Another common argument for the ubiquity of corn in the American diet is its extremely low price. The price of corn (and its little brother, the soybean) today is lower than it has ever been. This is due to the miracles of genetic, chemical and biological science, government subsidies and, frankly, cheap immigrant labor working harmoniously together.
In fact, it is indeed true, that at face value, the expense of food in general (mainly because of corn and soy) as a percentage of total income is lower than it has ever been.
This is of course, if you practice a certain type of accounting. That is, the type that hides the high cost of cheap food produced from corn.
Michael Pollan: "The ninety nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost-- to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc, costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity) and the environment (in the form of pollution)"
There are literally a thousand examples of the truly high cost of cheap corn on the American public, and especially the poor.
Take obesity for example. Obesity is arguably the most pressing public health epidemic of our time, costing the health care industry an estimated 90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight, one of every five obese. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born after 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. Obesity is worse the poorer you are.
How is this linked to corn you ask? High Fructose Corn Syrup is now the leading source of sweetness in the American diet. It was created in 1980 and added to the American diet shortly thereafter. Since 1985, an American's annual consumption of HFCS has gone from forty-five pounds to sixty-six pounds. One might think that this growth would have been offset by a decline in sugar consumption, but that didn't happened: during the same period our consumption of refined sugar actually went up by five pounds.
There are other examples of the cost of industrial corn on the lives of Americans:
1. The dangers of trace amounts of pesticides and herbicides that industrial farmers use on their crop is real. Astonishingly small exposures to residues of atrazine (0.1 part per billion) the berbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields everyday in this country, has been shown to turn normal male frogs into hermaphrodites. Frogs are not people of course, but every European government has banned the subsistence. Why haven't we?
2. An average Mcdonalds meal costs over 4,500 Kilocalories to make. This is because it takes 10 Kilocalories of fossil fuel to deliver 1 kilocalorie of food. 1/5 of all gas in America (as much as all automobiles) is used to ship food.
Why has the incidence of food-borne illness spiked in the country in the last twenty years? Why has the obesity rate tripled in as many years? Why is the incidence of type II diabetes most commonly found in the poor? Why are farmers receiving billions in subsidies and yet cannot stay in business? Why does the average industrial farm produce more toxic chemicals and pollution that the average paper mill?
Answers to all of these questions have something to do with the industrial use of corn in the American food supply.
I could go on and on, but this post is already too long.
Hanlin out
Monday, October 26, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Corn is not a vegetable
My friend Peter Ketchem commented in regards to the last post I had entitled, "Corn is in everything"
"You make it sound like its a bad thing"
I think this is important to address. The idea that, well, corn is a vegetable and so it must be good for you, right? And whats wrong with corn being in a lot of stuff, thats good for the corn farmers right?
I'm here to tell you that corn is NOT a vegetable and the fact that there is an overabundance of corn is terrible for corn farmers.
Short of reading the book Omnivore's Dilemma there really isn't enough space to illustrate how exactly corn is ruining America's health and nutrition.
I'll start with a short, but informative post on corn here
More will come
Hanlin out
"You make it sound like its a bad thing"
I think this is important to address. The idea that, well, corn is a vegetable and so it must be good for you, right? And whats wrong with corn being in a lot of stuff, thats good for the corn farmers right?
I'm here to tell you that corn is NOT a vegetable and the fact that there is an overabundance of corn is terrible for corn farmers.
Short of reading the book Omnivore's Dilemma there really isn't enough space to illustrate how exactly corn is ruining America's health and nutrition.
I'll start with a short, but informative post on corn here
More will come
Hanlin out
PR Rack Jerk
Rory 365 Split Jerk from Garry Michael Martin II on Vimeo.
Hit a big PR for the Rack Jerk of 365lbs. Thought people might want to see it.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Corn is in everything
Right now when my baby sleeps I spend my time reading two books. The Gamble by Thomas Ricks and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Pollan book is a real wake up call. I still haven't finished reading the rest of it, but I wanted to put an excerpt on my blog so people can get an idea of what we are dealing with.
"Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. "
"Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn."
"To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980's virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup-- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the from of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified for unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read:corn. Corn is the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shorting, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well--everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself--the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built--is no small measure a manifestation of corn."
"And Us?"
