December 26, 2022 by Sally K Norton

Fake Meat: Dangers and Hidden Reality

Food companies use truly scary ingredients and techniques to make today’s plant-based meat substitutes. To mimic the aromas, flavors and textures of meat, high-tech manufacturing plants need to create copycat proteins, fats, and flavoring compounds. They use genetic engineering to create the key “employees” that do this work: genetically edited e-coli, yeasts, algae, and even stem cells from animals. The job of these genetically engineered micro-employees is to digest and transform big-ag GMO crops into fake meat products for human consumption.

This manufacturing is a franken-fermentation process that generates dangerous waste end-products that need careful handling and complete incineration. They must not escape into our natural environment because the consequences are completely unknown and could be catastrophic.

Large bio-tech companies are investing huge amounts of money to make imitation foods taste like real meats. This is because humans naturally love the taste of meat, eggs, cheese, and fish. Our reliance on meats is bred into our biology. Big tech wants to save us from this “problem.”

In the face of our uncertain future, new food technology is a comfort to some—but where are we putting our faith and trust?

plant-based meat subsitutes on grocery store racks — Fake Meats in the Marketplace

Bio-Tech Brewing

The “synthetic biology” at work here is briefly explained by Alan Lewis, a VP at Natural Grocers, in a 2022 Environmental Health Symposium video, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgXbr24JP7k (I attended this conference.)

The manufacturing process is called “gene-edited fermentation” or “precision fermentation” occurring in large bio-hazard lab facilities. The Silicon Valley food-tech entrepreneurs describe their technique as a “proprietary probiotic production process” (terminology from a Berkeley, CA-based company called “Air Protein”, cited in Guthman and Biltekoff, 2020).

Creating micro-organisms that have never been seen on Earth before is a recipe for accidental epidemics of (yet more) untreatable infectious illnesses.

Plant-Based Meats: The Basic Ingredients Come from Industrialized Ag

The base ingredients “feeding” these synthetic manufacturing systems are GMO soy, corn, mung beans, sugar beets, plus hundreds of other additives that create the target microbe metabolite (some sort of novel protein, fat, or flavor compound). The sales hype gushes over these products as a miraculous futuristic achievement and strongly implies that they require no inputs—as if bacteria can produce food out of thin air. This could not be farther from the truth.

The source materials come from GMO farming systems which:

concentrate the control of food production into corporate hands,
put small farms out of business,
destroy soil,
heavily consume fossil fuels, and
add many harmful contaminants to our foods, including glyphosate, 2-4-D, and other pesticides.

And to make these “veggie” farm practices even more dangerous, the newest high-tech strategies already in use on farms now include spraying novel genetic materials on plants to trigger expression of selected genes as they grow in our rural countryside. In open-air farming, there is no way to contain the drift and to keep un-intended problems from spreading into natural habits, such as newly invasive superweeds that crowd out native plants!

Herbicides such as glyphosate are heavily used in GMO ag – the backbone of the new fake meat industry. Image: Exposure risk and environmental impacts of glyphosate: Highlights on the toxicity of herbicide co-formulants
Published by Elsevier; open access article (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

The Process: Changing GMO Source Material into Flavors, Fillers, and Proteins

Manufacturers fill bioreactors with a GMO-derived mash of sugars, proteins and gene edited bacteria. Those engineered bacteria are designed not only to produce a target molecule but also for antibiotic-resistance. The bacterial slurry is treated with antibiotics to eliminate the naturally occurring bacteria and select the “edited” micro-organisms to consume the “feed stock” and produce the desired target compound.

Natural vs “Franken”-Fermenting

Traditional use of natural lactic-fermentation (a safe process long in use by humans to create sauerkraut, sourdough bread, beer, and yogurt) is incorrectly referenced to make the “brewing” of GMO grains with manipulated e-coli (a novel pathogen unknown in nature) seem similar and even safe. This is a far cry from reality.

The extracts that go into consumer products likely contain genes and other remnants of the gene-edited pathogens that created them.

