I think girl scout cookies are great because they teach girls a bout business and sales and marketing. However, part of me wonders whether the organization loses sight of it’s deeper mission with so much money at stake.

From: Top Business Degrees

The dollhouse still stands in my mother’s home with a piece of plexiglass over one side to keep it dust-free. I see it and remember the great joy of playing beside my sister, who is still my close friend. Now my 2 year-old-son looks at it with great interest when he visits his grandmother, and I know when he gets just a bit bigger that the dollhouse will entertain a whole other generation of children- complete with lights that still work, rooms full of furniture, rocking chairs and deliveries on the porch, and a mailbox. But it doesn’t seem that boys typically share the same interest in decorating, and re-decorating, and playing family that we did as kids. Though I love having two boys of my own, I am most sad not to have a daughter who can share my love of dollhouses.

As women we celebrate new adventures and joyfully enter new phases of life. Many women get to a certain point in their lives, often after having raised kids, where they are ready for a new challenge. And this new challenge might be learning a new skill or even starting a new career.

For many women, the challenge of choice is a college education. I’ve known several mothers who, after spending 4-6 years raising kids with very little intellectual stimulation, choose to go back to school to get re-baptized into the world of adult life… a new start.

But going back to school later in life isn’t without challenges. Especially as a parent if you still have kids in the home. It’s a balancing act and sometimes you just won’t have enough time. But just because you can’t experience college like a single young adult who’s 18 years old, doesn’t mean it’s not worth your effort. It might just be the challenge you were looking for.

The website SuperScholar has listed twenty of the most influential women intellectuals of our time.   Admittedly, I don’t recognize most of these women, but we probably all owe them some debt of gratitude for bringing about a better world.

Here’s are the top ten and then you can read about them all and see the last 10 at the original article:

1. Margaret Atwood
2. Aung San Suu Kyi
3. Karen Armstrong
4. Susan Blackmore
5. Mary Daly
6. Midge Decter
7. Barbara Ehrenreich
8. Susan Faludi
9. Susan Greenfield
10. Germaine Greer

Read the rest here: 20 Most Influential Women Intellectuals

#1 grandson is of course going to press once again for his favorite name – Cool Ass Mojo – and once again isn’t likely to prevail. That’s okay, he can name his own child thusly. Grandpa and I are just delighted, hoping this birth will be much easier on our sweet daughter who has proven herself to be an extremely good Mom. Her family is happily well-adjusted and for her good choices we are grateful.

Meanwhile, Grandpa’s intensive work schedule in various regional public school systems kicked into high gear when school started in August, bringing home more than ‘the usual’ season-change cold this year. Some of you may know that the new H1N1 flu is officially rampant here in the Southeast. Some wish to call it swine flu, but it’s also got elements of bird flu and Spanish flu – a regular Chimera. So I just call it the Unicorn Flu, in honor of the worldwide panic it’s engendered since its so-public appearance in Mexico City this past April.

Hubby at first thought it was an attack of allergies, though he did have a headache and some fever to go with his sneezing and coughing. But not bad enough to cause him to miss work, so he no doubt helped spread it around. A couple of days later I came down with the sneeze attacks, head and body aches, sore throat and fever. I told him it had to be the flu, since allergies aren’t contagious.

Flu instead of just the usual cold because the cold doesn’t knock you down. Or, it doesn’t knock US down. I was down for a full 24 hours with this, and the fever was high enough to signal something more than rhinovirus. Still nursing a nasty congested cough two weeks later, with enough of a leftover fever to suspect I’ve graduated to bacterial bronchitis or mild pneumonia. Haven’t gone to a doctor and so long as I’m on top of it, won’t. It’s harvest time here on the homestead, I’ve been keeping up with that and preservation, can still play 5 holes of mountainside disc golf without trouble, and have been drinking a lot of my anti-viral/antibiotic herbal tea both hot and cold, with raw honey. I think I’ll live.

