I did not write the following text. It is an alert posted by
NaturalNews.com, who have generously offered to allow anyone to spread the word-- using their text-- as long as the person cites the source.
Every link on this post leads to fascinating, if not somewhat terrifying information. It's worth an hour of your time, for sure... And it's worth a letter to your Congress representative as well. Side note: I do not understand the purpose of targeting locally grown food, or the assault on small-scale farms. Our food is about to become unbelievably expensive, yet while that is an inevitable fact, the government seems to be targeting local solutions. Am I missing something?Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor (NaturalNews) The Food Safety Modernization Act looks like it's headed to become law. It's being hailed as a "breakthrough" achievement in food safety, and it would hand vast new powers and funding to the FDA so that it can clean up the food supply and protect all Americans from food-borne pathogens.
There's just one problem with all this:
It's all a big lie.
Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and the mainstream media:
Lie #1 - Most deaths from
food poisoning are caused by fresh produce. Here's a whopper the
mainstream media won't dare report: Out of the 1,809 people who die in
America every year from food-borne
pathogens (CDC estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer's contamination of
fresh produce.
By far the majority of food poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of pathogens.
For example, one of the largest food-borne killers according to the
CDC is
Toxoplasma gondii, a
disease that people acquire from
cat feces coming into contact with their
food, which can happen right in their own homes (
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5n...). Salmonella poisoning accounts for
553 deaths a year. As a reference for relative risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents in the USA, meaning driving a
car has a roughly
7600% higher chance of killing you than
eating fresh produce. (
http://www.driveandstayalive.com/in...)
In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and spoiled pasteurized milk.
S 510, of course, does absolutely nothing to address these
food contamination deaths, since those foods are considered "sterilized" at the time of sale.
Lie #2 - Under S.510,
the FDA would only recall
products it knows to be contaminatedNot true. S.510 merely requires the
FDA to have "
reason to believe" a food is contaminated. So right there, that means
all raw milk will be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has "reason to believe" the milk is contaminated
merely because it is raw.
In other words, the FDA no longer needs
science to outlaw a food product. It merely needs
an opinion.Is this "reason to believe" section really true? Yep, and here's how it was amended:
SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.23 (a) IN GENERAL. - Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended by
(1) striking ''credible
evidence or information indicating'' and inserting ''reason to believe'';
(
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi...)
In other words, in negotiating this bill, the U.S.
Senate removed the requirement that the FDA needed "credible evidence" in order to
recall a product and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing "reason to believe."
It is utterly amazing that the U.S.
Congress would give the FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even
imprison people based entirely on what the agency "has reason to believe."
Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food, no herb, no vitamin or supplement that
has any ability to prevent disease of any kind. They don't even believe limes can prevent scurvy, and you'd have to nutritionally illiterate to believe that.
The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants, therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless for human biology.
This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge of
the food supply, is
the belief system of an insane government agency that has completely lost touch with reality while abandoning nutritional science.
Lie #3 - They didn't tell you that nearly 70% of grocery store
chickens are contaminated with
salmonella every dayYep, it's true: Amid all the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at grocery stores every single day are widely contaminated with salmonella (
http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c...). Yet S 510 does absolutely nothing to address this. It's not even mentioned in the bill.
In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens across America. So the so-called "food poisoning" that's often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the contaminated
chicken meat people bring
home and slice on their kitchen cutting boards.
Lie #4 - S.510 will exclude and protect small
farmers. The
Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount
is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more "quantitative easing," anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket -- and this will shift even small
family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.
In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.
Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will
refuse to hire more people or expand their
operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.
Lie #5 - The FDA needs more power to enforce
food safety. The FDA already has the
power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already has the power to confiscate "misbranded" products, too, and it could easily use this power to halt the sale of contaminated food items.
But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently worked: Now in a
reaction to the food scare-mongering, the FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding, too! And you can bet it will find creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the health
freedoms and food freedoms of the
American people.Lie #6 - Fresh produce is contaminated because of a lack of paperworkThere is no evidence that requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their food safer. The real cause of produce
contamination is the existence of
factory animal farms whose effluent output (huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with fresh produce.
The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where you've got to reform the factory animal operations that now dominate the American meat
industry. S.510, however, does absolutely nothing to address this. Factory animal farms aren't even addressed in the bill!
Lie #7 - The American people are dying in droves from unsafe fresh foodThe truth is that Americans are dying from
processed food laced with toxic chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce. Partially-hydrogenated
oils, white sugar, aspartame,
MSG and artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people than bacterial contaminations.
The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals -- anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed by FDA-approved drugs (
http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html), most of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly fraudulent science and
drug company trickery. The FDA doesn't seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful co-conspirator in the scientific fraud carried out by
Big Pharma in the name of "medicine." (
http://www.naturalnews.com/027851_h...)
To think that the FDA -- the very same agency responsible for the Big Pharma
death machine -- is now going to "save us" by controlling food
safety is highly irrational.
Lie #8 - The FDA just wants to make food "safer"Actually, the FDA wants to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are vocal opponents of live food. They think that
the only safe food is sterilized food, which is why they've supported the fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have been pushed over the last few years.
California almond growers, for example, must now either chemically fumigate or pasteurize their
almonds before selling them (
http://www.naturalnews.com/021776.html). This has destroyed the incomes of U.S. almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw almonds from Spain and other countries.
Lie #9 - Food smuggling is a huge problem in AmericaOne of the main sections of S.510 addresses "food smuggling." Yep -- people smuggling food across the country. If you've never heard of this problem that's because it's not actually a problem.
Not yet anyway.
But there's a reason why they put this into the bill: Because they're probably planning on
criminalizing fresh produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli with the "intent to distribute."
Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend farmer's market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the "food smuggling" provisions of S.510.
Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to trade carrots for cash.
Lie #10 - S.510 will make America's
food supply the safest in the worldActually, even with S.510 in place, America's food supply is among the most chemically contaminated in the world, second only to China. You can find mercury in the seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the "natural" potato chips, and artificial petrochemical coloring agents in children's foods.
Eating the "Standard American Diet" is probably the single most harmful thing a person can do for their
health. It's the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Every nation in the world that begins to consume the American
diet starts to show
record rates of degenerative disease within one generation. This is the "safe food" that the U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.
Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD. And the FDA says it wants to keep everybody safe.
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