Tag: food

How Demographics are Driving America’s Long-Term Fiscal Illness

Stomach Bugs and Systemic Debt

If it’s not a bizarre new geopolitical crisis, it’s a terrifying headline about the safety of our  food supply. 

This, no doubt, is an age of constant, low-grade dread. Every time you open your phone, there’s a fresh, steaming pile of bad news waiting to greet you.

But while the mainstream media loves to keep your anxiety levels on a gentle simmer, we prefer to look at the bigger picture. The absurdity of modern life is what we’re after.

Lately, two seemingly unrelated outbreaks have been competing for the spotlight. There’s a microscopic parasite making its way through America’s salad bowls. A healthy lunch has suddenly turned into poison.

At the same time, there’s a massive, systemic failure quietly brewing in Washington. One that’s growing so rapidly it makes a stomach bug look like a walk in the park. While one threatens to disrupt your digestive tract for a week, the other quietly promises to derail the economic security of several generations.

In truth, both of these crises suffer from the exact same fundamental problem. A complete failure of basic hygiene. Whether we’re talking about food safety or fiscal responsibility, ignoring the fundamentals eventually catches up to you. And when it does, the results are always messy, painful, and incredibly hard to clean up.

How is it that a nation seemingly obsessed with clean living managed to let both its fresh produce and its national checkbook rot from the inside out?

Today, we are diving headfirst into two of the most uncomfortable, stomach-churning epidemics sweeping across the nation. One of them is currently lingering on your unwashed spinach. The other is eating away at the very foundations of your financial future.

Explosive Diarrhea

Many strange and unpleasant things are being reported these days. We don’t know if they are really new. But the way they are reported makes them sound new and nasty.

Without question, explosive diarrhea has been around since Adam bit the apple. However, this new description for a stomach bug, like using polar vortex or heat dome to describe winter or summer weather, makes it sound especially alarming.

If you’ve somehow missed the many headlines, there’s a disease spreading across the USA that’s being reported to cause explosive diarrhea. This disease stems from a stomach parasite that is hiding in contaminated food.

Cyclospora cayetanensis is the microscopic parasite behind the outbreak. The infection it causes is formally called cyclosporiasis, and nasty is an understatement. We’ll spare you the ghastly details. From what we gather, unlike your standard 24-hour stomach bug, this uninvited guest can hijack your gut for weeks, sometimes teasing you by fading away only to make a miserable, unexpected comeback. 

Right now, the epicenter of this outbreak is the Midwest, with Michigan getting hit the hardest by a massive surge that has shattered its typical caseload. Major spikes are also popping up in Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Texas. In total, health officials have tracked cases across more than 30 states. They’re all tied to people eating contaminated food without ever leaving the country.

The parasite hitches a ride on fresh, raw produce – things like raspberries, basil, cilantro, and spinach. Because it is incredibly sticky, it thrives in the tiny cervices of your favorite summer greens, making it tough to spot and even tougher to dislodge.

Certainly, this sounds awful. But we’re confident it’s controllable and will soon disappear from the reporting cycle. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for explosive debt…

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Adding Hemp To Dog Food Improves Digestive Health, New Study Shows

A new study found that adding hemp oil or hempseed byproduct to dog food can improve digestive health without negatively impacting the overall microbial system.

The study, published in the journal Veterinary Sciences, suggests that certain types of hemp derivatives could be safely incorporated into canine food as ingredients. However, the effects appear to be partly dependent on whether the cannabis is added as an oil or fiber supplement.

For the study, researchers at Kasetsart University in Thailand put 24 mixed-breed dogs into three groups: One had food containing an 11 percent concentration of a fiber-rich hempseed byproduct, another received food with 2 percent hempseed oil and a third got a control diet with no hemp.

The dogs were fed the diets for 90 days. Researchers compared fecal samples from before the experiment with those from after 30 and 90 days. Genetic sequencing was used to track changes in the composition and diversity of intestinal bacteria.

Dogs that were fed a diet with hempseed oil-infused food showed a larger increase in microbial species richness.

The diet was also associated with increased levels of “beneficial” bacteria from the Lactobacillaceae family, whereas the fiber-rich hempseed byproduct was linked with Actinobacteriota.

“Hempseed derivatives altered microbial composition by promoting certain beneficial bacteria, supporting canine gut health in a formulation-dependent manner,” the authors wrote, adding that the results “provide evidence for their safe inclusion as functional ingredients in dog food.”

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Chicago Residents Fume as Seven Grocery Stores Close Despite the City Spending Millions of Taxpayer Dollars to Save Them

The people of Chicago received hard lessons that crime and socialism have catastrophic consequences, as grocery stores are shuttering across the city.