Deal is, for all the super-hype for this flu, it’s not nearly as bad as some other flus we’ve managed to catch over the years. While I wasn’t inclined to eat anything, there was no nausea or vomiting like there was with the Hong Kong flu back in the ’70s. Which nearly killed us for sure, though we were healthy 20-somethings at the time. I’ve read quite a bit of alternative super-hype about the vaccines they’ve rushed into production for this flu, and that’s over the top as well.

The rampant paranoia about forced vaccination and quarantine is overblown, given that the first vaccine is still weeks away and the flu itself is rampant. Not even bad enough to close any schools, it’s making the rounds pretty much like your average cold and not causing serious absenteeism or an increase in hospitalizations on a par with the average flu season around here in January. I see no indications from CDC that they’re going to force us all to get shots now that a majority of us have already had the flu. What would be the point in that? If it ever was the plan, the vaccine is too little too late in a region where the epidemic has already taken hold (and just about over by now).

So. If you happen to live in one of the states where this flu hasn’t yet made itself rampant, you may well wish to get the vaccine. Especially if you are in the high-risk groups, which in this case includes healthy young people. I’ve advised younger daughter to get vaccinated a.s.a.p. because she’s pregnant – and pregnant women have depressed immune functions by purposeful nature so they don’t attack their own baby growing in the womb. They account for many of the deaths reported for this flu, so that’s a definite risk. We’ve got our fingers crossed that she’ll make it to when they release the vaccine, and is first in line. Prayers to that effect offered daily!

For the rest of us, don’t worry so much. It’s not that bad.

The first part of July was very full of relatives here at the homestead, and my relatives run the gambit in ‘size’ designations between morbidly obese and thin as rails. I’m a sort of in-between person. Weigh the same now (approaching my 40th anniversary next month) as I did the day I graduated from high school and the day I got married. Don’t tend to gain or lose and never have. Hubby is one of those ‘high metabolism’ sorts who could look like a starving Ethiopian with little trouble just by skipping a few meals, but keeps firm muscles under the no-fat covering by getting way more exercise than most guys these days. Comes from the homestead lifestyle, heating with wood (thus cutting and splitting), maintaining the acre of up-and-down yard, and playing lots of ‘challenging’ disc golf.

Our daughter takes after him. You’d swear she’s got a giant tapeworm or something watching her woof down more food in a single sitting than I’m likely to eat all day (or over two days!), never gains an ounce and has to eat lots to maintain what little she’s got. Her son takes more after his father, and could easily put on significant weight if he’s not careful. Of course his diet is worse than ours – he likes fast food burgers, fries and soft drinks, whereas we are mostly vegetarian, seldom eat out, and drink primarily our great spring water in herb/green teas or plain, or mixed with straight fruit juices like blueberry, cranberry, pomegranate or some combo. All of us get sugar cravings occasionally and are known to pig out on chocolate or other candy, but that’s rare enough not to be a big deal, living as far from town as we do. Daughter likes a little coffee in her sugar, when she’s not here a pound of sugar can last for months. Hubby and I don’t use it in coffee or on cereal (though we do like fruit on our Cheerios), and don’t drink milk straight-up ever. Daughter can consume a gallon a day without even trying.

Out of five kids in my family, 4 of us siblings tend to be slender like me. Yes, the poundage has rearranged quite a bit over the course of my 58 years, but you’ll have this (it’s a gravity thing, I think!). The youngest, my baby sister who had a 17″ waist when she got married, is now morbidly obese. She and her three children spent four days here, took grandson back with them to Florida. Her two sons are like her hubby, high metabolism guys whose plain old nervous energy keeps them skinny. They don’t exercise or even go out of the house much at all, so that’s not a factor. Her daughter is just now ‘chunky’, risks being fat as she gets older if she isn’t careful. Our parents weren’t fat folks, in fact, Mom was a runway model with long legs and perfect posture, lots of grace and beautiful chestnut hair – a real beauty. Grandparents weren’t particularly large on either side, though my father’s sister was a fat woman as was my mother’s grandmother. So there are no doubt a few fat genes in the mix, where there seem to be none on my hubby’s side.

