Deception in the American Food System

NOTE: This was a presentation given to a church in January 2016.

Proverbs 4:5-7, 10-13, 20-22
Get wisdom, get understanding;
do not forget my words or turn away from them.
Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you;
love her, and she will watch over you.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Geta wisdom.
Though it cost all you have,b get understanding.
Listen, my son, accept what I say,
and the years of your life will be many.
I instruct you in the way of wisdom
and lead you along straight paths.
When you walk, your steps will not be hampered;
when you run, you will not stumble.
Hold on to instruction, do not let it go;
guard it well, for it is your life.
My son, pay attention to what I say;
turn your ear to my words.
Do not let them out of your sight,
keep them within your heart;
for they are life to those who find them
and health to one’s whole body.

As you know, my mother and I are deliverance ministers, and part of our ministry is to uncover deception and break down paradigms or strongholds as the Bible calls them

Definition of stronghold: Place where a particular cause or belief is strongly defended or upheld.

The topic of what we eat is a very powerful stronghold, and there is a lot of deception about food that I am going to talk about – so hang on to your “sacred cows” (ha-ha). There is a lot of deception about the food we eat and American corporate greed. There is also a tie-in with the very powerful pharmaceutical and medical industries.

Years ago, my mother did a teaching called, “Does God mind what we eat?” In this teaching she taught on what the Torah or the Old Testament says about what God considers to be food for us. We personally believe that the Apostle Paul and also Peter’s vision in the Book of Acts created some confusion about meat:

25 Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, 26 for, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” (1 Corinthians 10:25)

Peter’s Vision in Acts 10 was about the clean and unclean animals – but as you remember, the vision required an interpretation – it was not literal:

9 The next day about noon, while they were still on their way and approaching the city, Kefa went up onto the roof of the house to pray. 10 He began to feel hungry and wanted something to eat; but while they were preparing the meal, he fell into a trance 11 in which he saw heaven opened, and something that looked like a large sheet being lowered to the ground by its four corners. 12 In it were all kinds of four-footed animals, crawling creatures and wild birds. 13 Then a voice came to him, “Get up, Kefa, slaughter and eat!” 14 But Kefa said, “No, sir! Absolutely not! I have never eaten food that was unclean or treif.” 15 The voice spoke to him a second time: “Stop treating as unclean what God has made clean.” 16 This happened three times, and then the sheet was immediately taken back up into heaven. 17 Kefa was still puzzling over the meaning of the vision he had seen, when the men Cornelius had sent, having inquired for Shim‘on’s house, stood at the gate 18 and called out to ask if the Shim‘on known as Kefa was staying there. 19 While Kefa’s mind was still on the vision, the Spirit said, “Three men are looking for you. 20 Get up, go downstairs, and have no misgivings about going with them, because I myself have sent them.”

The story goes on… the men were Goyim or non-Jews, or “unclean” in a Jew’s eyes. And they wanted to be baptized and follow Jesus…Peter figured out that the vision meant that God wanted to save and baptize the Gentiles as well as the Jews. Peter NEVER thought the vision was to be taken literally, you see.

There is an audio teaching on our website called Food and Holiness–my mother talks about what the Torah says about eating the flesh of animals, the blood of animals, the fat of animals and the type of seafood we should and should not eat. I am not going to talk about this today, but I really encourage you to listen to this teaching because this is part of the food problem in America, and the deception which we are under which is definitely leading to all the sickness we experience. There IS a connection. So please pay attention to this and ask the Lord if this is truth. Jesus said you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free, so ask Him.

But today, I am going to talk about other kinds of food and many things you may or may not know about our food system and how it appears we are all getting increasingly sicker even though we have more food than ever before. How can this be? I am going to tell you.

This past year, I have learned a lot about food because I started visiting a functional medicine or wellness doctor/nutritionist. He has successfully treated people with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, gastro-intestinal disorders and thyroid conditions by putting them all on the same diet, not necessarily to lose weight, but just to get healthy. Weight loss just happens naturally on his program, but it’s not really the end goal.

In the process of going through his program, he asked me to read a couple of books and watch a couple of food documentaries. Well, I started learning so much and was so surprised at what I learned, that I started watching a lot of food documentaries and became even more astounded at what is going on in American farming and the meat industry. This is what I am going to share with you today. If you will listen to what I have to say and follow some of my advice, I can save you the money that I paid this doctor to learn this and you might possibly improve your health, and come more into God’s will, as you will see in a minute.

