The High Cost of Junk Foods

Junk food is bankrupting our health care system. That is no lie.

"I found this statistic a little harder to overlook: For the first time in 200 years, today's children have a lower life expectancy than their parents."

Is this for real!?

Is it any consolation that I dress like I'm blind but I try to eat well?

Perhaps fashion and capitalism will always be at odds with common sense and health? ;)

nothin new here other than the fact that american's stil aren't responding to this information in a productive manner.

down with the empire!

"I found this statistic a little harder to overlook: For the first time in 200 years, today's children have a lower life expectancy than their parents."

I agree, this statistic is quite telling. Made me wonder; maybe the fact that our children will not live as long is part of some long term plan. I suppose it would be cheaper on society if we humans did not live so long. Don't get me wrong, I certainly could never adhere to such a philosophy, I also say; life for our future children may be getting shorter, but no can control how one will die. (by that I mean what disease one may succumb to) that is the roll of the dice.

If people were more connected to the earth , what they eat , their own bodies , these extremist religions would not have a foothold . Nature fills full that empty gap in our lives . Keeps us humble and honest with ourselves . It is a spiritual connection . The one that satisfies our hearts so much , we do not need to convert others to prove it is right to ourselves . It teaches where our home , our rightful place in the world really is .

Very good article. Now if we can only get our elected officials to listen.
I'm writing them again today.

nice, well done...and thank God for the FDA

continuing...
"According to Vandana Shiva, an Indian crop ecologist quoted in Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," over the course of history, humans have consumed over 80,000 plant species. That number has now been reduced to eight species, with a continuous honing in on modified canola, corn and soy.

When Kingsolver wrote the book in 2007, only six companies controlled 98 percent of the world's seed sales (Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow), and they continue to desecrate land. Juggernauts like Monsanto send 330 small farm operators off their land a week.

In a nutshell, government regulations will soon favor genetically modified (or GMO) seeds over organic seeds, and organic seeds might eventually become illegal.

Hand-planted kale and preservative-less poultry might be things of the past. The FDA says requiring eggs to be kept at 45 degrees will make us healthier, but I've owned chickens, and their eggs are like silk when it's 60 and sunny.

The standard that food providers should be held to is purity of process and intent. We don't need to add bad things to our food. Agribusiness doesn't promote food safety, it swells with immoral shortcuts (a thousand chickens in a bedroom- sized space, soil made prematurely infertile, etc.).

What we need to do is take a good, hard look at what "safe" means.

Take a garden. Plant what grows best in your sun. Water the leaves, the roots. Walk through your rows. (If you don't have a yard, that's what urban gardens are for.)

Now take another garden. Grow it long and wide, cutting away the ecosystems along its edges. Decimate the birds and the bugs. Spray it with regulatory chemicals to ward off the changes provided by the wind and the rain, the nutrient highways for our food.

Which one would you call "safe"?

I tried to teach my kids how to write, but I also told them what I'd learned: that an adult needs eight hours of sleep, that homemade bread and hand-written letters are second to none. That, as Annie Dillard said, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our years."

On a more human level, the current statistics mean that less of our kids' days are spent learning, whisk in hand, how their grandma's wrist turned yolks in a bowl. We are unaccustomed to bugs in our lettuce, fish with heads, berries covered in the harvest's dust.
The situation here is honest food; the deeper story is our respect for human life. Lose the first, and you lose the second, too.

I might not have much to hand down to my kids (when I have them). But I do have a recipe for sweet potato bread and a dad whose knees are muddy all summer long from gardening. I'd like to give my children shiny vegetables, basil that leans into the sun, and teach them how to smell a crust that's done. If the worsening economy means our kids might inherit less, then we should be giving them longer lives to live."

Megan Nix (www.megannix.com) of Denver is an editor at DiningOut Magazine and can be reached at thenixionary@gmail.com.