CSPI "top 10 risky foods" list gets it wrong: We need more leafy greens, not less

Saturday, October 10, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: e.coli, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) This week, the CSPI released a "risky foods" list aiming to reveal the top ten riskiest foods responsible for most food-borne illnesses. Number one on the list is "leafy greens." Does this mean people should stop eating leafy greens? Of course not: The list itself is flawed from the very start.

There's nothing inherently "risky" about leafy greens. There has never been a single food-borne illness caused by a leafy green. What causes food-borne illnesses are the bacteria that get onto the leafy greens. Putting the focus on the food item itself is not only scientifically inaccurate; it's also misleading to consumers.

The real question is how do foods get contaminated with e.coli? And that answer involves the growing and processing of those foods. Foods that are grown near factory animal farms are far more likely to be contaminated with e.coli than those grown in more natural settings. Foods grown using methods of biodynamic gardening are far more likely to be free from e.coli than those grown as monoculture crops.

What really causes foods to be contaminated are conventional mass-agriculture farming practices, not the foods themselves. So buying leafy greens from a local organic market is completely different from buying leafy greens grown with a corporate-controlled monoculture approach.

Don't blame the veggies!

It's a shame to see CSPI blame the veggies for all this, especially when fresh produce is precisely what more Americans need to be eating (or drinking as raw juice smoothies) in order to prevent degenerative disease and enhance their health. By publishing this list, the CSPI perpetuates the myth that only "sterile" food is healthy. With this list, they are implying that dead foods are better for you than living foods, and yet that's completely the wrong conclusion from all this. Dead foods lead to dead people. Only live foods can keep you alive in a healthy way, and when you're dealing with live foods, there's a need for more mindful agricultural practices.

Raw milk offers us a great demonstration of all this. Raw milk is far healthier for human consumption than pasteurized, homogenized, processed milk (the stuff most people buy and guzzle down). But selling raw milk would require dairy farms to clean up their unsanitary practices, and that's just too much trouble, so it's easier for the whole industry to just continue with their unclean milk collection practices (with blood, pus and all) and then cook the bacteria out of the milk while declaring it "safe" for human consumption.

The FDA wants to enact a similar death sentence for all vegetables, requiring fumigation or irradiation before any such items are allowed to be sold to consumers. Such a nefarious plan has already been put into place with California almonds (https://www.naturalnews.com/021776_almonds_fo...).

The ultimate goal? Irradiating all vegetables

Most of what you're hearing today about e.coli qualifies as just more "scare stories" (much like the swine flu) designed to get the public to react by agreeing to a food irradiation plot (https://www.naturalnews.com/023015_food_foods...). Remember this: U.S. health authorities don't want anybody eating healthy, living foods. They want the nation to subsist on dead foods because that's what brings in the most repeat business for the drug companies.

Dead foods also happen to save the government a fortune by making sure people don't live long enough to collect much money on social security or Medicare. (Seriously.) In the minds of the people running the USA, longevity is the enemy of health care cost control.

Most of the people who die from eating e.coli, by the way, were already suffering from compromised immune systems caused by -- guess what? Eating too many dead, processed foods!

People don't need more sterilized, dead foods. What they need is more live foods, more fresh produce and more living enzymes (which you can only get from living foods). Live foods have their natural medicines intact -- the delicate phytonutrients that provide most of the plant's medicinal benefits. Heat processing (pasteurization, etc.) destroys that natural medicine, transforming healing foods into dead, lifeless foods that are good for nothing more than a source of bland calories.

I find it astonishing that in an age when our national leaders are trying to figure out how to reform health, they would simultaneously be trying to figure out how to kill and sterilize the entire U.S. food supply.

E.coli is not the problem here. Disastrous farming practices are.

Sources for this story include:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shot...