Let’s begin with some statistics over the last several decades:

[Show historical and projected graphs of obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease]

Then there is also cancer which hits close to home here at our church. Why have these statistics all increased and continue to increase? One reason could be the food we are eating or not eating.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. – Hippocrates

Genetically modified food

Definition: Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can be defined as organisms (i.e. plants, animals or microorganisms) in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination.

19 ‘You shall keep My statutes. You shall not let your livestock breed with another kind. You shall not sow your field with mixed seed. Nor shall a garment of mixed linen and wool come upon you. (Leviticus 19:19 )

•   Corn and Soy and #1 and 2 – nearly all in US is GMO
•   Wheat is not GMO, but…”Modern wheat has been hybridized (crossing different strains to generate new characteristics; 5% of proteins generated in the offspring, for instance, are not present in either parent), backcrossed (repeated crossing to winnow out a specific trait, e.g., short stature), and hybridized with non-wheat plants (to introduce entirely unique genes). There are also chemical-, gamma-, and x-ray mutagenesis, i.e., the use of obnoxious stimuli to induce mutations that can then be propagated in offpspring. This is how BASF’s Clearfield wheat was created, for example, by exposing the seeds and embryos to the industrial chemical, sodium azide, that is highly toxic to humans.” (Dr. William Davis, author of Wheat Belly)
•   And there are others, like Canola Oil

Google: “top genetically modified crops in the U.S.”

Let’s talk about corn, the #1 most GMO crop in the U.S.

I hate to bring the bad news, especially because I love corn – corn chips, corn tortillas, cornbread, etc.—but US GMO corn is very bad. If you’re interested in more details, watch a documentary called King Corn. You’re going to be surprised. I will give you the highlights:

Most of the corn grown in the US goes toward two things: (1) feeding cattle and (2) making HFCS (high fructose corn syrup).

First of all, the corn is GMO to resist insects and herbicides. All this is in Wikipedia, but it is also in some of the food documentaries we watched. In other words, certain insects that bite into growing corn ingest something that has been genetically altered in the corn that kills them. Also, if a farmer sprays weed killer in a corn crop, the weeds die but the corn doesn’t, because it’s been GMO’d to resist weed killer. And that’s what we’re eating.

Remember this company’s name: Monsanto. They are the ones who are creating GMO seeds that our farmers are planting.

Now, let’s take this a step further. Now that same corn is being fed to cattle. This touches on the meat industry which will get into next. But when you go to the grocery store, you can buy either grain-fed beef or grass-fed beef. I will tell you right now, grass-fed beef is more expensive. Why?

Because someone discovered a long time ago that if you keep a cow from moving around too much and just feed them corn, they get big and fat real fast, which means they can be slaughtered faster, and the cycle can start again. Which means more money. So there are what they call “feed lots” where they cram cows for the duration of their lives. They can’t move, and all they eat is corn. The main problem is cows were not designed by our Creator to eat corn. They were designed to eat grass. Guess what happens when a cow eats nothing but corn? Its gut starts to deteriorate, it gets ulcers. Then it needs antibiotics to fix the ulcers. But they are slaughtered just before it gets real bad or else they would die. That’s why the meat has antibiotics. Not only that, but being fed so much corn and not moving causes the beef to full of fat–it’s not lean–the kind of fat that clogs up your arteries. And also you’re eating cows that have been fed GMO corn. All so that someone can get rich selling you this beef.

Grass-fed beef is more expensive, but it’s leaner, and it’s the way God designed it to be.

Now let’s talk about HFCS. HFCS started being mass-produced in the 1980s. It has become a cheap sweetening alternative to sugar. This sweetener is in EVERYTHING that is processed or packaged or at a fast food restaurant. This sweetener is made with GMO corn. Read the labels, and beware – it goes by a variety of names. Very rarely will you see actual cane sugar in anything.

The documentary King Corn is about two guys who did an investigation into corn. They found out their ancestors were from Iowa, one of the corn-growing centers of the U.S. First they had their hair analyzed to see what it was made of, and they were told it was made of mostly corn. So, they went to Iowa to analyze the corn-farming industry.

One of the most surprising things I found in the movie is that one of the farmers they interviewed said he was growing “c–p” and he himself wouldn’t eat it. But he like all these farmers in the USA are in the government subsidy program so they just keep growing GMO corn.