Hanlin out
The Pollan book is a real wake up call. I still haven't finished reading the rest of it, but I wanted to put an excerpt on my blog so people can get an idea of what we are dealing with.
"Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. "
"Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn."
"To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980's virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup-- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the from of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified for unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read:corn. Corn is the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shorting, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well--everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself--the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built--is no small measure a manifestation of corn."
"And Us?"
Hanlin out
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Results of the Anvil Challenge
All of the scores are tallied and the results of the Anvil Challenge are in. There were three workouts done last Saturday. The Workouts used were from the OPT competition that is being held this weekend. The workouts were
Fight Gone Bad
OPT 3
Rhiannon
Fight Gone Bad is a classic CF WOD consisting of five stations in which the athlete rotates to each station after a minute. After the fifth station, the athlete rests a minute and then repeats the stations. This occurs three times. During each minute the athlete completes as many repetitions as possible. Each repetition is scored. The FGB score is the total score of all of the repetitions of all of the rounds.
Exercises are Wall Ball, 20lb ball to 10ft target, Sumo Deadlift High Pull 75lbs, Box Jump 20 inch box, Push Press 75lbs, Row for calories
The OPT 3 is the total score in kilos of the athlete's Front Squat 3RM, Snatch 2RM and Pull Up (As many reps as possible without dropping from the bar).
Rhiannon is as many Double Unders as one can perform in ten minutes.
The competition is scored as the total of the FGB, OPT 3, and Rhiannon.
Top Three Finishers:
1. Rory Hanlin 1230
2. Garry Martin 1193
3. Rob Otteson 796
Videos of the workouts from these three competitors can be viewed on vimeo.com
The top three finishers of the Anvil Challenge all posted their results online in an effort to win the OPT competition. The OPT competitors are completing the workouts this weekend. We'll see if these scores stand up to some of the OPT Big Dawgs.
Hanlin out
Sunday, September 20, 2009
What happens when you push yourself
meeting pukie for the first time... from Garry Michael Martin II on Vimeo.
Sometimes when you push yourself past your limits, your body lets you know...
Saturday, September 19, 2009
A successful Challenge
This weekend we had the first ever Anvil challenge. It kicked serious bootay.
We used the September OPT competition for the events, provided by James Fitzgerald. (Thanks Coach) In the morning, when everyone showed up for the group warm up, I could feel the air starting to heat up. One could almost hear the adrenaline in the athletes as they warmed up. It was palpable. It seemed like forever until the first WOD was set up and ready to go, which of course added to the anticipation.
Rarely does a person get to train/compete in an absolutely electrifying environment like the one at the Anvil today. PR's were attempted and crushed, heavy weights were slung around like they weighed half as much, athletes poured their hearts into blistering metabolic work and thrashed it, leaving everything on the floor at the end of the day.
And that's really what its all about, leaving it all out there. Pushing the boundaries of human performance one rep at a time. Getting comfortable with uncomfortable.
This pic is just a little taste of what's to come. This is at the end of the day, when the three OPT Big Dawgs were left hanging out and analyzing the day, tired and beaten down, but certainly not beaten.
There are many pics, and even more vids to follow, all of which will be either posted or linked through this blog. It was a big day for the Anvil.
There will be bigger yet to come
Hanlin out
We used the September OPT competition for the events, provided by James Fitzgerald. (Thanks Coach) In the morning, when everyone showed up for the group warm up, I could feel the air starting to heat up. One could almost hear the adrenaline in the athletes as they warmed up. It was palpable. It seemed like forever until the first WOD was set up and ready to go, which of course added to the anticipation.
Rarely does a person get to train/compete in an absolutely electrifying environment like the one at the Anvil today. PR's were attempted and crushed, heavy weights were slung around like they weighed half as much, athletes poured their hearts into blistering metabolic work and thrashed it, leaving everything on the floor at the end of the day.
And that's really what its all about, leaving it all out there. Pushing the boundaries of human performance one rep at a time. Getting comfortable with uncomfortable.
This pic is just a little taste of what's to come. This is at the end of the day, when the three OPT Big Dawgs were left hanging out and analyzing the day, tired and beaten down, but certainly not beaten.
There are many pics, and even more vids to follow, all of which will be either posted or linked through this blog. It was a big day for the Anvil.
There will be bigger yet to come
Hanlin out
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