And indeed genetics do play a role. Primarily, I suspect, in how metabolism is regulated, along with hunger signaling and tendencies to store fat. But my observations also tend to support my strong suspicions that most of it is diet and exercise habits. Primarily diet. This was doubly confirmed during their four-day visit, when we had to be the food suppliers.

Now, I’ve an ample garden and the apples are ripe, the pears are dropping, and there’s plenty of juice, tea, milk, cereal (Cheerios and plain Shredded Wheat), whole grain bread, cheese, pickles, canned veggies, etc. I cooked dinner every night, usually a bean dish (Mexican), potato soup, salads, vegetable plates, linguini or ravioli, etc. None of them would eat a bite of any of it. Over those days the bring-home from work for hubby consisted entirely of a 24-pack of Coke, a gallon of whole milk and two giant-size boxes of Frosted Flakes. Sis and her daughter ate bowl after bowl after bowl, finishing off both boxes every single day. Niece also whined constantly for someone to drive to McDonalds and get her bacon cheeseburgers, though we never did.

When I visit them I observe their diet too. Bags and bags of fast food burgers and crap piled on the kitchen table, cabinets chock full of snack foods, a fridge full of fatty lunchmeats, ice cream, chocolate milk, etc., and boxes, bags and wrappers piled in corners and along the walls of every room. They haven’t had a working stove/oven in 15 years, but sis doesn’t cook anyway so there’s no need for anything more than the hot plate her hubby and sons use to make themselves occasional Campbell’s Soup or canned spaghetti and meat sauce or beef stew. Adding it all together in my head, I figure they must spend 5 times what we do for a week’s worth of food, and not a single bit of it is what I’d considered healthy.

This of course isn’t everybody’s story, but it certainly plays a part in most of the “obesity epidemic” in this country. Bad food, bad habits, bad choices. And sis, being an RN who actually knows the reality of such things, expects just like most of the rest of ‘em that medical science will simply come up with a “fat-pill” one of these days that will keep them skinny without them ever having to change a single thing about their choices in life. I find that terribly sad.

Now, I’m ten years older and will probably die long before she does of something or other. She could well be like my great-grandmother, who we called “Big Mama” and who lived to be an obese, chain-smoking (corncob pipe), happy and semi-healthy 100. So general health isn’t a terribly good argument to use if the person is perfectly happy as they are. She does have some issues with depression, but not considerably large ones (no more than the rest of us, I’d say). She and hubby love each other just as they are, the kids are well-adjusted enough to function, they seem to enjoy their life fine. So I don’t bitch, I just stand in awe and wonder.

I do perceive an odd American mindset in all this. Sort of flagrant indulgence in the deadly sin of gluttony (as popular these days as lust, greed, wrath, sloth, envy and pride) as a way of life, with full expectation that somebody will ‘cure’ the deadly results without the person having to give up the sin. I also am guilty of not feeling too sorry for the greedheads on Wall Street (who DO NOT deserve to be bailed out with my hard-earned money!), the lusty free sex addicts and serial semi-monogamists, the angry old racists who disrupt Town Hall meetings with their hatred, the evil torture-enablers who want to be tyrannical dictators, or the fat folks who live in a pile of empty food containers they can’t even manage to throw away.