As FOX 32 Chicago reported, seven Save-A-Lot stores on the Windy City’s South and West sides closed today. This news comes despite the stores receiving $13.5 million in city grant (taxpayer) money to stay open.

But Save A Lot previously cut ties with Yellow Banana, which operates the stores, leaving the operator with no choice.

Forget Constipation! Drink This And Empty Your Bowels Instantly!

In addition, Yellow Banana suffered a blow when CEO Joe Canfield died of a stroke at the age of 54 back in April.

Block Club Chicago also notes that Yellow Banana had a hard enough time opening the stores to begin with due to missed deadlines, protests, legal disputes, sudden closures, and scathing national headlines.

The closure of these stores will make it far harder for residents of the South and West to find fresh groceries. These are impoverished, crime-ridden areas that are already struggling with food insecurity.

Communist Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, of course, was quick to blame the federal government for the closures, citing ‘cuts’ to SNAP benefits, for example.

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UK government’s policy of adding folic acid to flour is not safe; studies show an increase in cancer

Why Cancer Is The Question

Folic acid forms the building blocks of DNA and drives cell division. Early embryos have cells dividing at enormous speed and they need a ready supply. Anything that helps cell division presents a hypothetical risk for people with cancer and also for the initiation of cancer in healthy people. Consequently, studies have been carried out to try and measure where that hypothetical concern is present in reality.

Measuring the Harm

The strongest test for harm is a randomised controlled trial, in which people are assigned by the toss of a coin to receive either the treatment or a placebo and are then followed up to see what happens. In 2013, researchers pooled every large folic acid trial, involving around fifty thousand people, into one analysis in The Lancet. They reported no significant effect on cancer. That result became the basis of the official safety verdict.

A year earlier, a separate, more careful review split the same trials by dose given. It found an increase in cancer in the trials using lower doses, close to the amount fortification delivers, but none in the trials using much higher doses.

That headline, a six per cent increase reported as no significant effect, is an average across every dose the trials used. Split the trials into three dose groups, on both the published figures and the patient-level data behind the 2013 analysis, and the average comes apart.

The increase is seen at the exact range that fortifying flour will deliver. That is the reverse of how a drug normally behaves, since a larger dose would usually carry more risk, not less. The result below 1 milligram is the same even if the single polyp-prevention trial that critics single out is excluded and it is seen in ordinary adults rather than just in high-risk groups. 

Prostate cancer in particular is a concern. In one trial, men given 1 milligram of folic acid a day were diagnosed with prostate cancer at 2.6 times the rate of those on a placebo, a ten-year risk of 9.7 per cent against 3.3 per cent. The trial had been designed to study bowel polyps rather than the prostate. Sixteen years later, there have still been no further trials to measure this properly. Instead, researchers re-examined the data from the other folic acid trials already run. Pooled together, six trials covering around 25,000 men showed a 24 per cent increase in prostate cancer among the men given folic acid (relative risk 1.24, 95 per cent confidence interval 1.03 to 1.49). A reanalysis at a case level claimed there was no signal but they specifically excluded dosages within the fortification range. Folate obtained from food carried no such risk, which points to the synthetic form rather than the vitamin as it occurs in the diet.

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American Farmers Shouldn’t Need Permission from the US Army to Grow Crops

For nearly a decade, California farmer Jack LaPant was the target of an investigation and prosecution by the United States Army, who alleged that LaPant violated the Clean Water Act by growing a wheat crop to feed his cattle. Earlier this year, LaPant was able to settle the case to get the Army out of his hair, but the settlement required him to give the Army more than $1 million in money and land value. This, despite the fact that the government never proved a single allegation in court.

Most of us today take for granted that we’ll be able to get the food we want when we go to the grocery store or our favorite restaurant. But the reality is that a safe, plentiful, and affordable food supply depends on people like Jack LaPant—a fact we should never forget.

Fewer Americans make their living in agriculture these days, which means more workers can devote their time and energy to other productive pursuits.

Modern farming produces substantial food surplus, which is an essential condition for an economy to diversify and grow. Less than 2 percent of the American population is now engaged in producing the food that nourishes the rest of us, thanks in large part to mechanization, technological advances, improved land and crop management practices, and other welcome innovations.

But let’s be clear: despite those advances, farming is still demanding, difficult work, and we should be thankful for those who make it their mission to feed the rest of us. Further, it is no coincidence that free economies produce the greatest food surplus. Centrally planned economies tend to produce famine. It is necessary that those few who do farm have their property and economic rights protected. If they aren’t safeguarded, we will all pay the price alongside them.

