Processed Foods Threaten Your Health

The Foxes Are Watching the Hen House

If you’re like most people, you probably think there’s someone somewhere looking out for the consumer’s best interest. If something is sold as food, it surely cannot be hazardous. Can it? In truth, it just might be… More often than not, government oversight committees are usually manned by members of the industry, who have a vested interest in commercializing these chemical ingredients; or they’re academics who appear on first glance to be independent but actually, in their day job, are getting a lot of funding from food companies.

Most of the research used to establish safety is also done by the industry itself, which structures the research to show that its products are safe. What’s worse, no one is really looking at the health effects of exposure to toxins from processed foods.

“What happens to people who eat large quantities of processed food, maybe people who really based their diets on that? No one is doing any research on that,” Joanna says. “There are all these assumptions that chemicals are fine in small quantities, but that’s not really looking at the cocktail effect for people, particularly children, who are obviously more prone to being affected by chemical overload. No one is looking at that at the moment.”

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Avoiding processed foods is one of the most important changes you can make if you want to improve your health or prevent or address disease. If there’s any question in your mind at all as to the reasons for reverting back to whole, minimally processed foods, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of Joanna’s book, Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets as it will radically increase your understanding, and secondarily your motivation and desire to avoid these toxic foods.

As an undercover insider, Joanna reveals details about the food processing industry that you simply cannot get anywhere else. Read it, and pass it around. Create awareness that will eventually, hopefully, inspire more people to make the switch to a more wholesome, health-preserving diet. If we don’t buy these foods, food manufacturers will have to stop producing it, and healthier whole foods will again become the norm.

As Joanna says, “we’ve got to catch up with the industry because they really bypass our comprehension of what they’re doing to our food. The take home message for me is that, in Europe, we have this idea that processed food is getting better. Everything is going a little bit not more natural, and actually, that’s wrong.

And we really can’t trust our regulators to get it right. We have to adopt our own, what I call PPP: Personal Precautionary Principle. You are the only person who’s going to really bother to think about these issues to deal with your food. You can’t rely on anyone else doing it for you.”

In the future, Joanna is considering writing another book on food processing, delving into newer processing technologies and synthetic biology, called SynBio. The use of completely artificial biology is also disconcerting, and an area that is as unregulated as the old Wild West.

Synthetic biology is basically like an extreme form of genetic engineering, which obviously carries a number of unknown risks. And, like genetically engineered foods, most people have no idea synthetic biology is even used, or that they may be eating it on a regular basis. To learn more about Joanna’s work, see her website, JoannaBlythmanWriting.com. It contains all of her journalism, covering all of her seven books.