That’s probably pride on my part, though I’ve nothing much to be proud of, so I’ve my deadly sin too. I don’t tend to fat. That’s because I don’t eat a lot, and I don’t eat junk. But if I WERE constantly hungry and DID eat junk, I’d weigh what she does. I’m too dumb to be greedy and too lazy to be rich, though I’d sure love to be not-poor for a little while in my life. Not ever likely to happen, though. Maybe I’d have been a loose woman had I not found my soul-mate early in life, so I can’t too much fault those still actively seeking The One in their own lives. And if I didn’t mind living in filth, I probably wouldn’t ever clean my house (or my daughter and grandson’s rooms, which qualify in spades for the ‘sloth’ designation). I do get mad enough to be considered ‘wrathful’, often at things I can do nothing about and sometimes at things I could do something about if I approached them differently. The Irish in me is just an excuse, so I’m no doubt guilty of that one as well. We’ve all got our issues and our weaknesses – our deadly sins – one is no better or worse than another.

So I just love ‘em. It’s all I can do. Try to encourage them to get more exercise or eat better when they’re here, but giving in and buying them most of the junk they want anyway just so they’ll be happy. Simply like being around them when I can, try to understand where I am overstepping and shouldn’t interfere, accept them as they are and as they come just because I love them. Life is hard on all of us, for sure. And no one can live anyone else’s lives, nor reasonably force them to be someone they’re not. So through the years I’ve learned to take things with a grain of salt, enjoy what little time I get with people I love, and try most of all to encourage their happiness. If what would make them happy is not something I can provide or they can ever provide for themselves, they’ll just have to learn to do without.

Like when some young relative who dropped out of school because he thought the requirements too stringent bitches that Bill Gates hasn’t yet made him the multi-billionaire VP of Microsoft (or some such ridiculousness), I just laugh. What’s the point of pointing out how silly that sounds? Or when another young relative bitches that nobody is giving her a nice car for free when she’s got two DUIs and wrecked the last one and is too drunk most days to hold a real job, what’s the point of suggesting that she quit getting drunk all the time, get a job and buy her own damned car? Or when another relative complains about achy knees and a bad back that make the stairs to the bathroom too difficult while weighing three times what a normal person weighs, what’s the point of pointing out that’s probably why she’s sore? All these things are entirely self-evident. They know that as well as I do. So they’re just sounding off, I make small noises of sympathy, then distract them with some other topic or project.

Still loving them, still glad to have them in my life, still thankful for the time in life I get to spend with them. And in return, I’m thankful that they don’t spend much time on my deadly sins and giving me advice I won’t take about how to ‘fix’ my life. Who knows? Maybe someday somebody really will invent a sin-pill we can all take to fix what our indulgences do to our lives and health!

The every-other-year trip to sunny Oklahoma to visit with Grandma (great-grandma to my grandkids) was quite the stressful situation this year, which is the year my hubby’s and my sole remaining parent turns 87. She was hospitalized for ten days a couple of months ago with a terrible case of food poisoning – we don’t buy the ‘flu’ excuse, it wasn’t flu – and we flew our daughter out there to stay with her when she got out because we couldn’t take the time off. Daughter made arrangements for home health care, which she needs because she lives alone in a too-big house. The one her mother bought just off Main Street, which survived the tornado that took out the hotel a block in front and the Presbyterian Church a block behind. Back when my hubby was 8 years old and Norma and Clint ran the hotel.

She has also lost sight in one eye, so needed someone to take her car keys away for public safety’s sake. This also makes her depth perception non-existent, and has led to a series of nasty falls that have us and her other son’s family who lives about 45 minutes away most paranoid. Her friends and neighbors love her, but don’t want to be the ones to discover her dead one day alone in that big house, but she’s stubbornly clung to her independence since her husband of 50 years died over a decade ago.

Luckily she has very tough bones, product no doubt of her youthful career as a Rodeo Queen – champion barrel racer – and the number of times she’d been bucked off her horse. But it’s inevitable that one of these days she’s going to break something, and all her choices will be gone. That would be a very sad end to a wonderfully storied life, and not something we would ever wish upon her. So our job was to unite with the rest of the family and try hard to convince her that she should go into a nice assisted living facility less than a minute away from #2 son.