So, now think of all the millions of fast-food restaurants in the U.S. serving corn-fed beef, and HFCS sodas and shakes, and frying French fries and onion rings in GMO canola oil.

And lastly, in this video, a scientist fed lab rats nothing but corn, and the females developed tumors all over. The males developed some other ailments. But I started wondering if this is why there is all this breast cancer nowadays – because we are large consumers of GMO corn – again, it is everywhere: in our beef, in our packaged products in our desserts and in our chips.

The meat industry

Two of the documentaries we watched were so very sad. They made me cry, they made me nauseated, and they would have made me become vegetarian, except that I personally believe we need animal protein to be healthy. It’s definitely in the Bible.

The way animals are treated in our country in the food industry is absolutely stomach-turning and abhorrent. I am sure that our God does not approve. God even ordained a Sabbath not only for man but also for the animals

…but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. (Exodus 20:10)

10 A righteous man regards the life of his animal, But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. (Proverbs 12:10)

As I mentioned, the cattle are treated cruelly. Not only are they cooped up and fed food that wasn’t made for them, but also the undercover videos showed sheer cruelty as the animals are rounded up for slaughter. You can tell they are in terror. Surely that rush of adrenalin all over their bodies cannot be good for us to eat.

The birds have it even worse. What we saw were how the chickens were treated. Again, the tip here is you want to eat free-range chickens–chickens that are allowed to roam around outside and eat from the ground like chickens are supposed to.

In these video baby chicks and chickens are thrown around like balls, kept in overcrowded cages their entire lives, fed hormones to the point where the breasts get so large they can’t even walk anymore. The undercover videos were absolutely horrible. And that’s what these poultry companies are selling to you which cute little marketing packages and TV commercials. Oh, and notice the words “undercover videos” – the meat industry does not want you to know what they are doing because it’s nauseating.

Here is how the Lord told the Hebrews to slaughter animals – this is an explanation of biblical Kosher slaughtering of animals, from Wikipedia:

The Torah (Deut. 12:21) states that sheep and cattle should be slaughtered “as I have instructed you” but nowhere in the Five books of Moses are any of the practices of shechita described. Instead, they have been handed down in Judaism’s traditional Oral Torah.

The procedure…involves severing the trachea, esophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and vagus nerve in a swift action using a special knife with an extremely sharp blade. In practice, this causes a rapid drop in blood pressure in the brain and loss of consciousness, rendering the animal insensitive to pain and to exsanguinate in a prompt and precise action.

Soy

Soy is the second most GMO crop in the US. There is a lot of controversy about soy. It is very cheap to produce. It is not native to the U.S. There is a lot of info on the Internet about soy, so I am not going to go into a long discussion here. But I am not eating soy because it is GMO. And men shouldn’t eat soy because it has estrogen.

Hidden sugars

I tell my friends that just because something does not taste sweet doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have sugar. Although your tastebuds taste the difference, your body does not know the difference. One of the books they asked us to read was Wheat Belly. In this book written by a cardiologist, he advocates a banishment of wheat from our diet because he says the wheat being produced in the U.S. now is so different than the way God created it. It’s not technically GMO, but it might as well be. It has been hybridized to grow shorter, and therefore mature faster so that the crop can be planted and harvested in a short time. On the surface this sounds really good, i.e. you can feed more people, but now what has happened is you have people developing all kinds of gluten sensitivities, like Celiac disease, Crohn’s disease and Hashimoto’s disease.

The doctor claims that the glycemic index of a slice of bread, whether white or whole wheat, has a higher glycemic index than a teaspoon of sugar.

Glycemic index: An indicator of the ability of different types of foods that contain carbohydrate to raise the blood glucose levels within 2 hours. Foods containing carbohydrates that break down most quickly during digestion have the highest glycemic index.

So could this be why we have such a rise in diabetes? Think of all the wheat products we eat:

•   Bread, rolls, hamburger and hot dog buns
•   Crackers
•   Muffins
•   Pastries
•   Cakes
•   Pies
•   Pizzas
•   And it goes on and on.

All these foods that you think are good for you because they are grains are actually full of sugar. Your body thinks its sugar, even if your tongue does not. Not only that but if you start reading labels, you will see how much sugar is in processed and packaged foods. You would be surprised. Did you know spaghetti sauce in a jar is loaded with sugar?

