Pesticides Are Not Our Friends
We’ve recently gone gluten-free in our house leading to a very great improvement in our health. I’ve read anecdotal reports that gluten-allergy is becoming increasingly common, and being the conspiracy-minded individual I am, I started thinking about all of the factors that could lead to increased wheat-sensitivity in the general public. Which, of course, made me wonder what kinds of pesticides are used on crops, not to mention anti-fungal and pesticide treatments for grain held in storage or during transport. And I found out LOTS of nasty chemicals are used to keep grain bug-free, mold-free, and ready for processing into the myriad wheat products we consume. Click here for the Top 50 Pesticides Used on Wheat in California in 2007. What a yummy list.
In fact, after my brief foray into unpronounceable pesticide studies, I have concluded that if you’re not eating organic, it’s no freakin wonder you’re suffering from all kinds of unpleasant effects including cancer, early puberty(not just overseas, but here in the US, too), reactive airways syndrome, asthma, migraines, and chronic sinus problems. One article I found in PubMed (which I cannot read in full since they charge about $600 per article) from the Laboratory of Toxicology, Department of Pharmacological Sciences, University of Milan, stated:
Epidemiological evidence from Western countries indicates that the prevalence of diseases associated with alterations in the immune response, such as asthma, certain autoimmune diseases and cancer, are increasing to such an extent that it cannot be attributed to improved diagnostics alone. There is some concern that this trend could be, at least, partially attributable to new or modified patterns of exposures to chemicals, including pesticides.
In other words, industrialized food production and its accompanying increase in widespread pesticide and chemical use is probably causing all kinds of human maladies that we are not yet aware of. Celiac disease, aka gluten-allergy, is one such autoimmune response that may be caused or exacerbated by these chemicals.
What to do? Buy organic when you can, and make yourself aware of what you’re exposed to when you can’t. Cook your own food, not from a box. Read the ingredient labels. Are there additives in there that you can’t pronounce? Whip out that Blackberry or iPhone and look it up before you eat it. To get educated in general, here are four cool resources:
- First, a book called In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, which you’ve probably heard of. (Also worth reading, the Omnivore’s Dilemma.) Not so much about pesticides per se, and more about the contortion of original food into industrialized, marketable, processed uh, crap. That we eat.
- Second, a new website called What’s On My Food? gives consumers some idea of commonly found pesticide residues found on non-organic produce. This site is published by the very good-looking and awesome Pesticide Action Network, which I don’t know much about, but will soon.
- Third, another website called the Ethicurian educates on industrial food politics and practices, encouraging consumers to “chew the right thing.”
- And yet a fourth website, Hungry for Change, comes from the film Food Inc. and also seeks to educate the public about food production issues.
It’s taken an investment in time and energy to figure out what’s good food, and to really know what we’re eating. So completely worth it. Health is too important to let marketing decide for you.
Need to recover deleted photos?
This is not the kind of thing I’d usually post about, but I just recovered over 400 deleted photos from my camera’s sim card. Yeehaw!
So it all started when I returned from a gloriously beautiful vacation in the Sierras and proceeded to download my photos the way I always do, using Adobe Photoshop Elements photo downloader. I even went out to Explorer to confirm that the files were on my hard drive before deleting them off my camera. Yup, check, they were there.
Or so I thought. Somehow the photos I saw must’ve been some kind of temp file preview. Photoshop Elements died mid-stream and the photos were no longer on my hard drive. I was mystified and very bummed!
So, I went searching on the Internet. Tried one free program that didn’t work (Asoftech photo recovery). Then found a review for PhotoRescue that claimed this software could recover deleted photos off my camera’s sim card. I had to go buy a card reader at Radio Shack ($12).
I plugged in the card reader and ran PhotoRescue and . . . YES, BROTHER! There they were. All my vacation photos. Too awesome. I love technology sometimes!
This is a cool model, too. First, you run the trial version of the software to see if it can find your files. If it does, you then go buy a reg-key ($29) and complete the process to download the photos. You only pay if it works. We wouldn’t need healthcare reform if the medical establishment followed this model.
Aquatic Ape Theory, Love it!!
Just watched this video of self-taught evolutionary theorist Elaine Morgan who lays out the previously abandoned theory that humans evolved from an aquatic existence. The Aquatic Ape theory, originally proposed by Sir Alister Hardy in 1960, answers the question: Why are we naked? Sweet! I’ve always wondered that! She outlines the theory’s main points:
- We are naked like other mammals either currently living in water or evolved out of water, including dolphins, whales, and other pachyderms.
- We stand upright on two legs because we needed to get the top half of our bodies above water. She points out that the only time other apes walk on two feet for extended lengths of time is while they’re wading.
- We are capable of speaking where other apes are not because of breath control learned while in an aqueous environment. She points out that other primates have all the working parts to speak, but are unable to accomplish the fine breath control it requires.
- We have a fat layer outside of our body cavity like other aquatic mammals, and quite unlike any other primates.
Interestingly, Morgan began her pursuit of evolution because she felt that evolutionary theory was too male-centered. She began to proclaim the aquatic hypothesis after becoming irritated with the the widely-accepted savannah theory. According to the savannah theory, humans became naked because men needed to cool down while hunting. From Wikipedia, “she thought that if humans lost their hair because they needed to sweat while chasing game on the savannah that did not explain why women should also lose their hair as, according to the savannah hypothesis, they would be looking after the children.”
I love two things about Elaine Morgan: she was a television writer, and clearly isn’t afraid of allowing imagination to influence vision, unlike so many rigid-thinking scientists. (So much evidence is only “discovered” if one assumes it exists and proceeds to look for it.) Secondly, she technically is not a scientist, and proves this by looking at the theory of evolution through a new lens, a feminine lens. Other women scientists, and any scientists from ethnic backgrounds other than Anglo/Euro, must struggle with hypotheses that fail to exalt Caucasian males as the inheritors of the earth. Elaine Morgan may well go down in history as the visionary who saw truth where others did not. I don’t know if her theory is right, but I’m super glad to see her get some recognition.
Enjoy the video!
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