Her mind is going, at least the short term memory part. She often repeats herself, and tells the same long-ago stories over and over again to anyone there to listen. I figure the assisted living crowd will love her greatly, and never tire of her stories because their memories are bad enough that they’ll always be fresh! Plus there’s bingo, Bible study her son the Baptist minister teaches, good meals served to her in her apartment or at a table in the great-room (with the big screen TV), and the staff is there to make sure all her meds are current and given on time, which prevents those overdoses or underdoses elderly people are so prone to.

Plus, we bought her a nice mini tape recorder so she could go ahead and tell those stories for posterity, write that wonderful book about her life that we’ve wanted her to write for years. Something about her hard-earned wisdom of getting right back on that horse no matter how much it hurts after you get thrown. So pertinent to dealing with the nasty curve balls life throws at us all if we live long enough, and at which she is a certifiable expert.

She lost a husband in WW-II, then married my hubby’s father because he insisted. Loved her the moment he met her, despite her strong independent and rebellious streak. They lived those 50 years in a love story that has been a never-ending inspiration to me, Clint was the best man I’ve ever known apart from his #1 son. She is lonely now, and vulnerable. The boys and sister-in-law pressured her pretty heavily for the change in her circumstances, as of course they had to do because they’re her boys and the love her and they worry endlessly about her.

I had a different job. She got me when I was just 18, and we’ve had the most amazing relationship all the years since. More like best friends or twins from birth, we’ve always been completely honest with each other and aren’t afraid to criticize or generally bitch, or laugh at the silliest or raciest things, as if we shared a private joke.

So I was totally honest. We know we’re going to lose her if we don’t get hit by a bus any time soon, and it doesn’t matter all that much to me how or when. I’m still going to wail and cry and miss her terribly. So will her sons. I respect her independence, and am not going to insist or cajole or push in any other way for her to commit herself to an assisted living facility, but I will say it’s a nice place, nice people, plenty of company and they’ve never heard her stories! It could literally add years to her life, though she is like me in dreading the thought of living to be 100. Yet she might, so she should make arrangements accordingly.

Norma Jean is already the last one standing of her family and friends from childhood, so that’s not a wish she can still dread like I do. So I told her something she’s told us a million times, her way of dealing with the patients of the Gould Farm facility she volunteered for through her church after Clint died. When they asked her advice – and they always did because they considered her their grandma too – she’d always tell them they already knew the choice they would make, so they didn’t need her to tell them otherwise or to support that choice.

That’s what I told my beloved Norma. She already knows what she must do, and she does. She has put it off long enough, and will make the move. I told her we’d do nothing with her house and all her nice things. Not sell it (I might need it someday!) or rent it out, just seal it up and let the bank keep on paying the bills and Brinks to keep it safe. Then, I said, if she ends up hating the place, we’ll just take her home again. I think that helped.

While I’d love to be in a position for her to live here on the mountain with us and let me care for her until it’s over, she’s deathly allergic to animals and nature these days. Plus, my only bathroom is in the basement and the only spare room in the loft. It cannot be. I could leave my family here and move into that big house with her, but she really could live to be 100. What about my life and my kids and grandkids and such? Totally impractical, and there’s no more work in Oklahoma for a 58-year old man like my hubby than there is here. Where he has a job he likes and pays the bills, letting us stay here in our beautiful retreat from the wider world.

But I’ve volunteered for a mission too. She’ll send me the tapes of the stories, I’ve promised to transcribe and send back, she can edit and add, I’ll get the final manuscript all typed up. And then I’ll find a publisher and get it published. Real history, wonderfully funny and exciting and sadder-than-sad stories that may help others well beyond her own lifetime. She owes that to the world, and I aim to make it happen.

I love you most sincerely, Norma Jean. You’ve always been my heroine!

Pictured is Grandson #2, Michael, who graduated from high school last month and will be attending a college for the artistically gifted, which of course he is. This marks two grandchildren to make it to college, two with rather extreme artistic talents who ought to do very well in the world, and one very, very proud grandma!

