April is Stress Awareness Month. Who knew? And did we even have one 20 years ago? What has made life get so busy so quickly? It seems that between managing our families, our kids, our careers, our lives, it is increasingly hard to manage our health. But it is critical. Thankfully, our friends over at Natural Vitality’s just released their latest eBook. It’s a free download and such a good read for our busy lives, full of some great tools to counter stress.
Today, in a surprise move, Monsanto announced that they are launching Monsanto Organics.
“The writing is on the wall,” said Robbie Fraley, Chief Technology Officer. “We’ve spent millions trying to hide our ingredients from Americans and influence legislation. We’ve funded the Grocery Manufacturers Association, keynotes from Hilary Clinton and scientists like Kevin Folta. None of it is working.”
Monsanto is having a tough year. The company cut its 2016 earnings forecast in December, and Goldman Sachs recently downgraded the stock to a “Sell” rating.
In Europe, over half of the member countries have recently moved to ban GMOs, and in the last month, Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Italy caused the delay in the re-licensing of glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s signature product, Roundup, due to concerns over its cancer causing properties after the World Health Organization declared it a probable carcinogen.
But perhaps, most telling, is the recent stalemate in the Senate, after Senator Roberts attempted to push through a piece of legislation that would keep Americans in the dark about whether or not Monsanto’s products are in their food. Famously dubbed the “DARK Act” because it denies Americans the right to know, Senator Roberts was unable to secure his own party’s support, perhaps forgetting that the Republican party very much supports a citizen’s personal responsibility for his or her health, as well as the importance of states’ rights. Senator Roberts’ bill would have stripped Americans of both.
Monsanto, under pressure from shareholders, after spending millions on PR campaigns and lobbying attempts to hide their products, have decided to hedge and will be launching Monsanto Organics.
Hugh Grant, Monsanto’s CEO said, “For the sake of our shareholders, we need to capture the upside that is happening in the marketplace. 21st century consumers have made it crystal clear that they want food that is free from our products. Organic is growing at 14% a year, and non-GMO represents an $11 billion industry.”
Grant continued, “We look forward to working with the organic industry to grow organic agriculture in the U.S., as right now, it only represents less than 1% of U.S. farmland.”
He’d be a fool not to, but it’s April Fools Day.
So Monsanto’s strategy continues to be to plow as many chemicals into their business model and as much money as possible into keeping Americans in the dark.
I have a friend battling stage 4 cancer. We met when we were five. People teased him in first grade. He was still my friend. People teased me in middle school, and he was still my friend. By high school, we competed academically in just about everything. He is fiercely intelligent, and for twelve years, he was one of my closest friends.
When I got the news he had stage 4 cancer, I cried. Life doesn’t turn out the way we plan. He reached out, “What can I do with my nutrition?” So I gave him the best resources available.
He isn’t the first one to reach out on this. In the past year, not only have I watched friends and family lose parents to cancer, but I have also seen friends lose spouses, children and siblings. Today, 1 in 2 men are expected to get cancer in the United States and 1 in 3 women. It is the leading cause of death by disease in American children. It is not just an epidemic, it is quickly becoming a plague, and we have to stop it.
One of the friends that I lost to cancer this year was another high school classmate. He was captain of the football team, captain of the track team, and someone that everyone simply adored. His heart was huge.
When we were in high school, I remember hanging out with him one night, and he shared that the night before his birthday, every year, he would dance. He danced to celebrate the year he’d just had, to wrap it up.
Tomorrow is my 45th birthday. A birthday has never felt as precious as it does this year, and tonight, as we cook dinner, I will turn on the music and dance. Dance in memory of Stephen, dance to celebrate Chris’ fight, dance because I love so many amazing people in my life and still have them here.
Life is loaded with minutes in every day where we can use our talents to make the world a better place and use our hearts to love.
Do it without hesitation. We never truly know how long we have.
