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Good Health Starts With Healthy Food

Nurses know better than anybody that the American food industry has contributed to an epidemic of weight problems and hypertension extraordinary in recent history through unconfined advertising, food additives and mono-crops. If we fail to address the disastrous impacts of ‘Big Food’ then this might likewise become a country whose population is likewise facing a wellness crisis.

According to The New York City Times, a big portion of the cash invested on health care in this country deals with chronic diseases linked to diet. But it’s not just the health of individuals at threat, the health of the world is likewise suffering. Even President Obama acknowledged that “our agriculture sector really is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector.”

Small family farms throughout America have actually mainly been replaced by mega-agricultural corporations running big animals feeding lots and a focusing of our food production in large-scale facilities and on huge farms.

Much at stake

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

In an innovative decision 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 numerous genetically-modified (GM) seeds. There is growing issue that presenting foreign genes into food plants may have an unforeseen and unfavorable effect on human health. The British Journal Lancet examined the impacts of GM potatoes on the digestion system in rats and found “appreciable differences.” Considerable study continues the necessary concern of the damage of GM foods.

This entire system has incredibly little oversight. And we’ve seen the consequences – under-regulated fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide saturated mono-crops of soy and corn replacing little scale multi-crop farms, increases in greenhouse gases produced by big animals operations, and even recent break outs of food-born diseases stemming from large cleaning and product packaging plants.

did attempt to combat back and exert some much-needed control over the food market – 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 gorgeous garden loaded with healthy natural foods. How will his garden grow?

It is certain that business agriculture will try to apply influence over the new administration at the expense of the household farmer and at the expense of the health of our country.

There is an alternative model for feeding our nation utilizing fewer chemicals, triggering less harm to the environment and promoting much healthier eating habits. That alternative originates from a country that could not 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 country was left in a precarious food circumstance, not able to import fertilizers, pesticides, or food to feed its residents. It likewise meant that what food Cubans could grow, they mostly consumed themselves instead of cycling through livestock.

At the same time, the Caribbean island needed to resolve the issue of farming in the age of extreme weather events.

These aspects added to Cuba being much more ready for circumstances now facing lots of nations throughout the planet. Cubans mastered what is now called “agro-ecology” in contrast to our country’s mostly commercial agriculture. Small scale farmers in Cuba are leading the country’s agricultural motion and promoting sustainable practices like planting flowers to draw in helpful pests and nitrogen producing beans to fertilize the soil. Cubans had to discover imaginative ways to till the soil and plant crops without fossil fuel-fed equipment.

Out of need

Cuba now produces nearly all of its own fruit and vegetables and much of its own meat. These agricultural developments were not made out of ideology. Rather, Cubans acted out of necessity, to fulfill the needs of a starving people.

Cuban agriculture can in some ways be viewed 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 world.

Already, scientists fear that our world is on the brink of no return from international warming. If we do not downsize our farming usage of fossil fuels we could tip the thermometer permanently for our warming planet, causing the very same type of food insecurity around the world that Cubans faced.