The SCARIEST corporations you buy from everyday

Health is like a machine. What you put into the machine is roughly what you get out of the machine.

This New Year, make a more conscious effort to understand the inputs you are putting into your machine, because your health is directly linked to the quality of your food, mineral, and nutrient inputs.

Food and dietary supplements should be considered a powerful and true form of medicine, and conversely, the wrong foods / inputs are now known to create:

Massive inflammation.
Digestive issues.
Insulin spikes.
Pro-cancer environments in the body.
Appearance issues.
So much more…

So picking better inputs that are organic, or less processed, do not use GMO’s, excessive sugars and cheap fillers, is a key to better overall health.

It’s also important for us as consumers to understand which brands could be detrimental to our health and – in general – human wellbeing.

In fact, many mainstream brands we buy daily, use secretive, misleading labeling practices and very poor/questionable ingredients that impact our health very negatively.

These same brands also lay a terrible impact on our planet and even on whole societies. They treat animals terribly, use child labor, and/or impact the earth without regard for the future.

Here are some very well-known companies that have some dark secrets that everyone needs to be aware of when at the local store.

Note: Being completely realistic, this list below represents a lot of the brands that we all buy each week, and we understand many people cannot / will not stop buying all these brands, BUT we do hope after reading this article that more of us gain more insight and control over the food and buying choices we make as consumers.

General Mills

General Mills is well known for its cereals and convenience foods. General Mills has been flagged in the past for its exorbitant use of toxic additives, high fructose sugars, GMO flours, and fillers.

For example, a recent lawsuit against General Mills summed up what’s really in Fruit by the Foot: “a mash-up of artificial, unhealthy substances such as artificial partially hydrogenated oil; corn syrup; added sugars; and artificial dyes”.

These are known hormone disruptors, inflammatories and the dyes are both toxic and carcinogenic, yet these are marketed to unsuspecting families and fed to our children / grandchildren.

ConArga Foods

ConAgra Foods is one of the biggest packaged food companies in the world, and also one of the worst for the environment. After being exposed in 2006 by the CERES Group for its lack of environmentally responsible behavior, it didn’t do much to turn themselves around.

The report measured how 100 leading global companies are responding to global warming and environment shifts, and these brands were evaluated on a scale of 0-100. ConArga scored a total of just 4 points.

Frequently, Conagra is involved in nitrate pollution, which sickens not just freshwater like rivers and lakes, but also oceans.

Excessive nitrates in the water can cause algal blooms that attract non-native species, creating a permanent environmental imbalance. Furthermore, they can also penetrate groundwater and pose a public health risk.

These types of farming practices are also a big part of the reason our soil is so depleted of its nutrients and crucial minerals like Sulfur, which in turn are fueling a disease epidemic that is killing millions each year.

Conagra’s multitude of sins are daunting, so if you are a fan of their sub-brands like: Bertolli, Slim Jim’s, and Chef Boyardee, among many others, might want to consider putting those “foods” back on the shelves.

Mondelez International

The owner of Kraft, Oreos and Cadbury, is a massive global supplier of food and drinks. For example, more than 70 million Oreos are sold every day! Americans alone spend nearly a billion dollars on Oreos each year.

Many of the main ingredients in Oreos (and other Mondelez sub-brands) are genetically engineered (GE or GMO). The high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar, and soy lecithin in their snack foods are all derived from GE/GMO crops.

Many GMOs are engineered to grow in conjunction with toxic agrochemicals such as glyphosate (the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup). This action produces crops that are resistant to weather, insects and, other threats, ensuring stronger sales and profits.

These ingredients, once ingested, have been shown to increase insulin resistance, inflammation, digestive issues, pain, and fatigue. There is also very little data on the long-term effects of GMO’s/GE’s on human health and the environment.

Look for foods that use fewer sugars, and are certified organic, fair-trade or Non-GMO. These may be a bit more expensive but they are far better on your body and overall health.

Chiquita

A brand well known for their bananas that you can find in almost every grocery store is actually a brand you might not connect with being very ethically corrupt.

But it is… Chiquita has been involved in numerous corporate crimes dating back to the 1950’s. Known originally as United Fruit Company in the 1930’s, the corporation bought thousands of hectares of land in Guatemala with the blessing of Dictator Jorge Ubico.

From there, the company began meddling in the politics of the country creating wars and funding black op’s.

In 1954 a revised labor code took hold in Guatemala and led to 40 percent of the land Chiquita owned being sold off. This lead Chiquita to fund a coup d’état that overthrew the entire government resulting in over 30 years of civil war. All because of a fruit company and its profits.

In Columbia, Chiquita has also been convicted of financing the “Banana Block” a paramilitary umbrella organization that is reported to have killed thousands of Colombians to ensure smooth business operations over the decades.

It’s hard to fathom how one company could have such a vast history of crime, and yet still be able to sell product freely in grocery stores across the world.

