Keeping Poisons Out Of Your Diet

I believe that staying healthy is important to being prepared for emergencies. You will have greater difficulties coping with emergencies if you are not healthy. During an emergency medical care can be very difficult to get. It is hard to work on preparedness if you are sick. Knowing how to stay well is a very good preparedness skill and knowing how to care for yourself and others with minor illness is another preparedness skill.

I think a lot of your health is affected by your diet. Good health is dependent on good nutrition. Just eating a balanced diet is not enough any more. We have to think about extras like GMOs and pesticides. 

I have already posted about GMOs. There are four GMO foods that are most common. They are: Soy, Corn, Cotton, and Canola. They make oil out of the last three and all four end up in a lot of food that are not necessarily labelled to let you know the GMOs are in them.

I found a list of foods to avoid because of having a lot of pesticides on them. I also found a list of foods that are relatively free from pesticides. I made a small print list of all of these foods, both good and bad ones, to carry in my wallet for shopping. I thought readers might like the list as well:

Wallet-sized list of good and bad foods for GMO's and pesticides.

Here is a link to the article about the dirty foods loaded with pesticides and the relatively clean foods:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/eat-safe/Dirty-Dozen-Foods

The list of the Dirty Dozen Foods changes from year to year. This is due to different growing conditions that cause growers to use more pesticides or not. If the weather is especially wet, for example, more fungicides will be sprayed. If the crop is hit by a large infestation of a particular insect, the food will be sprayed for that.

There is another site that lists the pesticides that have been tested as being on a particular food. It is more specific than the Dirty Dozen list. This can be helpful if you want to avoid specific types of contaminants on your foods. It also lists the way the type of contaminant affects you. One that I find particularly edifying is neurotoxins. I believe that those would be especially likely to encourage autoimmune diseases and Alzheimers and Dementia.

Here is a quote from the site:

Learn More: ADHD & pesticide residues

"A new study out of Harvard shows that even tiny, allowable amounts of a common pesticide class can have dramatic effects on brain chemistry. Organophosphate insecticides (OP’s) are among the most widely used pesticides in the U.S. & have long been known to be particularly toxic for children. This is the first study to examine their effects across a representative population with average levels of exposure. Finding: Kids with above-average pesticide exposures are 2x as likely to have ADHD."

Here is the link:
http://www.whatsonmyfood.org/index.jsp

You can also search the site by pesticides that you particularly wish to avoid, or the types of by products that the pesticides break down into. These can be very toxic and have different effects than the original pesticides.

I cannot afford to eat only organic foods. This information is especially useful to those of us who are forced to eat non organic foods. We can avoid the worst culprits this way.

I hate to tell you this, if you don't already know, but there is another problem that we are dealing with. Organic foods can be contaminated by pesticides too. Some of this can be airborne or come from dust or water. 

This is one reason why I have ambitions of living out in the Alaskan Bush and growing as much of my own food as possible. I would like to avoid all pesticides. I think I have a better chance of doing it that way.

If you live in or near a large city, even if you grow everything you eat, you are getting pesticides. It is tough to avoid all that nasty stuff. I hope my wallet list will help you to stay healthier.