Natural And Organic Products Swallowed Up By Multi-National Companies

Found this interesting article on Alternet which highlights the fact that many of the natural and organic products we enjoy and believe are good for us are now produced by large, multi-national corporations which have bought out the original companies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but are not these the same mega-corporations that produce toxic chemicals with little to no regard for environmental or societal issues? It’s an eye opener for sure.

After some more research, I found a list the following companies that have been purchased by their larger, mainbrand competitors on a blog titled withonebreath:

• Burt’s Bees is owned by Clorox
• Tom’s of Maine is owned by Colgate-Palmolive
• Stonyfield Yogurt is owned by Danone (Brown Cow); the CEO also sits on the board of Dannon U.S.A.
• Horizon is owned by Dean Foods (the largest dairy company in the U.S.)
• Odwalla is owned by Coca-Cola
• Naked Juice is owned by Pepsi-Cola
• After the Fall is owned by Smucker’s
• R.W. Knudsen is owned by Smucker’s
• Santa Cruz Organic is owned by Smucker’s
• Smart Water/Vitamin Water is owned by Coca-Cola
• Kashi is owned by Kellogg’s
• Back to Nature is owned by Kraft Foods (whose parent company also owns Phillip Morris USA)
• Cascadian Farms is owned by General Mills
• Barbara’s Bakery is owned by Weetabix
• Mother’s is owned by Quaker, which is owned by PepsiCo
• Health Valley/Arrowhead Mills is owned by Hain Celestial Group, of which 16% is owned by H.J. Heinz
• Green & Black Organic chocolate is owned by Schweppe’s.
• Dagoba Chocolate is owned by Hershey’s.
• The Body Shop is owned by L’Oreal/Nestle

It seems these large corporations are in a race to get a piece of the lucrative organic pie. Yes, the same pie that was ridiculed a few decades back has now become almost mainstream. Yet, even though some of these products are now available to a larger audience, I wonder what type of quality will remain with them, as many steps in the process will be discarded in favour of profit for investors. And as the “withonebreath” writer pointed out, “many of these mega-corporations utilize the same poor agricultural and manufacturing practices that prompted organic farming and consuming in this country” in the first place.

Do we really think they will change their habits for the sake of the organic consumer, or will they continue on the road to deceiving them? My vote is for the latter, even though there are third party oversight groups involved. There is far too much of the organic market farmed out to countries such as China with little or no oversight. I’m simply not convinced in light of the fact that many of these companies are lobbying the USDA to lessen the standards for organic products, and the FDA to loosen up on labeling requirements.

Want Some Estrogen With That Soft Drink?

It turns out a cold drink isn’t the only thing in your pop can. A Health Canada study of canned pop has found the vast majority of the drinks contain the chemical bisphenol A, a substance that imitates the female hormone estrogen and is now banned in baby bottles.

The highest levels of the chemical, known as BPA, were found in  caffeine-loaded energy drinks, but the residue was also detected in ginger ale, diet cola, root beer and citrus-flavoured soda. Pop cans are lined on the inside with BPA in order to prevent the drink from coming into contact with the metal in the can.

“The emphasis has always been on canned foods, and the results are especially startling, given that the average person, worldwide, consumes more than 22 gallons of soft drinks every year. Yikes!” (thedailygreen.com)

Out of 72 drinks tested, 69 were found to contain BPA at levels below what Health Canada says is the safe upper limit. However, studies in peer-reviewed science journals have indicated that even at very low doses, BPA can increase breast and ovarian cancer cell growth and the growth of some prostate cancer cells in animals. Health Canada spokesman Stéphane Shank said  there is no risk to Canadians. “The average adult weighing approximately 60 kilograms would have to consume over 900 cans per day” to reach the department’s safety threshold, he said. (www.cbc.ca)

The drinks tested came from a variety of sources, representing at least 84 per cent of the market share of soft drinks sold in the country. Despite this, the federal department did not reveal why this study was only published January in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry and on Health Canada’s website. The reasoning? It wasn’t their intent to hide it. However, had they wanted to get this report out, which would certainly have been the case if it was more positive, more sources would have been included.

Like estrogen — BPA is active in very small amounts. The average soft drink contains levels of around half a part per billion, resulting in 500 times more estrogen in people than normal. Some experiments have found harmful effects in animals at BPA concentrations as low as 1,000 times below Health Canada’s marker. Given this information, we need to consider the cumulative effect of hormone-disrupting chemicals.