Dr. Lipman writes, “Good supplies of magnesium can be found in lots of good-for-you foods, like wild-caught Pacific halibut, leafy greens, powdered green drinks, spinach, black beans, pumpkin and squash seeds. The challenge is that most of us don’t get enough of it—and with magnesium responsible for so many bodily functions, it’s easy to see why getting more of it is so important.
What else contains magnesium? Avocados, bananas, raisins and dark chocolate. Sign me up! We love those foods!
You can’t marginalize this mighty mineral. Dr. Mark Hyman writes, “a deficiency in this critical nutrient makes you twice as likely to die as other people, according to a study published in The Journal of Intensive Care Medicine.”
Magnesium is an antidote to stress, the most powerful relaxation mineral available, and it can help improve your sleep.
Dr. Hyman continues, “I find it very funny that more doctors aren’t clued in to the benefits of magnesium…I remember using magnesium when I worked in the emergency room. It was a critical “medication” on the crash cart. If someone was dying of a life-threatening arrhythmia (or irregular heart beat), we used intravenous magnesium. If someone was constipated or needed to prepare for colonoscopy, we gave them milk of magnesia or a green bottle of liquid magnesium citrate, which emptied their bowels.”
Dr. Hyman then goes on to share that “it is an antidote to stress, the most powerful relaxation mineral available, and it can help improve your sleep.”
I never thought about it this way. But let’s do a quick summary: More sleep, less stress! Why isn’t everyone talking about this?
That’s all I needed. The sleep thing. With four kids, a wonderful though sometimes loud husband and a mind that often can’t stop, I knew I had to try it, if only for sleep alone.
I don’t know how many years it’s been now. All of us are now on it. The kids ask for it.
And their favorite magnesium product, hands down, is Natural Calm. It was one of those things that when I first put it on the counter, they tried it, no asking. It doesn’t happen often, and since we had already received the nudge from the pediatrician, I was totally pumped.
They loved it.
Maybe it’s the monkey see, monkey do thing, I don’t know. But we got going on this, followed our doc’s advice, and it’s become part of our routine.
Stress is always going to be part of our daily lives. With the nonstop presence of social media, work, errands, kids’ activities, appointments and so much more, we need every resource we can find to help manage it.
Life is what you make of it, always has been, always will be and this one mighty mineral can play a role in that
So talk to your doc, your dietitian, and your pediatrician about magnesium. I’m so glad that ours insisted that we did.
In the late 1980s, Lieserl, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death.
Or at least that was the story. For a long time, this letter circulated as one of them. When I read it, the words rang so true. But when you read these things long after someone is gone, you also have to wonder how true they are….”Gandhi said this, Lincoln said that….” How do we know?
I wish Einstein had written these words. They are so true. Love is a rocket fuel.
“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.
I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.
There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.
When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.
This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.
To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.
After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…
If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.
Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.
However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.
When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.
I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer!”
Your father,
Albert Einstein
Love gives us unfathomable courage, unthinkable patience and incorrigible strength. It is more powerful than greed and more powerful than fear and a driving force in the food movement.
NOTE: Make sure that you are not allergic to sesame before trying this. You can always swap out the sesame oil for something else!
We’ve had so many requests for this recipe since randomly sharing this one night on my personal Facebook page, that we’ve decided to just put it on the site.
It is so easy, so good, and even my pickiest, non-green loving child wolfs it down.
The kids will eat this every time I make it. Their friends do. They try to get it all before the other kids do. It’s the best kind of awesome, and as a mom who was clueless to all of this ten years ago, still makes me so grateful.
And it’s so easy:
Broccoli, sprinkled with sesame oil, salt and pepper.
Single layer the broccoli heads on a baking sheet.
Sprinkle with sesame oil, salt and pepper.
Pop the tray into the oven at 450 for about 15 minutes.
So good that while we were getting this post up, we got this note from a mom of teenagers.