Jack LaPant decided 45 years ago to leave his steady power company job and take up farming. Since LaPant had no personal or family background in agriculture, this was an unusual career move, to say the least.

He moved his family from Oakland to a remote valley in the Sierras and learned to work the land. Over the decades, he built a living for himself and his children, while contributing to the food supply that sustains the rest of us. Then he found himself at odds with the US government.

The concern in LaPant’s case goes beyond the effects on the farm operations themselves. Heavy-handed and ruinous regulation at the hands of our nation’s military is a threat to the food surplus that we depend upon as part of the foundation of our modern life.

Remember that more than 98 percent of us have the freedom to do whatever our talents and opportunities allow because of the less than 2 percent of Americans who produce the food that the rest of us need. That imbalance marks a radical difference from the rest of the world—globally, about 60 percent of the population is dedicated to farming. In many less-developed countries, that’s not because farming is the path people choose—it’s because they have no choice at all if they don’t want to starve.

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Ultraprocessed Foods Linked to Measurable Drops in Human Attention Span

More than half of the calories on the average American or British plate now come from foods built in factories rather than grown on farms. That’s a problem your brain pays for in ways many people never connect back to their plate.

Research published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring adds another piece to a growing body of evidence: the industrially processed foods filling modern diets are eroding cognitive performance in midlife adults, long before any formal diagnosis appears.1

Unlike obvious memory loss, declining cognitive function often hides in plain sight. You notice it as brain fog, distractibility, slower thinking, mental fatigue, or trouble concentrating during conversations and work tasks. Many people blame stress, aging, or lack of sleep. Meanwhile, their daily diet floods their body with industrially processed snacks, sweetened drinks, packaged meals, and refined oils that disrupt how their cells produce energy.

What makes the findings especially striking is that the cognitive effects appeared independent of overall diet quality. Someone could still eat fruits and vegetables, yet experience measurable harm if ultraprocessed products remained a major part of their routine. The processing itself appears to matter, not just the nutrients displaced by it.

If processing itself is the problem, not just sugar, not just fat, then the standard advice to “eat more vegetables” isn’t enough. What you remove from your diet matters as much as what you add. Many people consume ultraprocessed foods several times a day without realizing how deeply these foods affect brain function, metabolic health, and long-term dementia risk. The next section breaks down exactly what the researchers found and why one specific aspect of cognition appeared especially vulnerable.

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New York Bodega Owners to City: Drop Dead!

It’s been more than 50 years since the New York Daily News reported that President Gerald Ford would veto any bailout for the city’s endless red ink with the headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Ford never said exactly that, of course, but the headline created such a backlash that Ford backed down a few months later, putting his signature on $2.3 billion worth of emergency loans. That’s about $14.3 billion in 2026 money — a very nice little bailout, indeed.

Today, New York City bodega owners know that nobody will bail them out when the city’s Commie-Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani puts them out of business, which is why they just silently told him to drop dead.

Or at least that’s the impression I got from a Monday morning New York Post exclusive detailing the showdown between Gracie Mansion and local retailers threatened by Mamdani’s campaign promise to build and operate city-run grocery stores.

“Business owners gripe that city officials are only now seeking their input — and seemingly as an afterthought — after sparking alarms in April with a surprise plan to build a public grocery store in East Harlem at La Marqueta,” the Post reported. “That store will cost a whopping $30 million to build – and threatens the livelihood of more than a dozen existing stores nearby.”

All of that is to be expected. The city can throw Other People’s Money at its socialist stores until it runs out, while typical grocers operate on razor-thin 2% profit margins. Considering the services they provide and the complexity of their operations, the real crime is how little money they make.

But I digress, as I usually do.

What I love about this story — and what makes it so newsworthy — is the sheer gall of the Mamdani administration. 

“We met with bodega owners so they could help us plan and ensure that we take into account their challenges and their role as a part of the food ecosystem,” Julie Su, deputy mayor for “economic justice,” told the Post in a statement. But what really happened was that bodega owners reported to City Hall last week at Su’s invitation for a roundtable discussion, “only to get barraged with ‘intrusive’ questions about their businesses,” according to the Post’s source.

The questionnaire bodega owners were expected to fill out included questions like, “What items are sold the most at your stores?” and “Where is your profit margin the greatest?” 

The correct answer to questions like those is, “Get stuffed.” The polite answer is, “Try running a bodega and figure it out for yourself, or get stuffed.”

Instead, an anonymous bodega owner who spoke to the Post said, “They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don’t answer our questions and that’s why there is distrust.”

“Tell us how to run you out of business with your hard-won institutional knowledge and your tax dollars” is pretty much the height of gall, I thought. But then I read the part where Su told the Post, “One of the questions we wanted to understand is whether there are key products bodegas sell and rely on that we should not sell. That’s how serious we are about not undercutting them.”

