The Impact of Processed Food for Our Health When we eat we usually think about the taste of the food, the price and the convenience of the product being adapted to our lifestyle. People love fast food because it is cheap, tasty and fast. That could be good in a society where the product could offer a great variety of advantages. But that is not our case. So we have a question important to answer in this assignment: how can we eat healthy food in a global world that depends on industrialization that offers unnatural food? There is not an easy answer for this question. We are accustomed to receive different points of view and adapt them for our reality without thinking about our culture. It means that many people do not respect the correct eating habits. Each country has rich cultures that offer important and beneficial sources where we can get a benefit from their richness. Unfortunately many people just follow what people call modernity and imitate their eating habits with terrible consequences. The research is planned to obtain solutions in relation to the problems in the field of food industrialization and its unnatural system of processing food. Investigations about healthy eating are made looking for alternatives in terms of eating the right natural foods that can give us everything we need.
Planning a research about the problems of food industrialization helps us discover the importance of eating healthy food and the consequences we might face if we do not take care of us when eating. Then my working thesis statement is the following: To live longer it is necessary to eat healthy food that helps us prevent sicknesses. Having success in a healthy diet implies feeling great, having more energy, stabilizing your mood, and keeping as healthy as possible. Eating unnatural food affects people’s lives so their life expectancy is shorter. Eating unnatural food is the problem that we face now and probably it will be the most serious problem with consequences that are not sized now. Farming is not just about animals and crops ;it’s about people. Very few farmers now grow any of the food their family consumes. People are leaving the farms because they do not make enough money and the big industry takes their place. These new farm industries that process food were developed in the late 50s (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2000).
Unfortunately, they have been producing unnatural food and we mostly eat products made of corn. This product has a great impact on sicknesses and of course people die when they are young with diseases that were not frequent in the past. Unfortunately the children are the ones who are mainly affected because their expectancy of life is shorter because they eat unnatural products during their childhood, they eat transgenic foods that now we not certain about their effects in the long term. We are saturated by genetically engineered foods. Almost the 80 % of all processed food contains them and others include grains like rice, corn and wheat ;legumes like soybeans and soy products ;vegetable oils, soft drinks ;salad dressings ;vegetables and fruits ;dairy products including eggs ;meat, chicken, pork and other animal products ;and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and ingredients in processed foods (Stephen Lendman, 2008) Jeffrey Smith in 2003 explained an investigation that discovered that Rats fed GM potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO potatoes, and there were cases of liver atrophy as well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could be a sign of greater future risk of cancer.
Equally alarming, results showed up after 10 days of testing, and they persisted after 110 days that’s the human equivalent of 10 years. All of these researches were not shown on time and then changed drastically because they’ve got ‘bad science’ down to a science. The risk is that parents are only guided by publicity and they give processed food to their children without knowing the potential high risk and that these products can be the greatest mistake of their lives against the expectancy of life of their children. Sicknesses are direct effects and consequences of eating unnatural foods obtained by food industrialization. Many people say that food industrialization offer people better conditions of life because people have products or food easy to get and they are also found everywhere. Unfortunately it is not truth because products obtained by industrialization increase sicknesses and the causes are proved scientifically. Many people die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and other diseases originated by eating products that were treated unnaturally. Mass production of food and factory farming promote contamination of large amounts of food that cause dangerous epidemics for consumers around the nation and abroad.
(Gabriela Steier, 2011) Another consequence is the infertility. According to scientists, the consumption of genetically modified foods will make people infertile. Russian scientists discovered that GM seeds soy and corn make women infertile, to detect this phenomenon in the third generation of animals fed with them. (Transgenic Products Threaten Humanity) When pesticides were first introduced, they were considered safe and as a miracle cure for farmers. Only decades later the technology revealed its truer lethal implications. Here We have a case of dead people due to consequences of eating unnatural food: In 1989, dozens of Americans died and several thousands were afflicted and impaired by a genetically modified version of the food supplement L-tryptophan creating a debilitating ailment known as Eosinophilia Myalgia Syndrome (EMS) . Released without safety tests, there were 37 deaths reported and approximately 1500 more were disabled. A settlement of $2 billion dollars was paid by the manufacturer ;Showa Denko, Japan’s third largest chemical company destroyed evidence preventing a further investigation and made a 2 billion dollar settlement. Since the very first commercially sold GM product was lab tested (Flavr Savr) animals used in such tests have prematurely died. (Gabriela Steier, 2011) Eating meat has terrible consequences for health because it maintains in the human being for several days and another effect is the environmental impact associated to its production. A United Nations report explains that globally the livestock sector is “one of the two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems,” including climate change, air and water pollution, land degradation, and biodiversity loss (Steinfeld et al).
The report estimates that livestock accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, significantly more than transportation. A recent report by the Environmental Working Group, which did a full cycle analysis on all types of meat, ranked lamb the worst in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Beef came in second, with cheese third (not technically a meat, of course), followed by pork and farmed salmon. Except for salmon, these meats also have the worst overall environmental impact, using up the most re-sources (Hamerschlag, 2011).
There are also gives important facts of the merits of the average American meat-based diet compared to the lacto-ovo vegetarian diet, like the fact that it takes only 3.3 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of protein from grain for human consumption and it takes 28 to produce 1 calorie of meat protein (Bobby Sciortino, 2012).
The list of diseases known to be associated with meat, which are commoner among meat eaters, looks like the index of a medical textbook: anemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostate, constipation, diabetes, gall stones, gout