With the year winding down, many are thinking about New Year’s resolutions. If there is any one thing that you can do to protect your health, it’s this: Eat Less Fake Food.
As we are quickly learning, there is still a lot that we don’t know about what all of these food additives, artificial colors, GMOs, pesticides and other new ingredients are doing to us either on their own or in combination.
So as we head into 2016, here are sixteen ideas for resolutions:
Drop the artificial colors. They’re not used in kids’ products in the UK, and companies are already starting to dump them here. Look for the Yellow #5 and #6 type of call-outs on the labels and avoid them.
Drop the artificial growth hormone in dairy. Look for milk, yogurt and ice cream that is labeled “rbgh-free.” Thankfully, you can find it almost everywhere: Kroger, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Wegmans and more. When it was introduced back in 1994, no other developed country – not one – allowed it.
Opt out of GMOs. According to the website, www.gmoscience.org, there is still a lot that we don’t know about these products. Look for the Non-GMO Project label or the USDA Organic label to ensure that you are opting out of this experiment. GMOs are labeled for 60% of the world’s population but not here in the U.S.
Dump the soda. Soda companies have been funding “obesity” studies to show that their products aren’t to blame. The same way that the tobacco companies did. Save some money and ditch the soda.
Purchase a water filter. This is an easy resolution that will last a lot longer than a year. You can hit Home Depot or any hardware store and find one that can fit under your sink. If that’s not an option, grab something like a Brita filter.
Read more. If you haven’t read my book The Unhealthy Truth, it’s a great starting point. Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis, The Blood Sugar Solution by Dr. Mark Hyman and any of Michael Pollan’s books are great starting points, too.
Watch GMO OMG or The Future of Food. Both films provide a great overview of the genetic engineering of our food supply. They have very different approaches (The Future of Food is more academic and one of my all-time favorite films on this issue).
Reach out to your local grocery store and ask for more organic and non-GMO products. They are listening! In 2014, 45% of new product launches were non-GMO.
Eat more plants. The biotech industry loves to say that we need GMOs to feed the world. In reality, a lot of the genetically modified corn and soy is going towards livestock feed. The less meat we eat, the less they can claim the need for their products.
Cook more. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good here. Do one thing, pick one night, one meal, make it a standing meal. Tacos on Tuesday, Chili on Wednesday, keep it simple so that you can stick with it.
Plant something. Remember those lima beans in a cup that we grew as kids at school? Do that again. Don’t be afraid to start small. Our garden grew over time. We started with one pot of tomatoes.
Teach your kids to cook. Don’t worry about the kitchen getting too messy. Let them have fun. Turn on the music and experiment together. Frying an egg, making scrambleds, roasting some broccoli with some sesame oil, salt and pepper. Little hands love to help.
Go organic. Pick your most popular food item. Love apples? Choose to purchase organic apples this year. Or maybe you have a milk-guzzling family. Look for organic milk at Costco the next time that you are there.
Start a book club. There are so many great reads, so many recipe books, gluten-free, allergen-friendly, food political books. Grab a few friends and read together.
Host a movie night. The Future of Food, GMO OMG, even Michael Clayton are all great conversation starters when it comes to starting the dialogue around our food.
Believe that one person can make a difference. Together, we add up in our schools, our churches, our communities and our local grocery stores. Never underestimate our collective abilities to create this change! We already are.
In the U.S., we spend 20.9% of our household incomes on healthcare and disease management (more than any other country). In 2014 alone, we spent over $374 billion dollars on healthcare. Per person, we spend 40% more than any other nation.
Service to our country was instilled in us at a young age. It runs deep in my family: my dad, my uncles, both grandfathers and even my mom all served our country (she was in Vietnam as a nurse with Save the Children).
So I can’t let today pass without a thank you to our nation’s veterans.
I think about the sacrifices that my grandmothers made: one held three jobs while raising four boys while her husband was away. The other sent her husband off to the World War, where my grandfather served as a clergyman to the soldiers.