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Seeds of Surveillance: The Track and Trace Playbook

QR codes are usually associated with convenience. In the Seed Act 2026, they become something else entirely: extending traceability to what is grown before it enters the supply chain, changing who has control over our food.

The Seed Act 2026 is presented by the Union Government of India as a necessary modernisation measure to curb the circulation of fake or substandard seeds.

The stated aim is the rollout of a new nationwide traceability system that mandates QR codes on all seed packets, compulsory registration for all commercial seed entities and significantly heightened penalties—up to ₹30 lakh (€27,000+ euros) and three years’ imprisonment—for seed fraud.

The government has consistently maintained that the Seed Act 2026 is designed to regulate only the commercial seed trade and will not interfere with the long-standing rights of farmers to save, sow, exchange or share seeds within their communities.

Officials emphasise that these traditional, non-branded and community-based practices remain a vital part of India’s agricultural heritage and are explicitly exempt from the registration and digital traceability requirements imposed on commercial entities.

While the government maintains that the Act will rebuild farmer trust, streamline quality control and strictly protect the traditional rights of farmers to save, share and exchange seeds, critics like the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (an umbrella coalition of 400+ farmers’ unions) view these reforms as a well-worn corporate strategy of enclosure that eradicates seed and food sovereignty.

Critics argue that these government assurances are insufficient and potentially misleading. They contend that by failing to explicitly define and protect community seed systems as a distinct sector, the Act leaves them vulnerable to administrative overreach.

Farmer organisations worry that without clear, ironclad legal safeguards, the pressure to comply with registration and branding requirements—especially for small-scale seed producers who may use simple packaging—will effectively force them to adopt the same burdensome and costly standards as large corporations, gradually pushing decentralised, village-level systems towards extinction.

Even with an informal exemption, the pressure to meet the ‘certified’ market standard could make traditional seed sharing increasingly risky. Critics argue that the rigid requirements for ‘certified, stable and uniform’ seeds will effectively criminalise or marginalise indigenous, locally adapted varieties, creating a dependency loop that forces farmers to rely on high-cost, proprietary inputs from large agribusinesses.

This would, in effect, mirror the pattern of corporate capture and loss of food sovereignty observed in other countries across the world.

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Big Corporations Get Rich From Their Secret Seed Patents — Taxpayers and Farmers Pay the Price

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties.

As a result, a small number of corporations can — and do — suppress competition in the seed industry, stifle innovation and turn taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found that two companies control more than 70% of U.S. corn and soybean seed sales, and the top four cottonseed companies control nearly 94% of that market.

In a May court filing in a legal dispute between two U.S. seed companies, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said patents on seeds are obstructing competition and research in the agriculture industry.

As researchers who work on plant breeding and seed policy, we have seen how that plays out.

When huge companies assert their patents, smaller businesses and public plant breeders, who often lack the legal resources to fight back, are frequently dissuaded from conducting research and development that might actually not be illegal at all.

And a lack of competition allows dominant companies — not always based in the U.S. — to collect large sums of taxpayer money that Congress allocated in hopes it would help farmers, not shareholders’ and executives’ bottom lines.

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Liberals’ 10% tariff on canned vegetables will hurt low-income Canadians: Kris Sims

On this week’s episode of The Gunn Show, Kris Sims of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation discussed the Liberal government’s recent imposition of a 10% tariff on certain imported canned vegetables.

Sims slammed the move as another tax on food that will hit low-income families the hardest, noting canned vegetables are a pantry staple for many Canadians trying to stretch their budgets, especially as grocery prices continue to climb.

The tariff, announced June 19 and effective immediately, applies to imports from most countries but conveniently exempts the United States, Mexico, and several others.

“Canned tomatoes, a big chunk of them come from Italy, because those folks are really good at working with tomatoes,” Sims explained.

“And what’s super upsetting about this is that anyone whose ever pinched a penny knows that canned tomatoes are you’re go-to staple in your pantry if you’re trying to stretch your dollar, if you’re making chili, you’re making spaghetti sauce, food banks just really count on stuff like this,” she continued.

“And [the government] is making it more expensive on purpose,” Sims added.

The tariff was described by the federal government as a provisional safeguard measure that can last up to 200 days while the Canadian International Trade Tribunal completes its inquiry into surging imports. Imports of canned vegetables have risen sharply in recent years, with notable increases from countries like Thailand, Turkey, and Peru.

The government says the tariff is needed to protect Canadian processors facing “immediate challenges,” but critics point out it comes from the same Liberals who repeatedly promised to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

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