“Cellular Meat”

Another human-invented fermentation type is lab-grown altered stem cells from beef, chicken, and pork. Bioengineers edit the genes of animal cells to enable them to survive in the fermentation tanks and grow exponentially fast to keep costs down. They remove the normal growth-regulating genes to bypass the cells’ normal growth limits (a self-regulation process) and to make them thrive on starch and sugar. This creates unregulated anerobic growth—the definition of tumor cells. Basically, this technique creates cancer tissue to be sold as a human food. Fake meat is marketed as superior to real meat, and even claims to be “animal free.”

More Synthetic Foods on the Way, Even for Babies

There’s even a lab-engineered breast milk alternative on the way called Biomilq, which is made from cultured human breast tissue. Bioengineers use a “proprietary cell culture media and growth factors” to stimulate the genetic code that directs the cells to create human casein and lactose as additives for an existing synthetic formula.

Dirtiness of “Clean Tech”

The major products of gene-edited fermentation, however, are massive amounts of “bio-waste” that must be deactivated. The spent synthetic GMO bio-hazard materials, gene edited microbes, antibiotics, and antibiotic resistant novel organisms all need to be incinerated. Misuse or release of these waste products into the environment could cause new disease outbreaks with no way to identify or track them. Regulation is almost non-existent, despite the risks.

Risks At Every Step

Key dangers are:

the presumption of safety;
limited surveillance of release controls and cleanup processes;
the absence of transparency;
lack of independent examination of the process and products;
no meaningful regulation;
no thorough safety review requirement.

The Solution: Better-Informed Consumers

The franken-synthetic realities hide under superior-sounding code names like “plant-based” and behind unproven promises like “planet friendly.” Unless consumers refuse to buy these franken-foods, the creation of cultured meat for the masses on a massive scale can only mean massive and novel environmental problems are in store.

No Real Benefits

Marketers promote these novel technologies as good for the planet. That could not be a bolder lie. As a 2020 academic article (Guthman and Biltekoff) put it, the food-tech entrepreneurs are engaging in “intentional veiling of pernicious processes” as they make grand claims and promises to attract investment capital.

Cultured meats have no environmental benefits. Bioengineers are creating GMO organisms that have never existed on earth before and these organisms and their waste are not even compostable and are certainly not edible. They pose great risks for environmental health for all life on earth, especially human beings.

Perhaps we are all Destined to Live in the Slaughterhouse . . .

The real world-changing ambitions of the bio-tech investors are to: 1) build up a culture that trusts big-tech over mother nature and, 2) to capture wealth and gain the on-going political control that comes with it. This gives them power to de-fang any future consumer protection efforts that might impede their vision of humankind needing near-complete dependence on corporate manufacturing for survival.

Who’s Cooking Dinner? Fake meat food-tech entrepreneurs.

Real Food from Real Farms

There are environmentally beneficial ways to farm. Instead of transitioning into factory laboratories where everything that comes out of them is a biohazard, we need to switch to regenerative farming and support local farms producing real foods using sustainable practices.

We can nourish ourselves by cooperating with nature. Regenerative farming communities—when set up as self-sustaining enterprise zones run and owned cooperatively by the farmers and not technocrats—can sustainably feed all humanity. It’s mostly politics (and big money) that stands in the way.

Please support small family farms not Big-Biotech companies in your food purchasing.

And to get involved in building a brighter future, you can participate in sustainable agriculture education. There are many ways to do this. Start by attending or sponsoring farmers to attend sustainable agriculture conferences. For the business minded, make connections with local leaders working to develop producer-run rural enterprise regenerative farming zones.

In Summary, here are Some Key Points:

E-coli based ferments use bacteria manipulated to be antibiotic resistant.

Lab meats are essentially cancer cells created from animal stem cells.

Neither the gene-edited living organisms, nor the substances that they create have any track record of safety.

Consumers are eating synthetic ingredients and gene-edited animal tumor cells thinking they are “plant-based” and “animal free.”

They are also likely eating virulent pathogens.

The waste products of these lab-factories pose health risks for all people, beyond those who elect to eat these foods (a choice typically made from ignorance).

