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  • From: "henry walden" <henrywalden@lycos.com>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] [RE] The High Costs of So-Called "Cheap Food"
  • Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:40:15 -0500 (EST)

I am so with this! I guess they're gonna need zip-ties cause I ain't buying
their pirated insurance! No way!





---------[ Received Mail Content ]----------
Subject : [Livingontheland] The High Costs of So-Called "Cheap Food"
Date : Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:46:46 -0700
>From : "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
To : livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org


The High Costs of So-Called "Cheap Food"
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19887.cfm
* By Ronnie Cummins &amp; Alexis Baden-Mayer
Organic Consumers Association, December 23, 2009
We Won't Buy Obama Care!
Join the Boycott of Forced, For-Profit Health Insurance! GO ยป


Over the past 65 years, chemical agriculture, factory farms, and now genetic
engineering have devastated public health, wrecked the environment, and
destabilized the climate. The U.S. public now spends $2.4 trillion dollars a
year on health care, $800 billion of which is directly attributable to
consuming chemical-laden junk food. In only 15 years unregulated and
unlabeled genetically engineered foods and crops (GMOs) have been planted on
millions of acres of farm land, on soil which is then repeatedly doused with
toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers. GMO corn, cotton, canola and soy
are currently laced into 80% of (non-organic) supermarket foods and
restaurant items. The bodies of the majority of American adults and children
are bloated and contaminated with so-called agricultural commodities: high
fructose corn syrup (GMO corn), trans-fats (GMO cotton, canola and soy oil),
and meat and dairy foods derived from factory farmed animals fed and reared
on GMO and pesticide!
tainted grains, antibiotics, hormones, and slaughterhouse waste.

As a direct result of chemical and GMO agriculture, most American consumers
are ill-fed and disease-prone.

Overall, diet-related diseases are the cause of an estimated 580,000 deaths
every year.

* OBESITY. In the U.S. nearly 100 million people are seriously and
dangerously overweight. Obesity kills thousands and costs taxpayers and
employers $147 billion annually.
* HEART DISEASE. In 2010, heart disease will kill hundreds of thousands (in
2006, 831,272 people died of cardiovascular disease) and cost the US $503
billion.
* DIABETES. The number of people with diabetes in the US is expected to
increase from 23.7 million to 44.1 million in the next 25 years. The cost of
treating diabetes is expected to triple in that time from $113 billion per
year to $336 billion per year.
* CANCER. Cancer has reached epidemic proportions, with 48% of men and 38% of
women now stricken during their lifetimes. 35% percent of cancers are diet
related. Diet-related cancers now out-pace smoking-related cancers (30% are
smoking related).
* FOOD POISONING. The U.S. industrial, factory farm food system is
responsible for 76 million cases of food-poisoning reported every year that
result in over 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. Food poisoning
costs are substantial, estimated at up to $22 billion each year.
* ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE. In part because of the routine overuse of
antibiotics on factory farms - in the US, animals consume 70% of the
antibiotics - more than 63,000 people die in the US each year from
hospital-acquired infections resistant to at least one antibiotic. This
financial costs of this public health emergency are up to $5 billion dollars
a year.

Overall, over $2.2 trillion is spent on health care in the US. (That's the
2007 figure.)

After poisoning us with cheap food and destroying the environment, Big Food
Inc. turns us over to Big Pharma and the Industrial Health Complex to repair
the damage, or rather to keep us alive long enough to extract maximum
profits. But from the warped perspective of the for-profit health insurance
industry, overweight and diseased people aren't very profitable. That's why
health insurance corporations spend $350 billion per year trying to avoid
coverage and deny claims. The vast, paper-pushing bureaucracy the for-profit
insurance industry has created to help them avoid providing services soaks up
31% of all health care spending!

If we shifted the 31% of health care spending taken up by the administrative
costs of the for-profit health insurance industry to a single-payer,
universal health care system, we could cover the uninsured without increasing
total health-care spending. The Organic Consumers Association supports
single-payer, universal health care, with a focus on preventive health, diet,
nutrition and stress-reduction.

However:

IF PRESIDENT OBAMA SIGNS A BILL THAT TAKES AWAY OUR HEALTH RIGHTS, THAT
FORCES AMERICANS TO BUY OVERPRICED, INADEQUATE COVERAGE FROM THE FOR-PROFIT
HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY, OCA WILL LAUNCH A BOYCOTT!

Forced health insurance is not health care reform, it's corporate welfare and
it is a direct result of the nearly 1 billion dollars that the health care
industry is projected to have spent to shape the bill.

Not only does the for-profit health insurance industry spend 31 cents of
every health insurance dollar pushing paper and avoiding claims, but the
for-profit "health" system has become almost as deadly as the chemical and
GMO food and farming system. Preventable mistakes kill as many as 98,000
people in hospitals every year. Another 300,000 people are injured due to
medical errors.

Pharmaceuticals are even more dangerous than medical errors:
# More than 50 percent of all drugs have serious adverse reactions that are
discovered only after the drugs have entered the market (e.g., they are not
detected during pre-market testing) - making us all unwitting guinea pigs.
# About 2,270,000 patients per year incur hospital costs as a result of
adverse drug reactions.
# Another 4,300,000 visit other health care providers (physicians, hospital
outpatient departments and emergency rooms) as a result of adverse drug
reactions.
# Approximately 230,000 die each year as a result of an adverse drug reaction
(105,000 using drugs as directed and 125,000 as a result of mistakes). This
is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
# The total annual health care costs as a consequence of adverse drug
reactions exceeds a staggering $200 billion - an amount equal to what is
spent on Medicaid every year and almost half of what is spent on Medicare.

Reforming our health care system is literally a matter of life or death.

Eventually, we have to stop arguing over who's going to pay for
out-of-control health care costs and restore public health! The real solution
to our health care crisis is to stop subsidizing chemical and GMO food and
farming, along with the destruction of our environment and our climate, and
make the long overdue transition to organics. Then, under universal health
care or Medicare for All, we can shift from health care that treats sickness
caused by unhealthy food and an unhealthy environment and lifestyle to health
care that promotes wellness.


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  • [Livingontheland] [RE] The High Costs of So-Called "Cheap Food", henry walden, 12/30/2009

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