Saturday, June 20, 2009

Where do you get YOUR protein?

When people hear that I cut meat out of my diet, the question I most often hear first is "So, where do you get your protein?"

No I don't get it from meat (or soy either, for that matter). However, here is not to explain my source, but rather to question yours - Where do you get YOUR protein?

In his 900 cat experiment, Francis M. Pottenger fed three groups of cats accordingly:
  1. All raw meat

  2. 2/3 raw meat

  3. 2/3 cooked meat
Read the article. But basically the cats eating all raw meat were the healthiest while the cats on the cooked meat begain to develop many degenerative diseases, including weakness, shortened life span, and even blindness early in life.

More intriguing than the results, however, is the discovered cause: the cooked meat became deficient of Taurine, which was destroyed during the cooking process. Today, they add the taurine back into the cooked cat foods and the cats (seemingly) do just fine. (Note: Iams skirts around the real issue of cooking).

So who suppliments "fresh" amino acids back into your meat?

Our society preaches a religously close relationship between our protein needs as human beings and eating meat. We are taught this from birth and it is reinforced by school system, media, and the government all our lives. However many people, including myself, would argue that this association is not a coincidence.

We can reason that we do not actually get all the protein we need from the meat that we eat. Not only is much of it destroyed during the cooking process, but the remaining amino acids (if any) are bound together and made extremely difficult for the consumer to digest, and thus actually use.

Believing that eating cooked meat will fulfill your protein needs is ridiculous, and if the industry ever becomes less profitable, or enough people die from cancer and other diseases, then people will wake up and add this notion to the list of old wives tales.

Check it out for real.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Don't Blame CVS

Yesterday I signed a petition in Philadelphia against CVS selling expired baby food.

Now, I think this is an atrocity and that's why I signed the petition. However I also believe that we can do much better. Why limit our demands to "non-expired" food? How about demanding higher quality food? How about demanding the best? Isn't that what our children deserve?

News flash: you're not going to get the best at CVS. You're not going to get it in little single-serving packages that have been sitting on the shelf for three weeks with a picture of someone else's baby on the front. No one out there can deliver the highest quality food for your baby in this manner. When it comes to feeding our kids (and parenting in general), we can't throw up our hands and point to someone else in a white coat who claims to know best.

Take responsibility. If we don't, then who will? Not CVS, or anyone.

We should at least take responsibiliy for our precious children. How hard is it to blend up some real fresh fruit? Make a baby-sized bottle of real juice? Feed our children real food? Hey, you could even go the extra mile and buy organic. Why feed your kid any amount of poison?

We all have a choice, and that's fine. However, we shouldn't inculcate our children with choices that we have already made, especially the ones we know are wrong. We shouldn't ruin their body before they even have a chance to decide what they want to do with it. We should teach them to choose - so if you want to make chemical additives and disgusting processed foods part of your regular diet, that's fine - but don't ruin it for your kids.

Parents: take some initiative and stop being so pathetically lazy.