My grandmother was pregnant at the time, and my grandfather didn’t meet my mom until he returned home when she was three years old. It is hard to imagine sacrifices like that, but we would not be here without them.
My dad has always worn his patriotism on his sleeve. It’s how we were raised—to raise the bar a little bit higher on ourselves, to be the best that we could be, to make family and our country proud, to serve.
The courage of our military and the sacrifices of those families is something that we can never take for granted. Those liberties and freedoms were hard earned.
Right now, our children, should they take the field, would require epipens, asthma inhalers and insulin injections to accompany them. They are our future military. We have to fight for their freedoms, too.
No one is talking about this in the presidential debate, but a country that defends the health of its citizens, its children, also defends its economy, innovation, its liberties and prosperities.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost that. Our kids are not healthy enough to take the field.
My dad, uncles and grandfathers bravely fought for the health of our country. As we do our part, bowing our heads in gratitude for those that came before us, protecting these liberties that we hold so dear, our generation faces a unique challenge to our freedoms:
Are we doing everything that we can today to protect the health and safety of our children, so that they can protect the health, safety and liberties of our country in the years to come?
We can not afford to get this wrong. We owe it to our military, our veterans, our economy, our families and our future.
Yesterday, we received this email. It’s not the first time something like this has happened, and it won’t be the last. I’ve been on the front lines for ten years.
What I decided to do this time was to share it on social media.
Within minutes, I got a reply that I did not expect from a mom of two who works for Monsanto.
.@foodawakenings It happens on both sides I’m afraid. I am pro-gm, work for Monsanto and get hate like that everyday. No one deserves it!!
It was kind and rang true as the words of a mom. I thought about her response, the civility of it and how we are probably both teaching our kids how to navigate in this world of online bullying. I wondered how she shared her work with her kids and thought about the lessons that I’ve shared with ours: to always be respectful, to never threaten anyone online and to let us know if bullying happens.
I shared the anonymous email with the kids.
Then I shared the anonymous email with my web team.
This morning, I woke up to an email in my inbox from my team.
Because the same person who had sent the anonymous email also made a hate-filled comment on the site earlier that day, my team was able to track down who made the comments, name, email address, location and job.
Scary.
It was an incredible example and lesson about “anonymity” and online bullying.
Nothing is anonymous on the internet.
So many moms are trying to protect their children.
And as we navigate the “he said” “she said” science of the GMO space, there are going to be moms standing on both sides of the aisle.
And while we may not agree on the GMO issue, my hunch is that as moms, there is probably a lot that we do agree on when it comes to bullying, cyberbullying, profanities and unconditional love.
I will continue to try to elevate the conversation, and one way that I know that I can do that is to thank Aimee, the mom at Monsanto.
Thank you for your kind words last night. Your kids obviously have an awesome mom.
Big chemical companies claim that tinkering with the genes of seeds will help feed the world with no impact on human health. Americans aren’t totally convinced.
Neither are our trading partners. More than half of European countries have decided to opt out and to ban the cultivation of these genetically modified crops.
On top of that, the World Health Organization states that a popular weedkiller used on genetically modified crops is a “probable carcinogen.” “Roundup Ready” crops have been genetically engineered to tolerate increasing doses of Roundup which contains glyphosate, a probable carcinogen.
Roundup is the same stuff we are told to not store under our kitchen sinks. The bottle itself says “Keep out of the reach of children.”
So what’s it doing to us as we eat it every day? What’s it doing to our children? And what is the answer?
Can all of the world’s food problems be solved by a chemical company?
Proponents of new farming technologies like GMOs say they’re needed to boost harvests worldwide with a projected 2 billion more mouths to feed by 2050.
But what if that’s a scare tactic? What if the solution is still out there? What if we already have it?
Will the solution to world hunger be “one size fits all by a chemical company”?
I share my thoughts in this radio interview. It’s short. Hit play, grab a cup of coffee and let me know what you think.