Tim Horton’s Crack Identified

Authors Comment: I found this article on this blog (hotgingeranddynamite.blogspot.com) and thought it was highly interesting, especially considering the interest in the apparent addiction factor of Timmy’s coffee. I’ve written on this subject before, (Tim Horton’s Nicotene/MSG? ) and that particular article went haywire with readers. After doing some research, I now find I have to alter my opinion on the ingredients of their coffee. Besides the moderation factor of coffee which most ignore, and the unhealthy chemicals so common in non-organic coffee, the Tim Horton’s brand may indeed have other highly undesirable ingredients. Check out the interesting read below:

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Speculation abounds on the internet as to why an entire nation can’t function without Tim Horton’s coffee. Canadians will go to astonishing lengths to wrap their hands around a hot double-double. Theories range from nicotine to MSG, to insane amounts of caffeine to good old all-purpose crack cocaine. Thanks to a CBC investigation, the coffee has even been submitted for laboratory testing and come up clean. A few days after our return from Canada, I was send this email:

From: Chris
Date: Oct 3, 2007 5:30 PM
Subject: Tim Hortons EXPOSED
To: Susannah

I spent some time yesterday evening looking into the mystery of Tim Horton’s rocket fuel. Some interesting finds:

Firstly, Tim Horton’s claim that none of their coffee contains additives (none of their food, for that matter). A huge and already prosperous business is unlikely to risk their reputation by lying about this, so I assume they’re telling the truth.

Harold McGee tells me that Colombian Arabica coffee beans, when roasted, contain small quantities of a substance called lactisole which reduces the apparent sweetness of sugar by two thirds. This is why a cup of ‘double double’ strength Tim Horton’s, which contains a whopping 18 grams of sugar, tastes quite benign. The same amount of sugar dissolved in water would taste unusually sweet.

I did discover that lactisole has been synthesised and used by a company called Domino Sugar in a mixture called Super Envision Flavour and Texture Modifier. Not mentioned on their main website, they’ve hived off all their more controversial formulas onto www.dominospecialtyingredients.com, which tells me that:

Super Envision® Flavor and Texture Modifier is the latest Domino Specialty Ingredient product of the Envision sweetness inhibitor line. This unique ingredient reduces sweetness and allows the food formulator to use a full range of carbohydrates to maintain the desired attributes of products, such as: moisture retention, mouthfeel and water activity. Super Envision can typically be used at < 1%.

In other words, this stuff is used to cram more sugar into foods and sports drinks whilst not making it taste too sweet. Possibly why a can of coke is stuffed with 39 grams of sugar in only 12oz and still remains palatable. So the recipe seems pretty simple. Very strong coffee beans carefully chosen for a wide popularity, lots of sugar, lots of cream. Keeps ‘em coming back for more.

In short: Tim Horton’s coffee has no secret ingredient. Its crack-like qualities arise from its unique ability, thanks to naturally-occurring lactisole, to deliver not only caffeine but a double dose of good old-fashioned sugar — 18 g, or just under 4 teaspoonsful, roughly as much as you’ll find in 8-and-a-half Pixy Stix — across your blood-brain barrier in a matter of minutes. The fact that a double-double also delivers 7 grams of delicious, delicious fat (4g of which are saturated), or roughly as much as you’ll find in 2 teaspoonsful of butter, doesn’t hurt either.

From: Susannah
Date: Oct 3, 2007 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: Tim Hortons EXPOSED
To: Chris

This is better than Matthew’s calling up Kleenex to cross-question them about the “anti-viral” properties of their latest bird-flu-paranoia-inspired tissue.

That Super Envision stuff is scary. I presume all that bland corporate jargon just serves to conceal the fact that the stuff is used to allow food makers to shoehorn even more sugar into processed foods to give them the true crack effect. From Domino’s company history:

During the mid-1990s, the company embarked on an intensive research and development program to develop non-sweet sugar for different food applications. For example, the company’s development of such a product, which combined Lactisole, a sweetness inhibitor, with sucrose, enabled it to tone down the sweetness in sports drinks and energy boosting beverages. Another application involved using non-sweet sugar as a fat substitute for frostings, icings, and a variety of frozen desserts. By 1995, the company had received approval for 18 food applications for its non-sweet sugar, including use in low-oil salad dressings.