DNA – Who Do You Trust to Design Your Franken-Foods?
Image by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

About Alan Lewis (from the video link)

Alan Lewis is based in Colorado. He has served various trade organizations: Non-GMO Project board, Organic and Natural Health Association board, Real Organic Project standards board, Retail Advisory Committee of the American Grassfed Association (certification program for grassfed producers), Farm Policy Committee of the Organic Farmers Association, and various committees of the Council for Responsible Nutrition (a leading trade association for the dietary supplement and functional food industry).

In addition to Alan Lewis’ talk, this article also references:.

Wuench, J. Got Milk! BIOMILQ Is The First Company To Create Human Breast Milk In A Lab. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliawuench/2021/06/01/got-milk-biomilq-is-the-first-company-to-create-human-breast-milk-in-a-lab/.

Guthman, J., and Biltekoff, C. (2021). Magical disruption? Alternative protein and the promise of de-materialization. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, 1583–1600. 10.1177/2514848620963125.

June 19, 2018 by Sally K Norton

Which spices are high in oxalate?

Spice of Life: about Spices and Oxalate content

Eventually, you’ll get around to wondering: which spices are high in oxalate? You wouldn’t imagine they could make a big difference, those light sprinklings of everyday seasonings. But they do.

A quarter teaspoon of regular old black pepper has as much oxalate as 1.5 cups of sliced onions and 22 times as much as the same amount of white pepper. In fact, if you’re sticking to an intake of 50 mg of oxalate every day, that ¼ teaspoon of pepper would occupy 6% of your days’ total oxalate allowance.

Granted, we need to take care of the heavy hitters first. After all, the 3 mg of oxalate in a ¼ tsp. of black pepper pales in comparison to the 33 mg provided by a 3-ounce portion of french fries or the 150 mg in one fluffy, half-ounce cup of raw spinach. Given the heavy hit made by these modern lunch foods, we’re tempted to discard any concern over how our food is seasoned.

But that would be a mistake.

Helen’s Breakthrough

My friend Helen is a case in point. She was still in chronic pain due to an auto accident 13 years ago. And she was also trying to drop stubborn pounds after decades of frustration at not losing weight while enduring a constant nagging hunger. For years she had struggled to get control of her tendency to reach for chips, soda pop, and a quick sandwich. Thus, she was pleased with her recent success in sticking with a strict no-sugar, no-gluten diet, but feeling discouraged that the excess pounds didn’t drop, not in the least.

Her best efforts to follow the combined advice of her nutritionist and counselor led to other frustrations too. Some of their advice conflicted with what her body was telling her—that many vegetables didn’t agree with her. “Healthy” foods often gave her stomach pains. Her nutritionist and counselor both insisted that she just needed to comply and eat her vegetables. She was caught in a tussle and needing some new ideas. I ran into Helen in a local café and she begged for my input. She needed more options, desperate for a breakthrough.

Trying Low-Oxalate

As we chatted, I told her that my physical energy and mental focus was much better on the low-oxalate diet—simply by avoiding certain vegetables, nuts, and fruits. In no way was I suggesting that this was a fit for her situation. But Helen insisted that I look at her diet and suggest changes. She wanted to know what not to eat. On a napkin, I wrote a list of low-oxalate vegetables she could have and told her to eat more butter and olive oil. I never mentioned spices. Later she set an appointment to get more details and suggestions, so she could try this approach and still comply with her counselor’s advice to eat “healthy foods”.

A few weeks passed, it was mid-July, and a much happier Helen called me. “I feel like I got my life back. I know this sounds like a trite exaggeration, but this approach has worked miracles” she said. “I feel better and I am not getting headaches. I’ve stopped taking Advil at night. My stomach aches are better, and my digestion is finally working. For once, I feel as if I am digesting and absorbing my food and I don’t feel hungry. I am eating much less, and it is easy. I am feeling a level of peace and simplicity about it like never before.”

Many Spices are High in Oxalate!

Helen got a second breakthrough when she studied my table of oxalate in foods. She was amazed to learn how much oxalate was packed into black pepper, cumin, turmeric, and other spices.

