Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 REPPED: The Senate Agriculture Committee recently held a hearing on school nutrition that has inspired the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) to keep driving toward national action that will help get junk food out of the public school system. Congress could move this year to restrict junk food sales in public schools, while lawmakers search for a way to conquer the national epidemic of obesity. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Adams is the author of the "Declaration of Journalistic Independence" and donates his writing efforts to an online news network that accepts no money from food, supplement or health companies, making it one of the few health news sources that doesn't suffer from conflicts of interests when it comes to covering junk food.
"With this action," Adams says, "Michael F. Jacobson once again demonstrates he is a true champion of consumer health, and that he will not be intimidated by the deep pockets of junk food manufacturers who continue to exploit the health of children for corporate profits. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 REPPED: In the wake of findings that food is the most-advertised product on television programming viewed by children, the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) recently issued a statement calling for "policies that will protect children from junk food marketers."
CCFC's Dr. Susan Linn made the statement in response to the Kaiser Family Foundation's report, "Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States. |
| Researchers found while children of all ages are bombarded with promotions for fast food, junk food and soda, 8- to 12-year-olds see the most food advertisements. This market, the "tweens," is especially important to advertisers because it encompasses the ages at which youngsters typically begin to make some of their own buying decisions.
According to Linn, "We know that marketing is a factor in the childhood obesity epidemic. It is unconscionable that 8-12-year-olds see, on average, more than 7,600 food commercials a year -- the vast majority for candy, snacks, cereals, and fast food. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Adams is the author of the "Declaration of Journalistic Independence" and donates his writing efforts to an online news network that accepts no money from food, supplement or health companies, making it one of the few health news sources that doesn't suffer from conflicts of interests when it comes to covering junk food.
"With this action," Adams says, "Michael F. Jacobson once again demonstrates he is a true champion of consumer health, and that he will not be intimidated by the deep pockets of junk food manufacturers who continue to exploit the health of children for corporate profits. |
| Jacobson, the effort promises a lawsuit to protect children from junk food marketing practices often described as "predatory."
Consumer advocate Mike Adams, known online as the "Health Ranger," today announced his full support for the CSPI effort. He also stated his intention to cover the story as an independent health journalist and, "...bring the truth about this story to the people, free from the influence of junk food advertisers. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 We can also tax foods by levying things such as the junk food tax. Although I'm not a big fan of increasing taxes or using taxes for social reform, it is true that taxing junk foods would make them less affordable to most citizens and might cause some people to choose alternative sources of food such as healthy snack foods. In other words, if we made unhealthy snack foods the same price as healthy snack foods by taxing the junk foods, people would have a more balanced choice of what they want to eat. |
Ron Garner
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 Eating a regular diet of junk food leads to vitamin, mineral, amino acid, and enzyme deficiencies. Junk foods are dead because they lack their live enzyme components. Further, most of them have been refined, processed, and overheated. In addition, chemicals have been added as taste enhancers and preservatives. junk food is toxic and stressful to the body.
Too Much Cooked and Processed Food
Cooked and processed food places hardships on the body. Enzymes, which are in raw food to assist in its breakdown, are destroyed when food is heated above ii2-i20°f (44-49°c). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Jacobson once again demonstrates he is a true champion of consumer health, and that he will not be intimidated by the deep pockets of junk food manufacturers who continue to exploit the health of children for corporate profits."
In his announcement of the challenge to Kellogg Co., Jacobson explains, "Nickelodeon and Kellogg engage in business practices that literally sicken our children. Their marketing tactics are designed to convince kids that everything they hear from their parents about food is wrong. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Clearly somebody lost their minds when they allowed these junk food chains to enter our public schools and hospitals. They should be immediately outlawed and yanked out of these institutions of learning and health.