You’re right — in other words, lactisole is a compound used by the forces of evil to satisfy our monkey brains and give us an “energy” boost without us realizing it’s all just sugar. Notice also that the use of “non-sweet sugar as a fat substitute” came about in the mid-90s during the “fat is bad” craze, when pretty much every edible item in the world, including Oreos, sported a badge proclaiming it was low in fat. Never mind how high it was sugar. Thus proving absolutely spot-on the words of Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising: “[It] must be low in something, and if it isn’t, it must be high in something else, and that is its health-giving ingredient we will sell.”

Further Information:

• Lactisole is a carboxylic acid salt isolated from roasted Colombian Arabica Coffee beans. Like gymnemic acid, it is a sweet-inhibitor or taste-modifier.

• Kinghorn, A.D. and Compadre, C.M. Alernative Sweeteners: Third Edition, Revised and Expanded, Marcel Dekker ed., New York, 2001. ISBN 0-8247-0437-1

Anti-sweet properties

At concentrations of 100–150 parts per million in food, lactisole largely suppresses the ability to perceive sweet tastes, both from sugar and from artificial sweeteners such as aspartame. A 12% sucrose solution was perceived like a 4% sucrose solution when lactisole was added. However, it is significantly less efficient than gymnemic acid with acesulfame potassium, sucrose, glucose, and sodium saccharin. Research found also that it has no effect on the perception of bitterness, sourness and saltiness. According to a recent study, lactisole acts on a sweet taste receptor heteromer of the TAS1R3 sweet protein receptor in humans, but not on its rodent counterpart.

Lactisole Interacts with the Transmembrane Domains of Human T1R3 to Inhibit Sweet Taste. P Jiang, M Cui, B Zhao, Z Liu, LA Snyder, LMJ Benard, R Osman, RF Margolskee and M Max. J. Biol. Chem., Vol. 280, Issue 15, 15238-15246, April 15, 2005

As a food additive

The principal use of lactisole is in jellies, jams, and similar preserved fruit products containing large amounts of sugar. In these products, by suppressing sugar’s sweetness, it allows fruit flavors to come through. In the United States, lactisole is FDA GRAS (Fema number: 3773) and approved for use in food as flavouring agent up to 150ppm. Currently, lactisole is manufactured and sold by Domino Sugar and its usage levels are between 50 to 150 ppm.

JECFA “Specifications for Flavourings”

Sugar sans sweetness – lactisole. Prepared Foods, May, 1995 by Fran LaBell

New Low with Statin Drug (Cholesterol) Push For 8-Year-Olds

NaturalNews.com, July 8, 2008

http://www.naturalnews.com/023583.html

In the latest example of absurd disease mongering to receive widespread media attention, the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee has announced that infants as young as two years old need to be screened for high cholesterol, and children as young as eight years old should be put on prescription statin drugs. This absurd advice is being offered even though statin drugs have never been tested on young children. But the FDA, in its ongoing drug-pushing campaign, has granted approval for the use of such drugs on children as young as eight. (Will they now expand that approval to children as young as two?)

The point of all this? To sell more high-profit prescription drugs, of course, to yet another group of victims being targeted for medication by Big Pharma. This is called “market expansion,” and it’s the only way drug companies can continue to grow their profits and keep shareholders happy.

As drug companies continue to expand their profits and influence over the now-utterly-corrupt medical industry, they are also expanding their customer base by continuing to push medications for increasingly younger demographic groups. Not content to drug more than half the adults in western nations, Big Pharma now sees children as its next area of market growth, in much the same way that soda companies once sought to persuade parents to feed their babies soda pop as a way to instill the desire for sugary beverages at a very young age.

The conventional medical profession — which has long since sold its soul to the drug companies and now functions as little more than an elaborate pharmaceutical vending machine — is likely to follow this absurd advice and place children as young as eight years old on statin drugs, even without a single safety test having ever been conducted with children taking these powerful chemicals. NaturalNews readers need no reminders that statin drug side effects include:

• Severe disruption of hormone production, including sex hormones
• Extreme loss of cellular energy
• Devastating loss of muscle function (rhabdomyolysis)
• Kidney failure
• Erectile dysfunction
• Mental confusion
• Homicidal impulses
• Amnesia

… and many others you can read about at: http://www.naturalnews.com/001353.html

Are these the kinds of results our medical community wishes to see in eight-year-old boys and girls? Do we really want to send adolescent boys off to school, doped up on drugs that cause homicidal impulses, erectile dysfunction and mental confusion?

