The Story of Our Toxic Food System

The graphic below should be a huge eye opener for anyone who eats. Yeah, everyone. Our food system has grown so toxic that we have worry about far more than calories and nutrients. Now we have to worry about hormone disruptors, neurodevelopmental deficits, and cancer…stemming from our food. Often times we see factory farms buy out the operations of family farmers and yet these farms still like to market themselves as local, family, salt of the earth farms when they are anything but. Can a once small chicken farmer or a strawberry farmer who now works for a huge agribusiness company and puts out the kind of volume required for that really still call themselves a small family farm? No, not in my mind. They are factory farmers now and as such they are bad news for our health.

• They feed their animals unnatural and unhealthy foods (candy, plastics, diseased flesh)
• They spray their crops with toxic pesticides/herbicides
• They create tons of toxic sewage
• Their animals are so sickly they have to be medicated with antibiotics
• They buy genetically modified seed

And the process of making our food toxic doesn’t stop there. Often times it is then processed into something unrecognizable and combined with food-like ingredients that we aren’t even supposed to be eating. It might be doused with various chemicals to improve its visual appeal or shelf life. It might be packaged in plastic which is made from a highly chemical process and those chemicals leach into the food. The nutrition might be largely extracted leaving us with empty carbs and lots of sugar and salt that taste great to our palates but leave our bodies literally starving.

If only this type of chart was put in front of our children in nutrition class and sent home to parents. Of course if it were, we might have more people questioning the nutritional value of school lunches…

Via Healthy Child