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Health Starts With Healthy Food

Nurses understand better than anybody that the American food industry has actually added to an epidemic of weight problems and high blood pressure extraordinary in recent history through unfettered marketing, and mono-crops. If we stop working to address the destructive impacts of ‘Big Food’ then this could likewise end up being a nation whose population is also dealing with a wellness crisis.

According to The New York Times, a big portion of the money invested in healthcare in this nation treats persistent illness connected to diet. But it’s not just the health of people at threat, the health of the planet is also suffering. Even President Obama acknowledged that „our farming sector really is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transport sector.“

Small household farms throughout America have largely been changed by mega-agricultural corporations operating huge livestock feeding lots and a concentrating of our food production in massive centers and on huge farms.

Much at stake

The farming commercial complex is a $1.5 trillion-dollar market in America – that’s trillion with a T – with huge corporations from farms, to feeding lots, to supermarket managing almost the entire procedure from seed to table.

In a cutting-edge choice that supported genetically-modified foods, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of seed patents – fertile soil for mega-agribusiness Monsanto, which was already developing lots of genetically-modified (GM) seeds. There is growing concern that presenting foreign genes into food plants may have an unexpected and unfavorable influence on human health. The British Journal Lancet took a look at the effects of GM potatoes on the gastrointestinal system in rats and discovered „appreciable distinctions.“ Considerable research study continues on the necessary concern of the damage of GM foods.

This whole system has extremely little oversight. And we have actually seen the consequences – under-regulated fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide saturated mono-crops of soy and corn changing small scale multi-crop farms, increases in greenhouse gases produced by big animals operations, and even recent break outs of food-born diseases originating from big cleaning and product packaging plants.

President Obama did attempt to eliminate back and exert some much-needed control over the food industry – enough so that a group backed by pesticide and fertilizer producers called the Obamas, „natural limo liberals“ and called on Michelle Obama to use pesticides in the White House garden.

President-elect Trump now inherits a stunning garden full of healthy natural foods. How will his garden grow?

It is particular that business agriculture will try to put in influence over the new administration at the expense of the household farmer and at the expenditure of the health of our country.

There is an alternative model for feeding our country utilizing fewer chemicals, causing less damage to the environment and promoting healthier consuming habits. That alternative comes from a country that couldn’t be more various from ours – Cuba.

What Cuba can teach us

Because of the USA-led embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tiny island nation was left in a precarious food situation, unable to import fertilizers, pesticides, or foodstuff to feed its residents. It likewise meant that what food Cubans might grow, they primarily ate themselves instead of biking through livestock.

At the exact same time, the Caribbean island needed to fix the problem of farming in the age of extreme weather condition events.

These elements contributed to Cuba being far more ready for situations now dealing with lots of nations throughout the planet. Cubans mastered what is now called „agro-ecology“ in contrast to our country’s mainly commercial farming. Small scale farmers in Cuba are leading the nation’s agricultural movement and promoting sustainable practices like planting flowers to draw in handy pests and nitrogen producing beans to fertilize the soil. Cubans needed to discover imaginative ways to till the soil and plant crops without fossil fuel-fed machinery.

Out of need

Cuba now produces almost all of its own produce and much of its own meat. These agricultural developments were not constructed out of ideology. Rather, Cubans acted out of need, to fulfill the needs of a starving people.

Cuban agriculture can in some methods be seen as an example for the United States of an agricultural system that is sustainable for the health of our people and the health of our planet.

Already, scientists fear that our world is on the edge of no return from international warming. If we do not scale back our agricultural usage of nonrenewable fuel sources we could tip the thermometer completely for our warming planet, resulting in the same kind of food insecurity around the world that Cubans faced.