The medical community apparently thinks so. After all, they’re already drugging up the children with psych drugs that cause suicidal thoughts and violent outbursts (school shootings, anyone?). The thought of adding yet another mind-altering, body-damaging drug to a child apparently doesn’t earn a second thought from modern medical doctors, most of which are too busy cashing “speaking fee” checks from drug companies to invest any real time actually protecting the health of their patients.

But what if these children really have high cholesterol?

I can already hear the drug pushers chanting in unison: “But what if these children really have high cholesterol? Don’t they deserve treatment?”

“Treatment,” of course, is a clever euphemism for “drug ‘em!” It’s the call-to-arms of the medication industry, and it really only means pushing more drugs onto more people who don’t need them.

I’m all for real treatment — that is, treatment that reverses the underlying health condition. But the medical community won’t stand for that. It is currently illegal in the United States to offer a patient any treatment whatsoever that claims to reverse cancer, for example. Doctors are only allowed to offer prescription drugs and surgery, and that’s it. Neither option, of course, will resolve the underlying health problem.

And what, exactly, is the underlying health problem in this case? Any child diagnosed with high cholesterol at the age of eight has been a victim of dietary abuse and physical neglect. To imbalance a child’s cholesterol at such an early age requires the consumption of large quantities of:

• Milk and dairy products (like cheese)
• Fried foods and trans fatty acids
• Processed meats and animal products

Such a condition also indicates a dangerous lack of plant-based nutrients in the child’s diet, since a plant-based diet focused on unprocessed, fresh foods and living foods reverses heart disease and normalizes cholesterol!

I submit that any child can be cured of high cholesterol in a matter of weeks by being fed a 100% plant-based diet, comprised entirely of non-processed foods, and including fresh, raw vegetable and fruit juices along with numerous superfoods. (The junk food companies, of course, will never stand for this. They earn no profits when children eat fresh produce…)

That’s how you solve the cholesterol problems in America’s youth. Change their diets, and you change the health results you get. It’s so simple that you’d have to be an idiot not to get it.

Why are the nutritionally illiterate in charge of health care?

Interestingly, the health authorities in power today are, indeed, idiots when it comes to nutrition. Having never been taught the absurdly simple relationships between food intake and health outcomes, they continue to operate in a fantasy realm of false ideas where food has no relationship to health and children who exhibit symptoms of disease merely suffer from pharmaceutical deficiencies requiring rectification with medication.

That’s right: The mainstream medical profession now thinks of pharmaceuticals as essential nutrients, believing that children who are not given numerous medications are somehow lacking treatment or missing out on the benefits of those drugs.

And yet, at the same time, the real essential nutrients — vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals — are scoffed at by conventional medical practitioners who claim that VITAMINS exhibit no health benefits whatsoever in the human body!

You got that? Vitamins are useless, they say, but pharmaceuticals are essential!

Why no drug company will face my $10,000 health challenge

Which brings me to my $10,000 health and fitness challenge. Two weeks ago, I challenged the drug companies to produce a single person who could beat me in a physical fitness contest, pledging that I would personally pay $10,000 to anyone who could beat me. The catch? They have to provide a contestant who is experiencing the “benefits” of multiple pharmaceuticals that the drug companies claim enhance consumers’ health. You can read the full details on that challenge here: http://www.naturalnews.com/023476.html

To date, not a single drug company has dared to meet this challenge. Can you guess why? Because pharmaceuticals make you sick, not healthy. The more medications a person takes, the worse their health gets! It’s true with adults, it’s true with senior citizens, and it’s true with children as well.

Big Pharma is an industry based on fraud. It is, in fact, a criminal operation that preys on the bodies of innocent children who will only be harmed by these patented, high-profit synthetic chemicals that have no place in the human body to begin with. What children need today is:

1: Regular access to honest, fresh, unprocessed foods.

2: An honest education in health that isn’t influenced by the junk food companies.

3: Protection from all the chemicals, additives and refined ingredients in processed foods and popular beverages.

They aren’t getting that in the public schools, and they sure aren’t getting that from the USDA’s laughable Food Guide Pyramid. (See www.HonestFoodGuide.org for a better guide.) And sadly, they’re not even getting that in the homes, since most parents know as little about health and nutrition as conventional doctors!