Weighty Issues

My friend Frances posted a quote on her Facebook status this afternoon ‎"Dairy products are the single, most relevant cancer promoter." : Kathy Freston, author of Quantum Wellness and I couldn't possibly disagree more. Look I am sure she has done loads of research - Kathy, not Frances - and I am certain that there is merit in her statement but if all we did was eliminate everything that promoted cancer, we would be living on, well, fresh air, and with global warming, carbon emissions and so on, there is precious little of that around either. Frances lives in Reykjavík, Iceland; she gets to chew on volcanic ash in her fresh air, which I am sure has bugger all nutritional value.

Of course I make this statement boldly because my weight has become a bit of an issue since Christmas where I seem to have found every pound, kilo and ounce that anyone within a 100km radius of me has lost. So what I swallow has significant significance. Fresh air is becoming a serious contender if I ever want to fit into any of my jeans ever again. I have consequently been giving the foodstuffs we eat a lot of thought. Not what they are, but what's lurking in them. 

For example, organic versus supermarket standard. The only difference I can actually see is the price. But Googling around I find that there is a whole lot more than meets the eye. There is nothing quite as insidious as the food we eat. We are duped and conned at every turn.

Standard stock is irradiated and what this actually entails will leave you without appetite completely. Irradiation is the process of blasting the food we eat with ionised radiation which affects the food at DNA level. We are assured it does not make the food radioactive (within safe limits) and destroys microorganisms like E.Coli and Salmonella and delays ripening and sprouting of the fruit and veg. In other words, it is rendered inert. Dead. And we swallow that. We feed it to our kids. "If you don't eat your food you wont have any pudding!"

Dead stuff. Well, all meat is dead, and decomposing. That's what a matured steak is - it is decomposed to a point of optimal tenderness. And unless it is organic, it is packed full of steroids and growth hormones. This is what makes a six month old calf look like a full grown bull. And he is off to slaughter. Hung, drawn and quartered, rotted a bit and then dipped in Sulphur Dioxide to stop the green and grey bits from showing and sold as a prime steak. Don't get me started on battery chickens.

Dairy, which is where this all started, is just as bad. Any milk is a direct product of whatever the cow is eating. If the cow has a fabulously healthy diet one could assume a fabulously healthy milk but unfortunately, unless the cow is organic, the milk is full of steroids and hormones and it is then pasteurised which renders it inert. Dead. If it is then turned into commercial cheese, it is flavoured with chemicals, curdled with synthetic rennet, coloured with more chemicals and ripened with sterile bacteria and yet more chemicals. Yum.

Which leaves nuts and berries. Nut farming is reliant on, among a plethora of others, a chemical called diethanolamine which is fabulous stuff. It is not only used to produce our foodstuffs but is also very useful in the making of paint and adhesives, production of leather, making of paper and board and the manufacture of pesticides. 

Unless you are picking your berries in some wonderful virgin field far away from any GM crops, tainted water sources, high yield carbon emission factories and acid rain, you are probably buying them in the market where, yes, you guessed it, they are irradiated.

My solution of course for any dilemma is ice cream. But not even ice cream is ice cream anymore. Most of it is hydrogenated vegetable fat combined with reconstituted milk powder and chemicals. Chocolate ice cream shares an ingredient in common with engine anti freeze. Actually it is an extracted gelatin protein from cow hide and used to make a compound called gelatin hydrolysate. Delicious hey? Think of that next time you are settling in with your two favourite men, Ben & Jerry, for an evening of wild abandon.

So where does this leave us? And what to do about my ever larger bottom needing its own postcode separate from my own? Organic, is the obvious answer. As close to the natural state as possible, as fresh as possible and as lightly messed with as possible. And in moderation. Everything will give us cancer. Everything. Including stress, cell phones, the air we breathe and depressingly enough, chocolate ice cream.

My eye opener is to be more alert to what's in what we eat which strips the joy out of eating really. It becomes yet another discipline in an already too stressful life. But it does conjure up romantic notions of a home veggie patch where I get to say what goes into the soil and how much of it, and the exercise; two birds with one stone! I'll let you know how it goes, just as soon as I finish this fag.