Another thing we should do as a nation is fund public education advertising campaigns that teach parents and the public about good nutrition. We need to have television ads, radio ads, and magazine ads that counter the billions of dollars in advertising promoting soft drinks, snack foods, fast foods, and other junk foods that cause obesity and chronic disease. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Stop junk food and soda advertising to children
Here's sort of another obvious one: outlaw the predatory marketing of junk foods, candy and sugary beverages to children, many of whom are already headed for a life of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. But wait: the soda companies say sugary drinks have nothing to do with obesity! And, better yet, the American Diabetes Association claims there's no link between sugar and diabetes! (Not sure how they can still say that one with a straight face, but they somehow manage it. |
Dan Buettner
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 Aren't these diseases occurring because people who eat junk food get fatter?"
"Obesity is certainly a risk factor," Greg replied. "But eating junk food also creates chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. The inflammatory response is good if we have an infection, but triggering it all the time by eating bad foods causes the body to produce chemicals that wreak havoc on our organs and arteries. People think that our skin is the main way our bodies interact with the outside world, but it is actually through our digestive tract—our stomach, large intestines, and small intestines. |
Ron Garner
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| THE ESSENTIALS OF FOOD
Real Food Versus Junk Food
Real food contributes to health. junk food contributes to disease. It is denatured and contains little or no health-producing properties.
Our bodies are always looking for food that contains usable components.2
Glucose—for energy.
Protein?amino acids) for building and repairing tissue.
Fatty Acids—to construct membranes and move electrical currents.
Ionic, food-form minerals—as catalysts and building components.
Enzymes (vitamins)—as catalysts.
Water—the medium for chemical processes.
Real foods:3
Are edible, and grown by nature. |
Hyla Cass
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 Globally, fast food, junk food, and sugary sodas and other drinks are increasingly accessible. These affordable, convenient sources of calories are being gobbled down in place of nutritious, traditional ethnic fare, and the result is weight gain . . . and ever-rising rates of type 2 diabetes.
Junk food accounts for 90 percent of diabetes diagnoses, affecting some 177 million people worldwide. Obesity, where body weight is 30 percent or more beyond ideal, is a major risk factor for diabetes. |
Michael T. Murray and Michael R. Lyon
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 High-sugar junk food diets definitely lead to poor blood sugar regulation, obesity, and ultimately type 2 diabetes. And, because of the stress on the body that they cause, including secreting too much insulin, they can also promote the growth of cancer and increase the risk of heart disease. Our simple recommendation? Don't eat "junk foods," and pay attention to the glycemic index of food that you eat.
The GI in quite useful, but since it doesn't tell how much carbohydrates is in a typical serving of a particular food, another tool is needed. That is where glycemic load comes in. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Usual causes: A combination of inadequate sleep and bad diet, such as loading up on coffee or junk food, can cause fatigue. Caffeine is a stimulant—but after the initial stimulation, people often experience rebound fatigue. junk food is usually high in carbohydrates, which can cause a surge in blood sugar followed by a drop, resulting in fatigue.
Limit your intake of caffeinated beverages to one or two servings daily. Go to bed and get up at the same times most days of the week. Eat nutritious meals and exercise regularly—it promotes deeper sleep. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 We're winning the war against junk food manufacturers! Kraft Foods, a company that I would categorize as the largest junk food / processed food manufacturer in the world (also owned by a tobacco company, by the way) has just announced it's slashing jobs and closing manufacturing plants. A whopping 8,000 jobs, to be exact.
That's good news for the health of Americans, because it means fewer factories are churning out disease-promoting junk foods. Overeducated, misguided economists would argue with that, screaming about the loss of jobs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 That's junk food. But medical studies call that "fruit."
The same is true with vegetables: a lot of people might think spinach lasagna counts as a vegetable serving. And, again, I consider that to be junk food. It's loaded up with cheese, it probably has some sort of chemical taste enhancer if it's been purchased at the store, it has refined carbohydrates in the crust, and it probably has refined sugar in the tomato sauce. And yes, there's a little bit of spinach in there too, but that's not a vegetable serving. That's just junk food with a bit of spinach filler. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Health food tastes wonderful: it's the junk food that's an offensive taste assault. (Of course, if you're used to eating junk foods or processed foods, you can really only taste three things: salt, sugar and fat. And health foods don't have much of those, which is why junk food eaters think healthy foods taste like cardboard.)
