[jenks]

This is absolutely horrifying. Insects are mother nature's sex organs!

In 1945 after world war 2, the US had an abundance of ammunition supply and decided do make use of it in other means than warfare. They used that ammunition supply to make Chemical NPK fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and rodenticides. This was the onset of commercial farming and - not so ironically - exactly when the world insect popluation started decreasing! Now we are just seeing it in its most drastic potential.

Pesticides not only destroy the detoxifying organs in our body upon consumption, they also destroy the basis of every ecosystem on Earth!

They don't stop at just killing insects though. Ever hear of the phrase of war "Salt the earth", where countries would pour salt over airable land to knock out the enemies food supplies? Pesticides are salts! They destroy the Humus of the soil which contains all of the microfungi and microorganisms which have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the plant to send filaments of nutrients through the roots and receive sap from the roots in return.

When you realize that the food you're getting is so much less nutrient dense than food that was farmed organically which actually obeys the laws of nature, you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food!

[majos]

>Pesticides not only destroy the detoxifying organs in our body upon consumption

What? Do you mean by direct consumption or residually on food?

> you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food!

Confused by this too. By this logic those of us who rely on commercially farmed food (most of us) should be continually wasting away and soon dying, which is not the case

[jenks]

As i mentioned, commercial farming leads to less nutrient dense food.

The processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination each take energy and nutrients to work. Foods grown in low-vitamin dense soil inherently have less nutrients to provide the organism which consumes them.

Be cautious in your assumption that everything is great with commercially farmed food. Widespread disease, reliance on stimulants like coffee, energy drinks, and even as extreme as ADHD medicine being given to children - even though the effects are almost identical to those of people being on cocaine - are becoming more widespread the more prevalent commercial farming becomes.

The rate of cancer in 1900 was 1 in 30, 1980 it was 1 in 5, 1990 1 in 4, 1995 1 in 3, 2000 1 in 2.

Correlation? causation? It's impossible to tell, but the idea that engineering mother nature to make her work more efficiently than the way she has engineered life over millions of years has yet to ever work in our favor each time we have tried throughout history.

[majos]

> Foods grown in low-vitamin dense soil inherently have less nutrients to provide the organism which consumes them.

Even taking this as a given, "less nutrient dense" is far from "so nutrient poor that digestion literally takes more energy than the food contains", which is what your original comment claimed.

> The rate of cancer in 1900 was 1 in 30, 1980 it was 1 in 5, 1990 1 in 4, 1995 1 in 3, 2000 1 in 2.

Ok. The cancer diagnosis rate has skyrocketed. That's a different point. In many ways this is good -- it means more people are living long enough with medical care to get a diagnosis.

> the idea that engineering mother nature to make her work more efficiently than the way she has engineered life over millions of years has yet to ever work in our favor each time we have tried throughout history

What? GMOs have worked out on a massive scale, improving billions of lives through new drought/pestilence/act-of-God-resistant strains.

I'm with you that agribusiness has many problems and bad actors, but the claims you're making go really far.

[mikestew]

Ever hear of the phrase of war "Salt the earth"

You mean the entirely symbolic ritual after an area is conquered? Or did you mean the myth that this was actually done to actually render the land infertile? 'cuz that didn't happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth

I normally wouldn't be this pedantic (oh, who am I kidding?), but when I got to this: you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food!

...I realized we'd wandered off to fantasy land, so a little pedantic banter couldn't make it worse.

[jenks]

What's so hard to understand here? The processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination each take energy and nutrients to work. Foods grown in low-vitamin dense soil inherently have less nutrients to provide the organism which consumes them.

[mikestew]

What’s so hard to understand, you ask? The part where you say that most of us run an energy deficit from the food we eat, yet don’t reconcile it with an obesity epidemic in the U. S., just for starters. But I’m not going to further engage such silliness, so have the last word.

[jenks]

You're assuming that obesity and a lack of energy are mutually exclusive when, in fact, they're very much related. In fact the main reason people become obese is that their liver must shuttle the massive amount of toxins into fat when it gets overwhelmed with toxins because it takes, get this, a lot of energy to detoxify your body.

Look at commercially farmed meats. How do you make the most money as a meat farmer? You sell meats by the pound so your goal is to get the heaviest animals possible. How do you get the biggest animals the fastest? You make them fat instead of muscular because it happens quicker. How do you do that? It turns out that you feed them garbage and treat them like garbage.

Cement powder, plastic chips, dead animal parts and even sewage are approved by the FDA to be fed to animals in commercial farms.