We’ll be seeing Mikey and his folks and sister for the week following the 4th of July. Now this is going to be a little bit tricky, but I’m looking forward to Mikey’s complaint-less help in harvesting blackberries for the cobbler he loves so much. We are leaving this coming Saturday for Oklahoma to visit Great-Grandma, who will be 87 in August. We’ll be on our second day homeward on the 4th, and will have to swing through Kentucky on the way home to meet with other sisters, brother-in-laws, nieces and nephews to send my little sister’s ashes over Cumberland Falls, something she made us promise to do before she died a couple of years ago. It’ll be the first time we’re all together since then, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Meanshile, Mikey and family will be leaving Atlanta on the 4th to come here. I’m going to give them the ‘break-in’ secret for getting into the house if we’re not home yet (and we might not be), because we’ve been having a bit of bear trouble this year. Don’t want them camping in the yard, for very good reason.

Usually it’s copperheads that make summer risky around the homestead, and Mikey knows that because he spent his 13th birthday in the hospital from copperhead bite. Only get bears passing through spring and fall, on their way to somewhere else. We’re right in between slices of National Forest, so that is to be expected. But in late April we were visited by a 300-pound she-bear who wasn’t just into dragging the trash from the bin up and down the mountainside. She’d come right onto the porch, sidle unconcerned between the bank and the truck just feet from the front door, and refused to be scared when we yelled at her. Even loaded up the shotgun and fired it off a few times in the air hoping she’d be scared, it didn’t impress her at all.

But she finally moved on a couple of weeks ago, we thought we were in the clear until pear season. Then a 250-pound youngster decided to show up and rummage through the compost. I’m thinking he’s a teenager she’s dropped off in the bottomland, and he thinks she gifted him with our place. ARGH!!! The bear population is booming – have seen more on the back road and here than ever before. A lady in our nearby town was injured just last week in her own driveway when she tried to save her little dog who was dumb enough to get between a trash-foraging she-bear and her two cubs.

It’s gotta be because our beloved 12-year old Lucy dog died. Bears will stay away from dogs. But we aren’t anxious to adopt another so soon, though we may have no choice. At any rate the wandering and camping will be a bit constrained this season due to bears. Just as well, I think.

Happy family fun to all my readers, may you enjoy ample family, lots of fun and fireworks, and heartfelt hugs from your wonderful grandchildren!

The volunteer students from D.C.’s Bancroft Elementary School who have put some backbone into the First Family’s organic kitchen garden this season enjoyed a fresh lunch salad topped with sweet, fat peas that they’d helped to grow and harvest. For dessert, they got cupcakes topped with berries, also grown in the garden on the South Lawn.

Thus far the well-tended organic garden, which sports various cultivars chosen by the White House Chef to compliment the cuisine served both to the Obama family and to their guests – with a majority of the bounty going to local D.C. food kitchens – has thus far produced 80 pounds of fresh food. And it’s still June, not even tomato time yet! As the First Lady says in this clip, getting involved in growing, harvesting and preparing fresh, organic food can help with a number of health-related issues that plague this country’s citizens…

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure are all diet-related health issues that cost this country more than $120 billion each year. That’s a lot of money. While the dollar figure is shocking in and of itself, the effect on our children’s health is even more profound. Nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese, and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime. In Hispanic and African American communities, those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer the same fate. Those numbers are unacceptable.

A. Siegel of Get Energy Smart blog does a little math and comes up with an intriguing scenario related to gardens just about a quarter the size of Michelle’s. If just five million Americans were inspired to create a Victory Garden in their yard (or in containers on their deck or patio, in window boxes, inside by a sunny window, etc.) that produced 20 pounds of food each year, it would amount to 100 million pounds (50,000 tons) of fresh, healthy vegetables and fruits grown right at home or in the neighborhood. That’s 50,000 tons of good food that would not have to be grown with chemical intensive agriculture, harvested by third world peasant/slaves, shipped to your local market using fossil fuels, and costing a hefty chunk of the shrinking household budget.