But people are afraid that if they give up their candy bars, cookies and donuts, they'll have to live a life of food celibacy. So fear becomes a strong inhibitor to change, and it's fear that keeps a lot of people stuck in the old destructive eating patterns. |
Mike Adams
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| We can also tax foods by levying things such as the junk food tax. Although I'm not a big fan of increasing taxes or using taxes for social reform, it is true that taxing junk foods would make them less affordable to most citizens and might cause some people to choose alternative sources of food such as healthy snack foods. In other words, if we made unhealthy snack foods the same price as healthy snack foods by taxing the junk foods, people would have a more balanced choice of what they want to eat. |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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| Globally, fast food, junk food, and sugary sodas and other drinks are increasingly accessible. These affordable, convenient sources of calories are being gobbled down in place of nutritious, traditional ethnic fare, and the result is weight gain . . . and ever-rising rates of type 2 diabetes.
Junk food accounts for 90 percent of diabetes diagnoses, affecting some 177 million people worldwide. Obesity, where body weight is 30 percent or more beyond ideal, is a major risk factor for diabetes. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Most of them "reward" their children with junk food, sugary sodas, candy laced with petrochemical coloring additives and refined sugars that promote obesity and diabetes. Most parents don't even make any real effort to follow nutritional discipline at home -- they simply buy whatever their children saw advertised on television, caving in to the all-powerful "nag factor" that junk food companies fully exploit when marketing to children.
As a result, human children are the least healthy youngsters of any species on the planet. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| When Big Tobacco says it's running ads to dissuade children from smoking, do you really think it wants children to not smoke? junk food companies work the same way. They know that the earlier they can get kids addicted to sugar, salt and MSG, the more those kids will buy of the same junk food when they grow up and have little chemically-damaged children of their own.
So I say we stop the ads. Stop promoting disease-causing substances to our children. It's only common sense. |
| How about this idea: For every junk food or soda ad a TV station airs, it should be required to air an educational, pro-nutrition public service ad in the same hour. That way, the advertising messages would at least be somewhat balanced out, and viewers wouldn't simply be assaulted by corporate-sponsored junk food ads all the time.
#13 End Big Pharma's FDA-enforced drug monopoly
Government regulators claim to support free trade in every area imaginable: corn, computers, software, automobiles and even steel. But when it comes to medicine, U.S. regulators feel they need to enforce a U.S. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Strangely, many parents actually reward their children for good behavior by buying them unhealthy fast food meals, thereby creating a psychological association between good feelings and junk food. (Fast food restaurants further exploit this psychological link by building playgrounds and running feel-good advertisements that emphasize friends and fun, then link those good vibes to their food products.)
12. Antidepressant drugs
Children as young as six months old are now being put on psychotropic drugs such as SSRIs (antidepressants). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Most people simply don't take care of their own health, and while I could argue for days about the need for more patient responsibility alongside corporate responsibility, the fact is that relentless advertising from drug companies and food manufacturers has bred a mindset of disease, junk food consumption, pharmaceutical dependence and patient victimization. We have a health crisis in this country, and it's going to take genuinely radical reforms to turn this around and save America from a financial wipeout exacerbated by runaway health care spending. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This trick is called "label padding" and it's commonly used by junk food manufacturers who want to jump on the health food bandwagon without actually producing healthy foods.
Hiding dangerous ingredients
A third trick involves hiding dangerous ingredients behind innocent-sounding names that fool consumers into thinking they're safe. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The same junk food crap that wasn't labeled with any health claims two years ago is now labeled "all natural" and positioned in the healthy food section of the grocery store. Same ingredients, new spin. It's all about positioning.
All this doesn't mean there aren't some genuinely natural products available in the marketplace today. There are, but they aren't manufactured by the big brand-name food companies. A few smaller, niche-market companies are offering real food these days, but you have to search them out. |
| Cable news stations, magazines, newspapers and other media giants are all too happy to take money from junk food manufacturers and run their advertisements claiming their foods are "all natural." There is absolutely no effort to determine whether such claims are really true or even partially credible. Media companies simply take the money and run the promotions, regardless of whether such promotions tell the truth. |
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