pesticides of any fish in the sea." Also look for fish from cleaner waters in the seas surrounding Chile, New Zealand and Greece. -D

From John Berlau's Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health!, pp. 218-219:

The Environment Isn't a Conservative or Liberal Issue

This saying I agree with. But not for the reasons usually stated. I think both conservatives and liberals should reject the tenets of modern environmentalism.

The merging of liberalism with environmentalism is actually a rather new political phenomenon, not quite forty years old. Recall Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech dedicating the Hoover Dam in which he bragged about "altering" the geography of the region and called the area that existed before "catus-covered waste."

[Even] Karl Marx and the early communists and socialists were not against factories. In fact many saw them as liberating to farm drudgery...

Those liberals who really care about humanity...should be the first in line to advocate spraying DDT to combat malaria outbreaks in Africa...It might also help liberals win some of their arguments. It's hard to argue that you're for government-run health care and against Social Security private accounts because you care so much about people when you then turn around and say that people's needs should take second place to those of the snail darter.