赤裸惊魂免费下载:什么是工业食品,及它的危害 -- What is industrial food, and why is it so bad?

What is industrial food, and why is it so bad?

Howdid our food get so bad? Ironically, the catastrophic decline in foodquality began more than 200 years ago with breathtaking improvement.

The Industrial Revolution, which would transform the lives of billions,was really a series of smaller, mutually reinforcing revolutions: Theindustrial energy revolution, the industrial transportation revolution,the industrial chemicals revolution, and so on. One of these was theindustrial food revolution.

From around 1800 to about 1950, all of the major food problems that hadplagued mankind for centuries were largely solved by industrialization,at least for people in the minority of countries that industrializedduring this period. Famine, food-borne illness, lack of food variety,basic nutritional deficiencies among the poor and other problems werelargely eliminated for millions.

Agriculture machinery, chemicals, railroads and trucks, factory assemblylines, refrigeration, pasteurization, sterilization and otherindustrial-revolution innovations drove down the cost of food, andincreased nutritional safety and variety. Lower food costs, plussupermarkets and household appliances meant people no longer had tospend most of their time paying for, acquiring or preparing food.Combined with advances in medicine, lives became longer, healthier andbetter. 

So what happened between 1950 and today?

The industrial food revolution turned food into a product. Like allconsumer products, food now had to constantly evolve into something"better," cheaper and faster. This evolution involved gradual changes inthe actual biochemistry of what we're putting in our mouths. But whilethe food keeps changing, our bodies don't. With each passing year, thefood supply becomes less compatible with human biology.

We define industrial food as food modified for factory farming, factoryprocessing, mass distribution or mass marketing. Industrial foods arethose that have been changed to satisfy the demands of the consumermarketplace.

One of the many false assumptions about industrial food is that, well,food is food, and it doesn't matter if a computer-controlled machinemixes the raw ingredients together in a factory or a cook does in akitchen. What's the difference? The difference is not the mixing, butthe myriad changes made to the food to optimize it for the overallindustrial process.

Most foods are "modified" or "processed" at some point. The questionthat separates industrial from traditional foods is the purpose of thosemodifications. Traditional modifications tend to improve the taste,health qualities, digestibility and long-term storage of foods. Grainsare modified to make bread, for example. Olives are processed into oliveoil. The food is altered to make it more edible, nutritious anddesirable, as well as storable.

The highest purpose of industrial processing is to lower the cost offood. Consumers favor cheaper food, so food companies compete to findnew ways to lower costs. Just like computer software or cars or anyother industrial product sold in the competitive marketplace, there hasbeen constant innovation in industrial food processing to drive downcosts. Low cost is achieved by optimizing absolutely every aspect offood manufacturing, including seeds, soil, farm equipment, harvestschedules, trucks, factories, additives, processes, packaging and more.Another strategy for lowering costs is to offshore the production andprocessing of foods to China or other countries with low productioncosts and lax food-safety regulations, or simply buy the ingredientsfrom Chinese companies.

Modifications to food begins before seeds are even planted. The firstpart of the industrial-food process is the selection of raw ingredients.Almost every food type originated with massive variety -- literallythousands of species of, say, apples or wheat. But industrial processingtends to favor only one or a small number of species, which have beenheavily hybridized, cultivated or genetically modified to make thembetter for modern food processing systems. If you buy an apple pie atthe store, it's made from single modern species of apples and wheat thatdidn't even exist 200 years ago.

Industrial processing and mass marketing dictates ingredient selectionchoices. Modern wheat is favored for bread-making over other grainsbecause of its higher yield, machine thresh-ability, super high glutencontent and other reasons. Specially bread dairy cows are favored over,say, goats, because they produce a lot more milk and can be feasiblykept in pens and a host of other reasons amenable to mass industrialprocessing, even though goat milk is far more compatible with the humandigestive system. Corn and soy are chosen as the universal "fillers" forprocessed foods, because they're super cheap to grow, in part becausegrowers receive government subsidies to grow them.