The added incentive is of course getting people outdoors instead of parked in front of the television when they get home from work, bending, digging, hoeing, tending and simply enjoying their garden. Even that little bit of exercise and simple enjoyment can help reduce a tough day’s accumulation of stress, and reducing stress has its health savings dividends as well.

Kudos once again to our beautiful First Lady, her helpers in the kitchen, the Obama girls and the students of Bencroft Elementary for a tasty job well done. Things like this are a fun and healthy chunk of the Change We Need!

My DiL is an organic gardener like me (I’m so proud!), we often go back and forth about different cultivars, particular techniques for (trying to) beat bugs, etc. She linked me to a story from the LA Environmental Health Examiner this morning that I’m making the subject of this post.

Jon Stewart spoofs and doctors warn: avoid GMOs

Seems that on the 8th of May this year the American Academy of Environmental Medicine [AAEM] officially called on doctors to educate their patients and their local medical communities as well as the public to “avoid GM foods when possible.” Why? Well, it seems that the results of those long-term feeding studies that Monsanto, et al. were NOT required by the FDA to do before they introduced poisons disguised as staple food crops are finally coming in, and they aren’t good…

“There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation,” according to the AAEM’s resolution to its membership.
“The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies.” A review of more than 600 papers in scientific journals led biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava to conclude that GMOs are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans. Worse, pregnant women and their babies are at the greatest risk for harm. What is known from experience with GMOs as animal feed so far:

• Female rats fed GM soy suffered a greater than 50% loss of their litters, compared with a 10% death rate for the natural soy control group.

• Surviving females in those rat litters experienced problems becoming pregnant when they matured.

• Male rates fed GM soy had their testicles change color. Their sperm was altered to produce fewer offspring and those offspring were smaller than normal.

• Indian buffalos that grazed on GM cotton plants after harvest had reproductive problems or became infertile. Pigs fed GM corn also became sterile.

• In the US, the incidence of low birth weight babies, infertility and infant mortality are all rising dramatically since the introduction of GM foods in the human foodstream.

Serious food allergies are rising epidemically, immune dysfunction is also becoming endemic in the US population. Multiple animal studies of GMO diets indicate that these too are attributable to the new staple foods. The various Bt crops – engineered to produce bacterial toxins in every cell of the plants – have been implicated in the mass deaths of buffalo, cows, horses and chickens.

Bottom line is that no matter how convenient these genetically modified crops are for farmers, seed purveyors and agricultural chemical conglomerates, they are not good for what we humans use them for at our end of the production chain – food. AAEM’s resolution contains advice to doctors to inform their patients to avoid GM foods. This means staying away from anything with soy or corn derivatives, cottonseed and canola oil, and sugar from genetically modified beets.

Those products are okay if they are labeled “organic” or “non-GMO,” so read those labels carefully. Growing season is upon us, so local farmers will be selling produce at farmer’s markets in bulk, and are usually on hand (or a family member is) to tell you whether or not the produce came from GM seeds. Eat as fresh and close to local as possible, avoid highly processed foods – most contain GM soy, high fructose corn syrup from GM corn, and possibly other GMO ingredients.

Your family’s health is on the line, so do what you must. And don’t let Monsanto’s strong-arm tactics get in your way, don’t believe a word of the pro-GMO advertisements they’re paying a fortune to brainwash you with. I’ve found that the best thing is to not buy any food you see advertised on TV. But then again, we quit paying to be brainwashed by TV way back in the mid-1970s, so that hasn’t been difficult!

Please go to the above link and read the article. It’s highly informative, and should help make up a lot of people’s minds about this issue. There is plenty of information about GMOs out on the wide web, easily accessed through OCA or a Google search on “GMO.” Educate yourself, save your family from the health effects of industrial foods.