Michael Pollan: Cooking for yourself is the real independence

(The Splendid Table) Psychologically and socially, cooking is good for you and your family -- not to mention the health benefits. But it’s also a political act, according to food writer Michael Pollan, author of Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.

New Seattle law: No food in trash

(Seattle Pi) Starting Jan. 1, it will be illegal to throw food and food waste in the trash in Seattle, when a new ban takes effect to increase recycling and composting in the city.

Currently, Seattle residents are allowed to throw food and food waste – pizza boxes, dirty napkins, soiled paper towels – in the garbage. Residents are required to have a food and yard waste collection service, but they don't have to use it for food. (Backyard composters are exempt from that requirement.)

Similarly, multi-family building owners are required to provide a compost collection service for residents, but residents don't have to use it.

But on Jan. 1, Seattle will ban food and food waste in trash. 

Nanocolloidal Detox Factors may help remove heavy metals from the body

Linked with a laundry list of disorders, heavy metal toxicity is the bane of modern health. To make matters worse, detoxifying from these metals can create more harm than good when the toxins are mobilized to more dangerous regions - such as the brain or heart. A painful healing crisis can also occur when our eliminatory pathways of the skin, lung, liver, kidney and bowel are impaired. And chelating therapies like DMPS, DMSA and EDTA are rife with harsh side-effects for those with compromised systems. So how do we detoxify safely and gently? Nanocolloidal Detox Factors (NDF) may provide an exceptional solution.

The secret to successful detoxification

According to the Simon Clinic in the U.K., NDF removes heavy metals through a process called Mucopolysaccharide Ion Exchange Resin (MIER). The nanonized chlorella in NDF bonds with toxic metals without stripping the body of essential minerals, like zinc and magnesium. NDF also crosses the blood brain barrier (unlike traditional drug chelators such as DMPS, DMSA and EDTA), which effectively detoxes heavy metals from the central nervous system. Nanocolloidal Detox Factors can be used daily, and safely eliminates up to 920 percent more metals per month than conventional chelators. Another unique feature of NDF is that it removes 95 percent of metals through the urine, instead of through the bowel, thereby protecting against reabsorption in the colon.

GMOs encourage weight gain and obesity, researchers discover

Looking around, it's no secret that Americans are putting on the pounds unlike any other time in history. Sure, we can't discount sedentary lifestyles, processed foods and outrageous sugar consumption as contributing factors. At the same time, an elephant in the room is often overlooked -- one known as genetically modified food. Researches are beginning to connect the dots, realizing that the possibility of GMOs contributing to weight gain is not as far-fetched as once thought.

Kick influenza and colds to the curb with garlic

An easy, inexpensive and beneficial remedy for the cold and flu season could be as near as your food pantry. Commonly known as "Russian penicillin," garlic has been used throughout history for everything from stomachaches to parasites and leprosy. In fact, the ancient Ebers Papyrus documents no less than 32 illnesses that respond to the herb. However, garlic really shines when we use it to stay healthy and flu-free while the rest of the masses sneeze and cough away. And what better way to reap the benefits of this odorous bulb than with a traditional 52-clove garlic soup or gingered garlic tea?

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Meet the new deal, same as the old deal

By Billy McMahon

(The Observer) In August of this year, I traveled deep into rebel territory in Chiapas, Mexico, to the jungle compound of “La Realidad” — a major base of operations for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. I was welcomed by the masked revolutionaries and invited to stay as long as I liked. They called me “compañero” and asked me to write of their global struggle against neoliberal capitalism, which they call the War Against Oblivion. Their 20 years of rebellion began on January 1, 1994 — the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. From union halls in Chicago to rebel villages in Chiapas, the new era of global “free trade” has been denounced as an affront to workers’ rights and human dignity.

GMOs: respected analyst says they could destroy life on the planet

(Alliance for Natural Health) Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a scholar, statistician, Wall Street analyst and advisor, professor at New York University, and the bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness  and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He predicted the 2008 financial crisis by pointing out that commonly used risk models were wrong. (He was correct, and he became quite wealthy from the strategic financial decisions he made at that time.)

Now his analysis of our use of genetically modified organisms shows that GMOs could cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.” Taleb and his two co-authors argue that calling the GMO approach “scientific” betrays “a very poor—indeed warped—understanding of probabilistic payoffs and risk management.”

Taleb believes GMOs fall squarely under the rule that we should always err on the side of caution if something is really dangerous. This is not just because of potential harm to the consumer, but because of systemic risk to the system, which in this case is the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet: