Reference
Database
At the OFDB you can find information on organic food products sold in stores such as juices, breads, fruits, vegetables, and dairy products. We also have listings of organically grown produce from organic farms and organic restaurants. Now you can also search through our stores and CSAs. The OFDB’s community seeks to expand it’s information world wide. Our goal is to provide the community with as much information as possible. This includes all types of practices such as farming, gardening, food manufacturing and food preparing.
http://www.organicfooddatabase.net/
Price-Pottenger Foundation
The Price-Pottenger Foundation has supported sustainable agriculture for over 50 years. They have preserved a collection of over 10,000 books and publications, spanning over 200 years of research from most of the great nutrition pioneers of our time, including that of William A. Albrecht, MS, PhD. The foundation is currently working on posting their archives online, and deveoping an education program available for people world-wide.
Weston A. Price Foundation
The Foundation is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education, research and activism. It supports accurate nutrition instruction, organic and biodynamic farming, pasture-feeding of livestock, community-supported farms, honest and informative labeling, prepared parenting and nurturing therapies.
Slow Food
The association’s activities seek to defend biodiversity in our food supply, spread the education of taste, and link producers of excellent foods to consumers through events and initiatives.
Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance
The Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance is an advocate for the many thousands of independent farmers, ranchers, livestock owners, and homesteaders in this country.
Eat Wild
Eatwild.com is an excellent source for safe, healthy, natural and nutritious grass-fed beef, lamb, goats, bison, poultry, pork and dairy products.
The Meatrix
An excellent flash presentation about factory farming and links about what you can do about it.
Food Routes
The FoodRoutes Find Good Food map can help you connect with local farmers and start eating the freshest, tastiest food around. Find your local food on their interactive map, listing farmers, CSAs, and local markets near you.
Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE)
- Grace Factory Farm Project
The GRACE Factory Farm Project (GFFP) works to create a sustainable food production system that is healthful and humane, economically viable, and environmentally sound. - Eat Well Guide: Wholesome Food from Healthy Animals
The Eat Well Guide is a free, online directory of sustainably-raised meat, poultry, dairy and eggs from farms, stores, restaurants, inns and hotels, and online outlets in the US and Canada. - Sustainable Table
Helping consumers make healthy food choices to create a sustainable system. - Sustainable Food In Schools
If you don’t like the food being served in your or your child’s cafeteria, do something to change it! Includes guidelines on what to do, how to do it, and examples of successful initiatives underway around the country.
Local Harvest
This website will help you find farmers’ markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably-grown food in your area, where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies.
Farmers Markets
National listing of farmers markets.
Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture
The Kerr Center was established to provide farmers and ranchers in the area with free technical assistance and information on how to improve their operations. Wise stewardship was emphasized.
National Farm to School
Farm to School programs are popping up all over the U.S. These programs connect schools with local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing health and nutrition education opportunities that will last a lifetime, and supporting local small farmers.
Farm to College
This site presents information about farm-to-college programs in the U.S. and Canada collected by the Community Food Security Coalition.
Center for Food and Justice: Farm to Hospital
The CFJ has a program Farm to Hospital: Promoting Health and Supporting Local Agriculture.
Farm to Cafeteria: Community Food Security Coalition
Putting Local Food on the Table: Farms and Food Service in Partnership
Farm to school programs have been addressing the dual issues of improving children’s health and providing new marketing options for family farmers.
Food Security Coalition
The Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) is a North American organization dedicated to building strong, sustainable, local and regional food systems that ensure access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food for all people at all times
The True Food Network
The goal of the True Food Network Working is to create a socially just, democratic and sustainable food system.
Acres USA
Acres U.S.A. is the only national magazine that offers a comprehensive guide to sustainable agriculture. Drawing on knowledge accumulated in more than 35 years of continuous publication, we bring our readers the latest techniques for growing bountiful, nutritious crops and healthy, vibrant livestock. Acres U.S.A. has helped thousands of farmers feed the nation’s growing appetite for clean, delicious food.
Ecological Farming Association
Eco-Farm supports a vision for our food system where strengthening soils, protecting air and water, encouraging diverse ecosystems and economies, and honoring rural life are all part of producing healthful food.
National Family Farm Coalition
The National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) provides a voice for grassroots groups on farm, food, trade and rural economic issues to ensure fair prices for family farmers, safe and healthy food, and vibrant, environmentally sound rural communities here and around the world.
Rural Coalition
The Rural Coalition is an alliance of regionally and culturally diverse organizations working to build a more just and sustainable food system which: brings fair returns to minority and other small farmers and rural communities, ensures just and fair working conditions for farm workers,
protects the environment, delivers safe and healthy food to consumers
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy promotes resilient family farms, rural communities and ecosystems around the world through research and education, science and technology, and advocacy.
Grain
GRAIN is an international non-governmental organization (NGO) which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture
The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture explores and cultivates alternatives that secure healthier people and landscapes in Iowa and the nation.
Rodale Institute
The Rodale Institute works with people worldwide to achieve a regenerative food system that renews environmental and human health working with the philosophy that “Healthy Soil = Healthy Food = Healthy People ®
- New Farm (Rodale Institute)
Helping consumers, brokers, restaurateurs and other farmers find the farm services they’re looking for.
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program has helped advance farming systems that are profitable, environmentally sound and good for communities through a nationwide research and education grants program.
National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture
The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture is a diverse nationwide partnership of individuals and organizations cultivating grass roots efforts to engage in policy development processes that result in food and agricultural systems and rural communities that are healthy, environmentally sound, profitable, humane and just.
National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service
ATTRA provides information and other technical assistance to farmers, ranchers, Extension agents, educators, and others involved in sustainable agriculture in the United States.
Family Farm Defenders
The FFD mission is to create a farmer-controlled and consumer-oriented food and fiber system, based upon democratically controlled institutions that empower farmers to speak for and respect themselves in their quest for social and economic justice.
The Center for Food Safety
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) is an interest and environmental advocacy membership organization established in 1997 by its sister organization, International Center for Technology Assessment, for the purpose of challenging harmful food production technologies and promoting sustainable alternatives.
ETC Group
ETC group is dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights.
Environmental Working Group
EWG specializes in environmental investigations. They have a team of scientists, engineers, policy experts, lawyers and computer programmers who pore over government data, legal documents, scientific studies and our own laboratory tests to expose threats to your health and the environment, and to find solutions.
WorldWatch Institute
WorldWatch is an independent research group working for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society. An excellent book published by WorldWatch institute is by Brian Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, 2004.
Union of Concerned Scientists
UCS is an independent nonprofit alliance of more than 100,000 concerned citizens and scientists. We augment rigorous scientific analysis with innovative thinking and committed citizen advocacy to build a cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world.
Institute of Science in Society
ISIS promotes science responsible to civil society and the public good, independent of commercial and other special interests, or of government control and a science that can help make the world sustainable, equitable and life-enhancing for all its inhabitants.
Organic Consumers Association
OCA is building a national network of consumers promoting food safety, organic agriculture, fair trade and sustainability.
Organic Center for Education and Promotion
OCEP generates credible, peer reviewed scientific information and communicate the verifiable benefits of organic farming and products to society.
Food and Water Watch
FWW is working on issues such as food and water safety, mad cow, sustainable agriculture, irradiation. Also has a factory farm campaign which aims to change government policies that promote factory farms, fight corporate control that forces farmers “to get big or get out,” and encourage sustainably raised meat.
United Poultry Concerns, Inc
UPC is dedicated to the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Sierra Club
(Including a toolkit for Factory Farm Pollution Activists)
The Sierra Club’s mission is to explore, enjoy and protect the wild places of the earth. Practice and promote the responsible us of the earth’s ecosystems and resources. Educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment. Use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.
Beyond Factory Farming
Beyond Factory Farming is a coalition of citizen’s organizations from all across Canada that share a vision of livestock production for health and social justice. Their mission is to promote livestock production that supports food sovereignty, ecological, human and animal health, as well as sustainability and community viability and informed citizen/consumer choice.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
Wegmans Cruelty
Video showing what goes on inside a factory chicken farm. Includes news and events.
Humane Society of the US
The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has worked since 1954 to promote the protection of all animals.
Humane Farming Association
HFA is an animal protection organization. Campaigns against factory farming and slaughterhouse abuse. Also home to the world’s largest farm animal refuge.
Compassionate Consumers
Compassionate Consumers was founded in 2003 by a small group of people concerned about animal welfare in the food industry.
Chicago’s only sustainable market with the highest quality locally farmed products.
Demographics
United States of Food
http://www.ediblegeography.com/united-states-of-food/
Fructose
The Double Danger of High Fructose Corn Syrup
| Health Topics - Modern Foods |
| Written by Bill Sanda |
| 2004-Feb-19 |
| For many years, Dr. Meira Fields and her coworkers at the US Department of Agriculture investigated the harmful effects of dietary sugar on rats. They discovered that when male rats are fed a diet deficient in copper, with sucrose as the carbohydrate, they develop severe pathologies of vital organs. Liver, heart and testes exhibit extreme swelling, while the pancreas atrophies, invariably leading to death of the rats before maturity.
Sucrose is a disaccharide composed of 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. Dr. Fields repeated her experiments to determine whether it was the glucose or fructose moiety that caused the harmful effects. Starch breaks down into glucose when digested. On a copper-deficient diet, the male rats showed some signs of copper deficiency, but not the gross abnormalities of vital organs that occur in rats on the sucrose diet. When the rats were fed fructose, the fatal organ abnormalities occured. Lysl oxidase is a copper-dependent enzyme that participates in the formation of collagen and elastin. Fructose seems to interfere with copper metabolism to such an extent that collagen and elastin cannot form in growing animals–hence the hypertrophy of the heart and liver in young males. The females did not develop these abnormalities, but they resorbed their litters.1 These experiements should give us pause when we consider the great increase in the use of high fructose corn syrup during the past 30 years, particularly in soft drinks, fruit juices and other beverages aimed at growing children, children increasingly likely to be copper deficient as modern parents no longer serve liver to their families. (Liver is by far the best source of copper in human diets.) “The bodies of the children I see today are mush,” observed a concerned chiropractor recently. The culprit is the modern diet, high in fructose and low in copper-containing foods, resulting in inadequate formation of elastin and collagen–the sinews that hold the body together. BINGEING ON FRUCTOSEUntil the 1970s most of the sugar we ate came from sucrose derived from sugar beets or sugar cane. Then sugar from corn–corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, dextrine and especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)–began to gain popularity as a sweetener because it was much less expensive to produce. High fructose corn syrup can be manipulated to contain equal amounts of fructose and glucose, or up to 80 percent fructose and 20 percent glucose.2 Thus, with almost twice the fructose, HFCS delivers a double danger compared to sugar. (With regards to fruit, the ratio is usually 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose, but most commercial fruit juices have HFCS added. Fruit contains fiber which slows down the metabolism of fructose and other sugars, but the fructose in HFCS is absorbed very quickly.) In 1980 the average person ate 39 pounds of fructose and 84 pounds of sucrose. In 1994 the average person ate 66 pounds of sucrose and 83 pounds of fructose, providing 19 percent of total caloric energy.3 Today approximately 25 percent of our average caloric intake comes from sugars, with the larger fraction as fructose.4 High fructose corn syrup is extremely soluble and mixes well in many foods. It is cheap to produce, sweet and easy to store. It’s used in everything from bread to pasta sauces to bacon to beer as well as in “health products” like protein bars and “natural” sodas. FRUCTOSE FOR DIABETICS?In the past, fructose was considered beneficial to diabetics because it is absorbed only 40 percent as quickly as glucose and causes only a modest rise in blood sugar.5 However, research on other hormonal factors suggests that fructose actually promotes disease more readily than glucose. Glucose is metabolized in every cell in the body but all fructose must be metabolized in the liver.6 The livers of test animals fed large amounts of fructose develop fatty deposits and cirrhosis, similar to problems that develop in the livers of alcoholics. Pure fructose contains no enzymes, vitamins or minerals and robs the body of its micronutrient treasures in order to assimilate itself for physiological use.7 While naturally occurring sugars, as well as sucrose, contain fructose bound to other sugars, high fructose corn syrup contains a good deal of “free” or unbound fructose. Research indicates that this free fructose interferes with the heart’s use of key minerals like magnesium, copper and chromium. Among other consequences, HFCS has been implicated in elevated blood cholesterol levels and the creation of blood clots. It has been found to inhibit the action of white blood cells so that they are unable to defend the body against harmful foreign invaders.8 Studies on the Maillard reaction indicate that fructose may contribute to diabetic complications more readily than glucose. The Maillard reaction is a browning reaction that occurs when compounds are exposed to various sugars. Fructose browns food seven times faster than glucose, resulting in a decrease in protein quality and a toxicity of protein in the body.9 This is due to the loss of amino acid residues and decreased protein digestibility. Maillard products can inhibit the uptake and metabolism of free amino acids and other nutrients such as zinc, and some advanced Maillard products have mutagenic and/or carcinogenic properties. The Maillard reactions between proteins and fructose, glucose, and other sugars may play a role in aging and in some clinical complications of diabetes.10 Fructose reduces the affinity of insulin for its receptor, which is the hallmark of type-2 diabetes. This is the first step for glucose to enter a cell and be metabolized. As a result, the body needs to pump out more insulin to handle the same amount of glucose.21 OTHER EFFECTSNancy Appleton, PhD, clinical nutritionist, has compiled a list of the harmful effects of fructose in her books Lick the Sugar Habit, Healthy Bones, Heal Yourself With Natural Foods, The Curse Of Louis Pasteur and Lick the Sugar Habit Sugar Counter. She points out that consumption of fructose causes a significant increase in the concentration of uric acid; after ingestion of glucose, no significant change occurs. An increase in uric acid can be an indicator of heart disease.12 Furthermore, fructose ingestion in