Did you know something else? On food labels that show the RDA – recommended daily allowance – for vitamins, minerals, etc., you will not find the RDA for sugar. Somehow the sugar lobby was able to persuade our government to omit that very important fact. Watch That Sugar Film for more info.

Organic produce vs. non-organic produce

So, if you’ve noticed at the grocery story, the organic section is starting to grow, I think because of these documentaries, and the fact that people are getting wise to the ways of big business America, out for the money only and not caring about people’s health.

So, yes, organic food is more expensive. What makes it organic? It is not sprayed with pesticides. The farmers are using other methods to keep the food pest-free. Why is this important? Because you don’t want to eat pesticides, right? Even if you wash the produce, it’s inside it. And we don’t know if those things are causing cancer. If it’s killing insects, then can you conclude it might be causing cancer? I can. I personally sleep better at night knowing that I am eating organic food and not pesticide-laden food.

The rule of thumb is if it has a thick skin like a watermelon, you probably don’t have to buy organic. Like grapes, you’d better buy organic, they are full of pesticides. Coffee too.

The US Food Pyramid fallacy

So our government says this is how you should eat. But I say this is a bad idea, since all the wheat products are at the bottom. The pyramid really should look a little more like this:

The SAD diet – Standard American Diet
[Show graph of food pyramid, from bottom up: Bread, cereal, rice, pasta/ Vegetables, fruit/ Dairy/ Meat, poultry, eggs, nuts / fats, oils and sweets]

Optimal Health Diet
[Show graph of food pyramid, from bottom up: Vegetables/ Healthy fats, nuts and seeds/ Lean protein/ Fruits/ Soup, broth/ Treat]

The interesting thing is that God not only created us from the ground–He said “dust you are, and to dust you shall return” – but he also created man to “till the garden”. Interesting….what’s in a garden besides flowers? Lots of vegetables!! So since we are made of that same substance, it would seem logical to me that we need to eat mostly of that same substance.

Also, here’s another Bible scripture to ponder, from Daniel chapter 1:

8 But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s delicacies, nor with the wine which he drank; therefore he requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. 9 Now God had brought Daniel into the favor and goodwill of the chief of the eunuchs. 10 And the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, “I fear my lord the king, who has appointed your food and drink. For why should he see your faces looking worse than the young men who are your age? Then you would endanger my head before the king.” 11 So Daniel said to the steward[a] whom the chief of the eunuchs had set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 12 “Please test your servants for ten days, and let them give us vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13 Then let our appearance be examined before you, and the appearance of the young men who eat the portion of the king’s delicacies; and as you see fit, so deal with your servants.” 14 So he consented with them in this matter, and tested them ten days. 15 And at the end of ten days their features appeared better and fatter in flesh than all the young men who ate the portion of the king’s delicacies. 16 Thus the steward took away their portion of delicacies and the wine that they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.

So, enough said! We need to eat a plant-based diet to be optimally healthy. We do need healthy fats, like nuts and seeds and oils (and the recommended oils are olive, coconut, flaxseed, avocado). I would stay away from canola and vegetable oils, etc. We need lean meats, mostly chicken, fish 3x week because of mercury, and red meat once a week. We need to drink lots and lots of purified water. And as we get older, we thirst less, but our need for water does not diminish, so we need to drink, drink, drink, even when we are not thirsty. (Organic herbal teas are good too.)

Conclusion 

So to summarize, in the U.S., it’s all about the money – powerful lobbyists in the food industry and our government who do not have our best interests at heart…who have hidden the truth from the American public. I have learned that other countries, like European countries and even Haiti, for example, do not allow GMO food to be grown and sold. So why does the US? If you watch these documentaries, you will just be shocked like we were. I have only touched the subject. Please learn for yourself. God says get wisdom and get understanding because if you do, you just might live longer and healthier. I am going to end by reading Proverbs again:

Proverbs 4:5-7, 10-13, 20-22
Get wisdom, get understanding;
do not forget my words or turn away from them.
Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you;
love her, and she will watch over you.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Geta wisdom.
Though it cost all you have,b get understanding.
Listen, my son, accept what I say,
and the years of your life will be many.
I instruct you in the way of wisdom
and lead you along straight paths.
When you walk, your steps will not be hampered;
when you run, you will not stumble.
Hold on to instruction, do not let it go;
guard it well, for it is your life.
My son, pay attention to what I say;
turn your ear to my words.
Do not let them out of your sight,
keep them within your heart;
for they are life to those who find them
and health to one’s whole body.