Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
The increase in American obesity and allergies is not a spontaneous or strict alteration of social behavior. It is true that people are eating out more, eating more fast food and eating wholesome home cooked meals less. Consumption is the main driver but caloric intake has decreased this past year and obesity rates are still high. So are people really eating worse or is what they are eating getting worse?
The quality of the American food supply has gradually degraded and Americans are increasingly eating things that have a chronic negative impact on their health. We are able to bypass those “safe” and tolerable levels of toxic or perilous effect on humans but that does not make them safe in combination with other things or over decades. In the aggregate, such a position not only opens the American public up for increased diseases like obesity and weakened immune systems but also replaces a once robust citizenry with a weakened and lethargic populace. Fattening us up for the kill?
Ingredients for health: food, life-style, exercise, genetics, emotional and psychological well-being. Contaminants: foreign substances that are unnatural to the biological processes of the human body and that interfere with such benign natural functions.
GM foods, pesticides and processed foods are not all bad, but does that mean that they are all good? It would be impossible to say that GM foods have no substantial negative impact on the body if a test has never been conducted over 70 years, let alone 30 years. And even in such testing, one must consider the inordinate possibilities of cross-contamination of foods, drugs, genetics, chemicals, life-style and other factors.
Fact: the de facto experimentation on the people with certain newly created GM and chemically altered or processed foods within an increasingly highly medicated society adds a combination of negative foreign contaminants into the human body slowly over time interfere with healthy functioning.
Is this bad? Yes, but we do not yet know how bad it is yet. Right now we are seeing the effect of this recent development which have both social benefits and costs. Unfortunately, we are highlighting the benefits and ignoring the costs for expediency and efficiency.
Benefits include increasing quantity and control of the rapid food production process and the regulation or maintenance of diseases that prevent outbreaks. In the future, it is also likely that many food will contain targeting drugs to specific illness or disease prevention. Currently, processed foods and fast foods have also taken some blame in the contamination process but have afforded society with a means of increased efficiency at the expense of human health as well as GMO and pesticide crops. One might critically say that we no longer have an American food industry apart and distinct from the chemical industry. So closer and closer we grow and process foods in an increasingly chemically and genetically controlled manner of uncertainty and incremental long-term peril.
Most importantly, of all of the benefits from GMO corporations that create seeds and upstart the most cutting edge research are an increase in bioweapon defenses and a national biotechnology advantage over other competing states around the world. Thus national security is one added benefit. Nevertheless we remain unsure as to hidden costs of an overall clandestine contamination process as more and more of it leaks out onto American streets without proper tracking, real-time study or distinction from other growing or food production methods.
Are we contaminating our society faster than other nations to increase our economic, security and biotechnology edge? The same technologies are increasingly used in drugs as well or drug development. The future will largely depend on the safe and successful innovation of new therapies and related practices such as genetic engineering in humans in response to disease and to combat foreign or terrorist biological threats. The US cannot afford to be left behind.
The problems within the food and drug industry, however, go far beyond the obesity and allergies. Some have been cited to include: infertility, accelerated aging, immune system damage, hormonal problems, heart disease, cancer, autism or autism like symptoms; the destruction of benign intestinal bacteria, psychological deficiencies, etc. It is important to note that all of the above are on the rise and there is a consequential long-term impact that lies in-store years ahead.
Children remain the highest risk of any background contamination effects. The rise in childhood obesity is the real crisis and shocker. Children are eating many of the same fatty foods they consumed in the 1980s and 1990s and their health is worse most likely because the quality of food is worse and at greater risk systemically.
The need for greater transparency, better food safety regulation, independent investigations and inspections is not an unreasonable request- it is a national public safety imperative; one that is not being met with any substantial vigor or positive substantial effect. One must not sacrifice public safety for national security and economic advantage- they must all exist in greater balance.
The worst part of it all is that in this nationwide experimental process, there are no control groups- we are all contaminated.
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