Just a week before we heard about more food recalls and the continuing obesity crisis, the documentary “Food, Inc.” opened in the United States, warning us of those hazards and more from our current industrialized food system. The movie is now showing in select cities across the country. Readers of this blog already are in the know about many problems in our commercial food supply, but director Robert Kenner wanted to make a film that brought the subject to people who haven’t thought about the food they are eating and what we all can do about it.

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Ready to take another step in eating for optimal health? Take the No GMO Challenge.

Five days ago, on April 22, Earth Day, co-sponsors Real Food Media and the Institute for Responsible Technology started a campaign urging consumers to take the No GMO Challenge to protect themselves from one of history’s greatest man-made health and environmental threats – genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It is a rolling challenge, meaning you can join at anytime. Begin by cleaning out your cupboard and make a 30-day commitment to eating as many non-GMO meals as possible. This challenge is particularly important for people who have switched to eating more corn after starting a gluten-free diet.

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SPECIAL REPORT

By Jeffrey M. Smith

If you eat lots of corn, be careful. Most US corn is genetically modified (GM), and most is engineered to produce its own toxic pesticide. When certain insects such as European corn borers take a bite, the toxin from the plant splits open their stomachs and kills them.

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Many people who begin eating gluten-free replace wheat products with corn products and are completely unaware that corn has several dark sides. Not only is corn a high-carbohydrate, high-glycemic food that packs on the pounds and elevates blood sugar and insulin levels, but most corn grown and eaten in the United States is genetically modified (GM), also called genetically engineered, which carries with it many potential health risks.

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Soda, granola bars, ketchup and many other foods taste sweet but many have an alarmingly bitter side: they also come with mercury, a heavy metal that is toxic to humans.

These surprising findings come from two studies that focused on high-fructose corn syrup — one of which was published in the journal Environmental Health and the other by the non-profit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

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Americans are speaking up about the importance of nutrition and of going against the grain in healthcare.

President-Elect Barack Obama has launched an interactive healthcare site
welcoming comments and ideas from people on what should be done to reform the U.S. healthcare system. There are already fifteen pages of comments, but on the first page alone, the importance of nutrition and some of the issues I raised about corn in previous posts — Corn Fed and Fat: The American Problem that is Spreading to Other Countries and “King Corn” A Must-See Film — have been raised.

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Many people like to read nutrition information that motivates them to eat better, but they also like to learn information through watching movies. As one client said to me, “Being able to both read information and watch it works really well together, helping to reinforce why we all need to ‘go against the grain’ with our diet for improved health.”

In my previous post, I wrote about “King Corn”, a documentary that explains how cheap corn ends up in most commercial American foods and plays a major role in our widespread and widening health problems. But two other documentary movies to watch are “SuperSize Me” and “McLibel”.

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If you rent just one movie to watch at home this year, make sure it’s “King Corn”. Better yet, buy yourself a copy, so you can watch it every so often and remind yourself of the messes that have been created in our farming practices, our system of raising animals for meat, our own health and the health of the environment — all because of growing outrageous amounts of corn.

“King Corn” documents the experience of two idealistic college graduates who decide to grow an acre of corn in Iowa. Viewers follow them through the whole process — government subsidies, genetically engineered seed, and pesticides that kill everything but the genetically engineered corn. Viewers then learn how the surplus of corn seeps into our foods in many ways, and what all that corn does to us, to animals, to the environment, and to small farmers who can’t compete with big industrialized food corporations.

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At a gluten-free fair a few months ago, a friend briefly saw me and said, “Oh, Melissa, I am so bloated and gaining so much weight lately. I know it is all the corn products I have been eating lately.”

My friend is not alone. Corn has infiltrated the American food supply in a major, yet mostly invisible way, and virtually all Americans eat corn in some form without knowing it. People who begin a gluten-free diet (free of wheat, rye and barley) often are so focused on avoiding gluten that they substitute corn-based foods in place of wheat – repeatedly having corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas, for example – and end up eating a lot more corn-based foods. They gain weight and develop other health problems and don’t understand the reason why. Corn is the reason.

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