humans results in increases in blood lactic acid, especially in patients with preexisting acidotic conditions such as diabetes, postoperative stress or uremia. Extreme elevations cause metabolic acidosis and can result in death.13 Fructose is absorbed primarily in the jejunum before metabolism in the liver. Fructose is converted to fatty acids by the liver at a greater rate than is glucose.14 When consumed in excess of dietary glucose, the liver cannot convert all of the excess fructose in the system and it may be malabsorbed. The portion that escapes conversion may be thrown out in the urine. Diarrhea can be a consequence.19 A study of 25 patients with functional bowel disease showed that pronounced gastrointestinal distress may be provoked by malabsorption of small amounts of fructose.26 Fructose interacts with oral contraceptives and elevates insulin levels in women on “the pill.”17 In studies with rats, fructose consistently produces higher kidney calcium concentrations than glucose. Fructose generally induces greater urinary concentrations of phosphorus and magnesium and lowered urinary pH compared with glucose.18 In humans, fructose feeding leads to mineral losses, especially higher fecal excretions of iron and magnesium, than did subjects fed sucrose. Iron, magnesium, calcium, and zinc balances tended to be more negative during the fructose-feeding period as compared to balances during the sucrose-feeding period.19 There is significant evidence that high sucrose diets may alter intracellular metabolism, which in turn facilitates accelerated aging through oxidative damage. Scientists found that the rats given fructose had more undesirable cross-linking changes in the collagen of their skin than in the other groups. These changes are also thought to be markers for aging. The scientists say that it is the fructose molecule in the sucrose, not the glucose, that plays the larger part.20 Because it is metabolized by the liver, fructose does not cause the pancreas to release insulin the way it normally does. Fructose converts to fat more than any other sugar. This may be one of the reasons Americans continue to get fatter. Fructose raises serum triglycerides significantly. As a left-handed sugar, fructose digestion is very low. For complete internal conversion of fructose into glucose and acetates, it must rob ATP energy stores from the liver.21 Not only does fructose have more damaging effects in the presence of copper deficiency, fructose also inhibits copper metabolism–another example of the sweeteners double-whammy effect. A deficiency in copper leads to bone fragility, anemia, defects of the connective tissue, arteries, and bone, infertility, heart arrhythmias, high cholesterol levels, heart attacks, and an inability to control blood sugar levels.22 Although these studies were not designed to test the effects of fructose on weight gain, the observation of increased body weight associated with fructose ingestion is of interest. One explanation for this observation could be that fructose ingestion did not increase the production of two hormones, insulin and leptin, that have key roles in the long-term regulation of food intake and energy expenditure.23 HYPERSENSIVITYThe magnitude of the deleterious effects of fructose varies depending on such factors as age, sex, baseline glucose, insulin, triglyceride concentrations, the presence of insulin resistance, and the amount of dietary fructose consumed.24Some people are more sensitive to fructose. They include hypertensive, hyperinsulinemic, hypertriglyceridemic, non-insulin dependent diabetic people, people with functional bowel disease and postmenopausal women.25 Everyone should avoid over-exposure to fructose, but especially those listed above. One or two pieces of fruit per day is fine, but commercial fruit juices and any products containing high fructose corn syrup are more dangerous than sugar and should be removed from the diet. Sidebar SOFT DRINKS IN THE SCHOOLSHigh fructose corn syrup is the primary sweetener used in soft drinks, now readily available to children in school vending machines. The soft drink industry increased US production from 22 to 41 gallons of soft drinks per person a year between 1970 and 1997. Teenagers and children, the industry’s main tragets, are among the largest consumers. In the past 10 years, soft drink consumption among children has almost doubled in the United States. Teenage boys now drink, on average, three or more cans of soda per day, and 10 percent drink seven or more cans a day. The average for teenage girls is more than two cans a day, and 10 percent drink more than five cans a day. A typical 20-ounce Coke contains zero fat, zero protein and 67 grams of carbohydrates, usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup. There are an estimated 20,000 vending machines in schools nationwide, according to the National Automatic Merchandising Association. The USDA collected data on vending machines in schools and reported that 88 percent of high schools, 61 percent of middle schools and 14 percent of elementary schools have food or beverage vending machines for student use. Thirty-four percent of high schools and 15 percent of middle schools permit students to use school vending machines at any time, and 6 percent of elementary schools allow students to use vending machines during lunch. REFERENCES
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2003.About the Author
|
Bill Sanda, BS, MBA, served as Executive Director and Director of Public Affairs for the Weston A. Price Foundation. Bill was a partner and co-owner of The McAdam Group, a lobbying company specializing in elements of education policy, and was a consultant to Primezyme, Inc., a nutrition and healing clinic. He has extensive experience in Washington D.C. politics and government, having served as a professional staff member in the US Senate.
