By Curtis Price

It was probably about 5 years ago, maybe even longer, but I can remember the magazine cover as clear as day. It was the Economist magazine and the cover had two sheep standing side by side and the caption mentioned the sheep’s name as Dolly and that these were the first successfully cloned animals. The article went on to discuss cloning and “how this was a huge breakthrough, however, cloned animals for consumption wouldn’t happen anytime soon because this was all so new”. Well how time flies by! I was reading one of my health industry magazines recently and low and behold, “The US Food and Drug Administration issued a final rule on January 15, 2008 stating that meat and milk from healthy cloned animals and their offspring posed no risk to human health, and do not need to be labeled.”* Some of you may be reading this and think nothing of it.  But for some of us who don’t want their produce to have any pesticides or chemicals, and their meats to be organic and feed on natural ingredients, (not pumped full of steroids and growth hormones to fatten the animal up quicker for slaughter), this isn’t a joyous occasion! What truly gets me is that we don’t even have the right to know if what we are getting ready to consume has been created by some good ol’ fashioned barn yard loven or created in a test tube from a lab. “Because it costs $10,000 to $20,000 to produce a cloned animal, it is not likely to be sold as food, but its offspring could be in the meat or dairy case by 2011, with no plan to track the progeny.”* To me, this seems to be something that would happen in the newest Sci-Fi thriller and not on Capitol Hill. I know that 2011 might seem like a long ways off, but I highly urge you start to seriously paying close attention to what you and your families are consuming.

By taking action now, you’ll start to condition yourself to eating healthy meats and meat byproducts. Organic and Free Range have never sounded more appealing to me than right now. The costs for some organic foods are higher, but I think that you’re worth it. A lot of people would like to think that meat itself is the culprit and that you should just give it up.  However, it’s the quality of the animal that is the real reason for alarm. How the animal was raised, (or in this case even brought into existence), what it was feed and how it was slaughtered is what you should be looking at. Now, I normally try to leave my readers with some healthy tips and I must say that I am rather stumped. I am giving you a brief description of what Organic and Free Range are really all about and urge you to do the same. Start to pay even more attention to those labels and try to incorporate as many organic foods into your lifestyle as possible.

Organic foods are produced according to certain production standards. For crops, it means that they were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed without ionizing, radiation or food additives. For animals, it means they were reared without the routine use of antibiotics and without the use of growth hormones. In most countries, organic produce must not be genetically modified.
Free range is a method of farming husbandry where the animals are permitted to roam freely instead of being contained in any manner. The principle is to allow the animals as much freedom as possible, to live out their instinctual behaviors in a reasonably natural way, regardless of whether or not they are eventually killed for meat. Free range may apply to meat, eggs or dairy farming. In ranching, free-range livestock are permitted to roam without being fenced in, as opposed to fenced-in pastures.

Curtis Price
Eradicating Diabetes and Obesity ONE Bite at a Time!
www.whoathatslow.com