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Poisoned Earth, Poisoned Children

Ronnie Cummins- Organic Consumers Assoc.

Mrach 12, 2015

The Dark Side of Nitrogen

When was the last time you thought about nitrogen?

That’s what we thought. Yet with every bite you take—of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach—you’re consuming nitrogen. Because plants, including food crops, can’t survive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil.

It used to be that the amount of food a farmer could grow was limited by his or her ability to supplement soil nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure or moving on to a new, more fertile field. But all that changed about 100 years ago, when a technical innovation that enabled us to produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen ushered in the age of industrial nitrogen fertilizers.

For the last 50 years, farmers around the world have used synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to boost their crop yields and drive the 20th century's rapid agricultural intensification.

But in their fervor to increase yields, farmers often dose their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess is now causing serious air and water pollution, and threatening human health. Ironically, all that fertilizer may even be ruining the very soil it was meant to enrich.

Read the essay

Poisoned Earth, Poisoned Children

For decades, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has known that Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide, marketed under names like Dursban and Lorsban, is dangerous to children and farmworkers.

And yet, the EPA has allowed the continued use of this dangerous pesticide on golf courses, on parks and on farms—where it drifts onto food.

In her recent article, “Pesticides, Birth Defects and Brain Damage in Children,” Dr. Janette Sherman, MD, says that chlorpyrifos “is a serious risk to health and intellect for people working and living in proximity to fields.” Sherman also said that detectable levels of chlorpyrifos in New York City children raises the question of exposure via food. According to Sherman:

Although the neurotoxicity of pesticides has been known for decades, recently, several national magazines, have named the pesticide, chlorpyrifos (Dursban/ Lorsban), as an agent causing loss of intelligence, as well as birth defects and structural brain damage.

Known to damage children’s brains, Dow’s chlorpyrifos is now up for review by the EPA. Will the EPA finally ban Dow’s chlorpyrifos? Or will the agency continue to allow Big Ag to poison our children?

Tell the EPA: Stop Letting Dow Chemical Poison our Children with Chlorpyrifos!

One Last Push

We have almost 29,000 signatures on our letter to Cathleen Enright, executive vice president Food & Agriculture, for the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO). Can you help us reach 50,000 by the end of this week?

Enright is responsible for keeping the OCA off of a panel at this coming weekend’s “Southbites: Feed Your Mind” session during Austin’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Interactive.

In a phone call with OCA, Enright said she didn’t want a representative of OCA on the panel because she didn't want the conversation to turn into a debate about the health and safety of GMO crops and foods. According to Enright, that debate has been settled.

Um, we don’t think so. And neither do millions of others, including consumers, scientists, scholars and physicians.

That’s why we’ve written this letter to Enright, and are asking consumers to sign it. When we get to at least 50,000 signatures, we’ll ship the letter and signatures off to Enright—so she’ll know that not everyone thinks the GMO debate is over.

Background here

Read our letter to Cathleen Enright

TAKE ACTION: Tell Cathleen Enright: The debate over GMOs is not over.

BOOK REVIEW

An 'Effortless' Read

Consumers looking to make sense of the relationship between food and health have a new blueprint: Effortless Healing: 9 Simple Ways to Sidestep Illness, Shed Excess Weight, and Help Your Body Fix Itself, by Dr. Joseph Mercola.

Whether you’re dealing with a chronic illness, weight gain, age-related conditions, or just looking to ward off everything from the common cold to cancer, Effortless Healing provides clear explanations and easy-to-follow strategies, based on the latest research, peer-reviewed studies and Mercola’s personal experience treating patients for more than 25 years.

Effortless Healing is a valuable read. Mercola has done the research, sifted through the studies and tested the theories—and then translated that knowledge into terms everyone can understand. But the book doesn’t just provide insights and illumination—it also outlines, step-by-step, the ways in which everyone who has the will can take control of his or her own health.

Read Ronnie’s Review of Effortless Healing

Order the book

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SUPPORT THE OCA & OCF

Vote of Confidence!

When we asked you to vote for OCA to receive funding from CREDO, we really had no idea what to expect.

But thanks to your tremendous response, OCA was awarded a grant of $79,015.

Wow.

We’re grateful to CREDO for the opportunity to compete for this important funding. And we’re grateful to all of you who took time to vote.

This additional funding will help us continue our important work on our ongoing GMO labeling campaigns, and will also allow us to step up our efforts to campaign against industrial factory farms—a huge source of air and water pollution, antibiotic and growth hormone use, animal torture and unhealthy (for human consumption) meat, eggs and dairy products.

Not to mention that a far greater percentage of GMO crops, grown with toxic chemicals, are fed to livestock than go into the human food supply.

Thank you for your vote of confidence!

Read the press release

Donate to the Organic Consumers Association (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic standards, fair trade and public education)

Donate to the Organic Consumers Fund (non-tax-deductible, but necessary for our GMO labeling legislative efforts)

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Like You’ve Never Before Heard It Explained

Watch this important video.

And then watch it again with your friends.

Thierry Vrain, a retired biologist and genetic engineer, explains the links between glyphosate (the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup), GMO food and your health.

For everyone who has trouble explaining to friends and family why this issue is so important, and why banning glyphosate and GMO crops and foods is so critical, this video lays it out as you’ve never before heard it explained.

Watch the video

NEW STUDY

Poisoning the Economy

Big Ag’s chemicals, especially the endocrine-disrupting type (see our alert above on Dow’s chlorpyrifos) aren’t just making us sick. They’re making the world’s economy sick, too.

So says a new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The study, based on research conducted by 18 researchers in eight countries, examined the costs associated with hormone-disrupting chemicals found in human-made products, from plastics to pesticides.

Conservatively speaking, those chemicals have cost Europe alone more than $170 billion, the researchers said.

The cost to human health worldwide? Staggering.

More here

Read the study