Processed foods.. Do we have a choice?

Some will say yes, of course, we always have a choice.

But do we? Is there a choice when one is obliged to buy 'cheap stuff' from the major grocery stores? I know that some say it is cheaper to buy 'fresh', but it is cheaper or any safer? I have an acquaintance who always buys from 'Farmer's Markets'. I might do the same if I could afford the prices and if they had the range of foodstuffs that I like, but neither condition is reached.

Why is ostensibly unprocessed meat a target for the doom and gloom brigade? Maybe it's because whatever is sprayed in one part of the world is going to blow into adjacent parts even if you can't see it happening.

Also, while it could be said that the small farmer is there to do good and honest service, there is still the need to make enough money to continue being a farmer.

I don't trust anything that I am told because the people telling me stuff are JUST human, and a long way off any kind of perfection. I question and research everything from as many sources as I can. If I see plagiarised stuff, and there is a lot of it about, I ignore pretty much all of it.

The organic food now can never be the same as food was fifty years ago because every condition has changed. We didn't call it organic food years ago. It was just food, where cows and pigs and sheep and goats and chickens all spent most of their days OUTSIDE, eating whatever the individual animal ate.

Even vegetables are not safe from a variety of bacteria, some of which can kill an oldie or a baby within hours.

I am not going to walk away and hide in a corner until things get better because that is not going to happen any time soon, or ever. So where does it leave me? I have recently had a huge operation to remove Oesophageal cancer, and I don't want a repeat or some other type of cancer.

I have to make serious choices but who do I believe? Where do I go? Worst still, who cares what happens to me apart from me? And who will listen to me? I have no outlet for my thoughts apart from stuff like this blog. :-(

Red meat, processed meat

 

It's anything but good news.. from my local news channel today..

 

Eating processed meat can lead to bowel cancer in humans while red meat is a likely cause of the disease, World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Monday in findings that could sharpen debate over the merits of a meat-based diet.

 

The France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the WHO, put processed meat such as hot dogs and ham in its group 1 list, which already includes tobacco, asbestos and diesel fumes, for which there is “sufficient evidence” of cancer links.

 

“For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal (bowel) cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed,” Dr. Kurt Straif of the IARC said in a statement.

 

Red meat, under which the IARC includes beef, lamb and pork, was classified as a “probable” carcinogen in its group 2A list that also contains glyphosate, the active ingredient in many weed killers.

 

The lower classification for red meat reflected “limited evidence” that it causes cancer. The IARC found links mainly with bowel cancer, as was the case for processed meat, but it also observed associations with pancreatic and prostate cancer.

 

The agency, whose findings on meat followed a meeting of health experts in France earlier this month, estimated each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent.

 

The IARC, which was assessing meat for the first time and reviewed some 800 studies, does not compare the level of cancer risk associated with products in a given category, so does not suggest eating meat is as dangerous as smoking, for example.

 

Health policy in some countries already calls for consumers to limit intake of red and processed meat, but the IARC said such advice to consumers was in certain cases focused on heart disease and obesity.

 

The preparation of the IARC’s report has already prompted vigorous reactions from meat industry groups, which argue meat forms part of a balanced diet and that cancer risk assessments need to be set in a broader context of environmental and lifestyle factors.

 

The IARC, which does not make specific policy recommendations, cited an estimate from the Global Burden of Disease Project – an international consortium of more than 1,000 researchers – that 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.

 

This compares with about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking, 600,000 a year due to alcohol consumption, and more than 200,000 each year due to air pollution, it said.

If the cancer link with red meat were confirmed, diets rich in red meat could be responsible for 50,000 deaths a year worldwide, according to the Global Burden of Disease Project.

The state of food..

I am recovering from esophageal cancer removal surgery, where I was reconstructed a little internally. There were problems with eating before the surgery, and I have got more problems now.

One of them is the quality of food available. It is next to impossible to reliably work it out from labels because the standard behind some of the terms is so vague and misleading.
Click here for an article written last year.

Ham and cold cuts in general..

Go into any grocery store and see if you can buy real unprocessed ham. You know that the pre-packed has been messed with a lot, but the stuff of the deli counter is just as bad. It is almost all re-constituted to look like the original, but the texture tells another story. The shape does too. Please point me in the direction of sandwich shaped pigs. No, there is no such thing, but there is such a thing as sandwich shaped ham.

Bread.. Getting decent bread is very difficult.

Some multi-grain bread has such a strong flavour that it overpowers anything eaten with it. The sandwich breads which are made the same shape as the sandwich pigs have an unpleasant flavour too, and I used to have problems getting them down way before I ever knew about esophageal cancer. Breads from smaller bakeries are often frozen in transit, losing quality for every kilometre travelled, and are not quite what one might expect from the labelling, eg French, Italian etc..

Frozen vegetables..

I have a suspicion that some are frozen for a lot longer than you might expect, but no manufacturer is ever going to admit that. The size of vegetable also suggests that many are picked way too early, and are probably grown in an environment that is far from natural. My journeys through countryside never reveal much by way of different crop types or animals too. Scary..

Does anybody care?

Yes, many of us do, but the food producers don't care. I have written to some about certain products, and they send me a $10 voucher. Big deal. I don't want a voucher that is only good for the crap that I am complaining about. I want a CEO, to whom I send a challenge to eat what the company produces, and tell me that it is ok and that they would allow their own families to eat the stuff.

The trouble is that the Canadian Federal Gov't can't, won't ensure that we, the great Canadian public, are covered, and as long as the laws are lax, the food producers will be too? Like any other business, they only do the minimum if they can get away with it.