The most extreme modifications are made in the lab. Biotech companyscientists custom-tailor the genetics of seeds in ways that used to beonly science fiction. Fish genes are grafted into strawberry DNA toreduce crop loss from frost, for example. Corn and potatoes are alteredto manufacture their own toxic pesticides. Many of these designer cropsare created to be wholly dependent upon a specific brand of herbicide orinsecticide. Produce has also been hybridized and genetically modifiedfor uniformity, blemishlessness, durability for transportation and otherqualities that boost the salability of food. As with all industrialfood innovations, these crops have been transformed into a betterproduct to sell, and not a better food to eat. And they look better tothe uniformed consumer than organic produce, with its blemishes andvariable shapes and sizes.

GM technology is great for the companies that create them. Geneticallymodified foods are patentable, for example, which confers a marketplaceadvantage on the patent holder. And seeds genetically modified torequire specific brands of herbicide or pesticide lock in customers forthose products.

Genetically modified crops have been aggressively introduced into ourdiet only in the past 15 years or so. According to the USDA, thepercentage of soybean acreage devoted to GM soy rose from less than 10%in 1996 to more than 90% in 2010. GM corn acreage rose from almost zeroto more than 2/3 of all acres. The vast majority of processed packagedfoods contains one or both of these GM crops. Farm animals are usuallyfed GM feed. Vitamin pills are often made from GM crops. GM foods havepervaded the entire industrial food supply, at least in the UnitedStates where they are legal and unlabeled. They've not been seriouslytested for human health, and they do not require consumer notificationon the label. Adults today are feeding their children foods that didn'texist when they themselves were children.

Once the particular type, species or "brand" of seed has been planted,the growing or raising of industrial foods is typically done in a waythat optimizes the ingredients for industrial processing. Just a centuryago, farms involved the raising of a variety of crops and animals in asymbiotic ecosystem where the waste from animals fertilized the crops,and some of the crops fed the animals. Crops were rotated to maintainsoil health.

Industrial farming involves plots of land growing a single crop -- oftengenetically modified and crop-dusted with an airplane spraying hundredsof gallons of poison all over the food and the soil -- not because it'shealthy or results in better-tasting food, but because that's how youget the maximum amount of produce out of each acre of land at the lowestcost.

Fruits and vegetables destined for industrial processing are typicallyharvested well before ripening, so the food can survive the long journeyto the factory, where it may be ripened with ethylene gas. The samegoes for a lot of the produce sent to supermarkets.

Before produce even gets to the factory or supermarket, it has alreadybeen modified aggressively. As a result, according to several studies,the overall concentration of nutrients in foods has decline dramaticallyin the past 50 years. The protein concentration of wheat, barley andcorn is way down. The mineral content of wheat and many vegetables isdown. This general trend makes intuitive sense. As producerssuccessfully find new ways to get more pounds of food out of the sameacre of land, you might expect the nutritional quality to decline withrising yields.

But it's at the food processing and packaging plant that the deepmodifications take place. Of course, different kinds of foods undergovery different processes in the manufacturing process. One nearlyuniversal outcome is that food usually has to be sterilized or nearlysterilized before leaving the factory.

A typical food manufacturing facility involves pipes and vats, bins andkettles of such size and complexity that it's impossible to keep thesethings clean. Because food is processed in mass quantities, bacterialcontamination can spoil huge amounts of food. And because industrialfood will usually be stored for long periods of time, any bacteria wouldhave weeks or months to develop into a full-blown pathogenic danger.That's why many industrial processes require the pasteurization orsterilization of food before, during or after the bottling, canning orpackaging stage.

Food sterilization can be problematic for health in two ways. First, itchanges the food, destroying or altering the chemical structure ofnutrients. Second, it turns out that human health needs the bacteria,fungi and other microorganisms that live on natural whole foods. Eating adiet of primarily processed foods can leave you with a compromised gutenvironment, which can lead to susceptibility to illness, allergies andother problems.

Because industrial food will be eaten when old, rather than fresh, foodprocessors have to employ a wide range of tricks to "embalm" the foodand prevent it from decomposing, as it naturally would.