M&M / MARS

Cocoa, milk, and child labor. All the ingredients we look for in a chocolate bar….

M&M / MARS has been a target of Fair Trade activists for the profit they make from child labor.

For a decade and a half, the big chocolate makers have promised to end child labor in their industry—and have spent tens of millions of dollars in the effort.

But as of the latest estimate, 2.1 million West African children still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa.

Multinational chocolate makers are heavily dependent on West Africa. More than 70% of the world’s cocoa is grown in the region, and the vast majority of that supply comes from two countries: Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce 60% of the global total.

70% of working children in West Africa are employed in the agriculture industry with a large chunk associated with cocoa crops. This gives you an idea of the darker side of chocolate.

The following is a list released by the group FairTrade America, exposing which chocolate brands truly care about their supply chain versus does that do not. Guess where Mars came in… (Kraft / Mondelez did not do much better).

Source: FairTrade America.

Smithfield Foods

Nothing brings the family to the breakfast table like the smell of bacon. Or a glossy ham waiting to be devoured on a dinner table… unless it comes from Smithfield Foods.

Animal rights in the mass food production are a growing concern with any slaughterhouse. But let’s look at Smithfield Foods: each year they package about 6 billion pounds of pork annually.

The problem with packaging this much pork is that you need a lot of hogs. Smithfield’s pack their hogs in tight. So tight that pregnant sows spend their lives shoved into a confined space that allows them very little movement.

You’re probably wondering what happens to their waste. How does it get cleaned when there are so many pigs? Well, it travels through the slatted floors of the barns and into a ‘lagoon’ the size of two football fields.

These are an example of the ‘pink’ toxic lagoons that you find right across North Carolina, where Smithfield has a large base of operations.

FYI… Pigs produce 10x the amount of fecal matter as humans do! So you can imagine the toxic, bio-hazard ingredients of these lagoons which sometimes overflows during rainfall.

In 1997 the company was fined by the Environmental Protection Agency after they were exposed for dumping 4.6 million gallons of hog fecal matter into North Carolina’s rivers.

These actions to both defenseless animals and to the environment of places like North Carolina scream for change in what we eat or who for whom we buy our meats from. It’s much better to use local farmers, and smaller butchers, which tend to yield much more sustainable products and practices.

Nestlé

Nestlé is one of the biggest food companies in the world, their brands are found in many places in your grocery, department, and convenient store, as you can see from the sub-brand chart above.

Nestle has a long history of wrong-doing. For example, during the 1970’s Nestlé marketed their infant formula to underprivileged women in third world countries who struggled to pay for the formula and resorted to diluting it with unclean water resulting in malnourished babies and high infant death rates.

That’s right – Nestlé marketed to many uneducated women in third world countries, who already couldn’t afford infant formula, that breastfeeding was actually harmful to their infants.

Also, that case of water you may buy from them every week, it also is part of Nestle’s massive global impact, removing millions of liters of fresh water each year from ecologically sensitive areas around the globe to bottle and resell to consumers.

Find an economically weak region, buy the land surrounding the water resource, and capitalize on the profits. Countries including Canada, allow their water resources to be capitalized by Nestlé for a few dollars per thousand gallons drawn.

Peter Brabeck, former CEO and now Chairman of Nestlé made an astounding statement that water should not be a human right. Comforting….

Monsanto

We could focus an entire article on Monsanto that would go on for pages and pages. Over their history, this company has been involved in a number of highly notorious actions and products that have devastated both farming and food production industries, and as a result, have greatly impacted human health around the globe.

An Illustrated History of Monsanto

Source: Joe Mohr.

Monsanto is also the king of genetically modified foods. Their ‘Roundup-Ready’ seeds are manufactured to resist pesticides and herbicides to ensure they stayed alive in a field that has been sprayed with Roundup (a product of Monsanto).

RoundUp has been flagged as a level 1 carcinogen and is linked to various diseases.

Monsanto also started the ‘bigger is better’ game in the food industry, and suddenly over-sized fruits and vegetables were over-taking the produce section of grocery stores.

Theses over-sized foods have also been linked in studies to various diseases including cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s. While Monsanto will shield off these accusations, feeding tests conducted on lab animals continue to show the connection.

Our biggest problem is avoiding Monsanto. Their products are found in many brands. Take a look at the chart below.

This gives you an idea of how little choice we have when deciding on products that do not come from Monsanto.

The growth of their products across the globe has increased at a consistent alarming rate between 1996 and 2006. This puts pressure on both the consumer and the farmer, which doesn’t give us much of a democracy when it comes to food…and with that note, makes it increasingly difficult to avoid GMO’s.

Brands We Encourage You To Consider In The Future.

The following brands are certified Non-GMO, use sustainable sourcing practices in their supply chains, and also offer a portion or full Organic options.

We encourage you to look for these brands at your local grocery store when buying next.

We hope this article helps open some eyes and allows you to provide your precious body the right inputs it needs in going forward.

Happy Body Store News

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