Elizabeth Yarnell, Author, Innovator, Naturopath, Speaker
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Popcorn is Never a GMO

At the Seeds of Doubt conference recently, Jeffery Smith, epopcornxecutive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology and GMO expert, assured us that even though almost 90% of the corn grown and eaten in this country is GMO corn, popcorn comes from a different seed and has not been genetically modified.

So, while you should assume that your Doritos brand corn chips and those sweet corn cobs on sale at the grocery store are Genetically Modified even though they are not labeled as such, you’ll never have to worry about your popcorn being GMO. Makes you feel a little bit better about ordering that large tub at the movie theater!

A Fight MS with Food Case Study: Marion P.

Marion P. is a 65-year old active married woman. She experienced MS symptoms since the age of 24 but was not diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis until she was 63. A busy, successful business owner with a quick brain, Marion and her husband divide their time between their winter and summer homes.

In March of 2010, Marion noticed that she was experiencing constant MS symptoms of light-headedness, balance and coordination issues, and her gait was off. She felt very fatigued all the time, run down, and depressed.

In July of 2010, Marion joined the Fight MS with Food project and took the MRT blood test to identify her unique food sensitivities. With the results of her personal reactivity to 150 foods and chemicals in hand, we designed a customized meal plan for her to follow out of what we now knew to be her least-reactive foods. She began eating a personalized anti-inflammatory diet that was custom-designed to account for her unique oral tolerance thresholds.

Additionally, Marion collected her urine for 24-hours and submitted it for laboratory analysis. This urinalysis showed Marion had incomplete digestion. She began a customized supplement regimen based on the laboratory results and aimed at helping her to fully digest her foods and assimilate nutrients.

Within three weeks, Marion noticed that the dizziness and wobbliness had abated. Within five weeks she reported that her gait had returned to normal and she no longer had to worry about setting her feet down carefully when she walked. She felt completely clear of MS symptoms.

She reported an incident that happened when she was traveling for business and ate a dinner of food that was off of her diet. Within an hour she had a headache bad enough to send her to bed. By morning, her MS symptoms had reappeared, and she felt dizzy and unstable. She remained faithful to the diet and by the following day she felt fully recovered. That incident convinced her that the this approach was working.

In March of 2011, she reported feeling as if there was a hot, burning spot on the top of her head, an MS symptom. After some probing, she revealed that she had been taking large quantities of aloe vera juice after a conversation with a doctor who believed it could cure MS. When she was reminded that aloe vera is in the same family as onions, to which the MRT showed she was reactive, she ceased taking the aloe vera juice and the hot spots disappeared.

As of June of 2012, two years after changing her diet and changing her life, Marion is continuing to lead an active and busy life while feeling free from MS symptoms.

Learn more about the Fight MS with Food project and how undiagnosed food sensitivities affect MS. Please feel free to contact me to set up a free consultation to see if you would be a good candidate for this protocol.

AMA says to trust GMO foods

Last week the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a weak and dangerous position on Genetically Modified foods: “trust but verify.”

If you’re like me, this probably made you say, “What?”

Apparently “trust but verify” means the foods seem safe but should still go through a “mandatory pre-market safety approval process” to look for major changes in nutrient or toxicant levels. Of course, we are way too late to institute “pre-market approval processes” for GMO crops as 94% of soybeans, 88% of corn, and 90% of cotton in this country are already Genetically Modified.

Though the AMA admits that the science proving the safety of GMO food is lacking (a massive understatement), it still argues against labeling of GMO products. GMO producers are fighting labeling because they believe consumers will choose non-GMO products when given a choice. It’s tragic to realize that powerful biotech lobbying interests exert corporate influence at the cost of the public health with this country’s most respected medical association.

Tragic, or disgusting?

Since GMOs first appeared on shelves in 1996, the biotech giants like Monsanto have been playing fast and loose in an experiment with the public health on a nationwide scale. The effects of GMO foods on humans have yet to be determined, but studies on mice fed GMO feed showed that each successive generation experienced increasing infertility, and within three or four generations the mice were infertile.

What we eat today could affect our great grandchildren… or lack thereof.

Interestingly, even though the AMA would like to see testing done on nutrient and toxicant levels in GMO foods, those levels may not reflect how the altered DNA affects living bodies when absorbed and assimilated. That’s the really scary part.

We should demand that the AMA care more about our health and wellbeing than about corporate profits. And continue to  push for mandatory labeling of GMO foods, because we deserve to be able to make our own decisions about what we eat.

Top 10 Food Apps

Rodale.com has compiled a top ten list of food apps. If you’re into food and health, these apps can do everything from alert you to dangerous ingredients after scanning a bar code to

  1. Fooducate: Scan the barcode and learn healthiness score.
  2. Seafood Watch: Is that seafood sustainably harvested or overfished?
  3. Wild Edibles: For those who like to gather their food from the land.
  4. What’s On My Food: Compares pesticide levels on 90 items of organic vs conventional produce.
  5. Non-GMO Project Shopping Guide: How to be sure your food is not unlabeled GMO.
  6. True Food: From the Center for Food Safety, evaluates brands for GMOs and lets you email your congressional rep about it, too.
  7. Eat Local: The NRDC created this to show local foods in season by zip code.
  8. EWG’s Dirty Dozen: Shows the fruits and vegetables most contaminated by pesticides.
  9. Eden Foods: The only food company in the USA to adopt BPA-free lining on their canned foods shares 1,000+ recipes.
  10. Harvest: Teaches you how to pick and store produce.

Enjoy!

Food Dyes and Children

In March of 2011, the US Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) finally decided to call for a committee to examine the many recent studies looking at the link between synthetic food dyes and colors (FD&C) and behavior problems in children, such as ADD and ADHD.

Most commercial food dyes that you’ll find in almost every commercially-sold processed food are made from petroleum and were approved by the F.D.A. in 1931, according to the New York Times.

While the FDA and indeed, the mainstream American medical community, might debate the effects of food dyes on children’s behavior and the public health in general, the Europeans already require warning labels on products containing food dyes. And guess what happened when they did that? American food companies like Kellog’s, Kraft, and General Mills stopped adding food dyes to their products to be sold in Europe.

The FDA’s website page on food dyes proudly displays that it was last updated in April, 2010. I guess that means the scientific committee convened 15 months ago, in 2011, to look at the safety of widespread use of FD&C in our national food supply has yet to come to any new conclusions.

I guess we’ll have to keep waiting and watching with bated breath to see whether the FDA will buck industries that believe adding food dyes to their products make them irresistible to us, the consumers who have been raised to expect brightly colored foods from cakes to cereals to yogurts, ice creams, candies, medicines, and even pickles. Once you start reading labels, you’ll find food dyes lurking where you least expect them and in so many kinds of foods.

In our house, we’re well familiar with the effects of even the smallest trace of red food dye, like the swirl on the white circle of a Starlight mint. The last time a well-meaning relative slipped my son a one of these harmless-seeming candies, he was vomiting up a complete dinner in the restaurant bathroom 20 minutes later.

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