We all know that when food gets old, it "goes bad." Food is transformedby bacteria, molds and enzymes, causing it to lose flavor, texture andcolor. Liquids and semi-liquids separate. The shape, structure andtexture of food degrades. Because industrial food products will beshipped, handled roughly, kept at unpredictable temperatures and sit onthe shelf for weeks or months, all the potential damage to the productmust be countered with additives. The food industry employs thousands ofchemicals and compounds that act as preservatives, emulsifiers,stabilizers, anti-caking and anti-foaming agents, thickeners, colorenhancers, flavor enhancers and others. Some of the unpronounceableingredients on food labels are chemicals and additives that make old,stale food look fresher. Other additives don't have to be listed on thelabel at all. For example, cottage cheese, non-fat milk, sour cream andsome ice cream brands are whitened with a potentially toxic substancecalled titanium dioxide. But you won't find that on the label because ofa loophole in the regulations that enable its classification as a"manufacturing aid" rather than a food ingredient. Other loopholes allowcompanies to hide a huge number of ingredients single umbrella termslike "artificial flavors," even if the ingredient is not used to affectthe flavor. The list of ingredients that can be legally added to winewithout being disclosed on the label runs six pages.

Food products need containers, which are constantly being upgraded forlower cost shipping and storage, and increasingly made from plastic orplastic-lined cans. Plastic is cheaper than glass, less breakable andlighter, too, which brings down shipping costs. As with many industrialfood innovations, plastic containers improve the product but wreck thefood.

It turns out that chemicals in plastic containers can leach into thefoods they contain. In the past few years, consumers have become awareof the dangers of substance in many plastics called Bisphenol A, or BPA.BPA is used in many plastic containers, and also in the plastic liningof many canned foods.

When BPA gets into food, and then into the body, the human endocrinesystem mistakes it for estrogen. Such anti-angrogens, or anti-malehormone compounds, harm the health of women as well as men. Researchersare still working on how all this fake estrogen affects health, but itcould be partly to blame for declining sperm counts in men, as well ashave some link to cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

BPA isn't the only problem. Many different kinds of plastics have manyother different chemicals and compounds that also disrupt the endocrinesystem.

Container makers often use a class of substances called phthalates,which make plastic containers soft and flexible. Phthalates leach easilyinto foods from containers because they're not strongly bonded toplastics. As the plastic containers age, they break away from thecontainer and blend into the food, onto the surface of the outside ofthe container and even into the air we breath. These also disrupt thehormonal system, and have been linked to all kinds of health issues,from birth defects to obesity and even insulin resistance.

Both BPA and phthalates can be detected in the urine of just about everyadult in America. Our bodies are saturated with these anti-androgenhormone disruptors.

Other types of industrial-food containers have similar problems. Swissscientists discovered, for example, that the recycled cardboard used forindustrial breakfast cereal boxes contain enormous quantities of toxicchemicals that can leach into the food.

The differences between industrial and traditional foods are profoundand many. Because industrial food has been so thoroughly modified, itbears almost no resemblance from a nutritional perspective totraditional foods.

Nearly all the foods available to consumers, from grocery stores, torestaurants, to vending machines to company cafeterias are industrialfoods. Even cooking at home from scratch can involve industrial foods,in the form of modern wheat, industrially sourced and processed oils,pasteurized ingredients and other foods from the supermarket. Likewise,it's possible to make traditionally processed food products in factories– what matters is the degree to which foods have been modified forreasons other than taste and health.

Confusion about the difference between industrial and non-industrialfood has led to mistaken conclusions about which foods are healthy, andwhich are not. In recent years, various food categories have beenvilified as unhealthy. Meat, milk, grains, sugar and so on have beenvilified by various health experts as categorically bad for you. But itturns out that only the industrial versions of these foods are bad. Wildfish and game, raw goat milk, ancient grains, raw honey – thetraditional versions of these foods are healthy in moderate quantities,while the industrial versions are not.

As we said at the top of this post, we define industrial food as foodmodified for factory farming, factory processing, mass distribution ormass marketing. Industrial foods are those that have been changed tosatisfy the demands of the consumer marketplace. It's not theindustrial processing that matters, but the modification of biochemistryspecifically for that processing.

The Spartan Diet is what we call a post-industrial diet. We'll explain what that means in the next post.