She had always gravitated to spicy foods. Her favorite snack, specially ordered and shipped in, was black pepper potato chips. Her favorite local hot-bar was stocked with heavily seasoned foods loaded with exotic aromas and strong, pungent spices, including: Indian curries, Ethiopian cuisine, and Mexican-style dishes.

Photo by: T. Maari

After seeing the actual numbers, the amount of oxalate conveyed to her diet by seasonings, she made a big, surprising shift. She started cooking most all her meals at home… cooking for one and eating alone, just she and her cats. She does NOT like to cook, and keeps it all as simple as she can. She tells me: This produced another breakthrough. Her back and knee pain were so much better! She could walk, exercise, and take stairs like she hasn’t for years.

Refine Your Diet

Paying more attention to spices might be a good way to refine your oxalate-aware eating plan. If you are really already avoiding potato chips, fries, nuts, snacks with nuts and seeds, spinach, and so on – the spice cabinet might be your next step. After all, most spices are potent seeds.

If you love spice too or love to cook with spices like I do, you might be daunted or otherwise resist this step. (It took me years to discard several spices languishing in my cabinet.) Please, don’t be afraid of cleaning out your spice cabinet. You can still enjoy great food, even with a simplified approach to seasoning. Undoubtedly, the best flavors come from the quality of the ingredients. When handled with care and skill in the kitchen, fresh ingredients shine without excessive embellishment. But, you don’t have to give up spices entirely – just be aware of what you’re eating, and use spices that are consistent with your low-oxalate goals.

Alternatives to High Oxalate Seasoning

Easy Substitutions and Approaches to Bringing out the Flavor of Foods

1. White pepper in place of black pepper

2. Lower the amounts of spices in your cooking by half

3. Use more white pepper, ground mustard seed, pinches of cayenne pepper, and mineral-type salts like pink Himalayan or Real Salt brand salt (ancient sea salt mined in Utah).

4. Use more salt. If you’re not eating processed food, you’re getting half of what most people are. And salt has an undeservedly bad nutritional reputation in any case: you might even need more salt to be healthy!

5. Add a hint of lemon juice, lime juice, or vinegar just before serving to give all the flavors in your dish a subtle lift.

6. Use enough fat when cooking and serving. An extra dash of olive oil or butter when garnishing and serving extends and enhances flavors.

7. Try prepared horseradish more often. It is great with beef and seafood. Good stirred into sour cream or yogurt, too (along with Frank’s Hot Sauce).

Essential oils and extracts can make good substitutes in the kitchen. Begin with these easy substitutions:

1. To replace (whole root) turmeric use a turmeric extract sold as a dietary supplement. (Start with 1 -3 caps per recipe, opened and the capsule discarded.) (Oxalate tends to stick to fibers and other elements removed when an extract is made.)

2. To replace lemon peel: use oil of lemon (1 small drop per tsp. of zest) or lemon extract (1/4 tsp./ lemon). (Oxalate is filtered out during extraction, and does not hang around in the oil fraction of any given food.)

Extracts typically don’t have exactly the same taste as the whole spice, but for certain recipes they can still provide a safe and pleasant flavor enhancement.

An adventurous cook will want to try using other essential oils too…

. . . such as the essential oils of clove, ginger, cardamon, and cumin seed oil (not black cumin seed -nigella- oil – which has very little flavor) (Cumin seed oil is hard to find.)

Purchase high-quality edible grade essential oils and a brown glass dropper bottle.
Dilute the essential oil 10:1 (5 teaspoons macadamia or almond oil to 1/2 teaspoon essential oil).
Label the brown glass dropper bottle with the names of the two oils used and the ratio of your mixture. (invest in a quality label machine). Store the mixture in a dark cabinet.
When cooking, add the oil at the last step of preparation.
Use only one drop of the diluted oil per recipe, taste and adjust up from there.
Make notes about what worked or didn’t.

For Curry Style Foods . . .

Try the curry styles of Thailand. Instead of cumin and turmeric (Indian style curry ingredients), Thai food are seasoned with various combinations of the following: cayenne, chili peppers, garlic, lime, lemongrass, mint, coconut milk, fish sauce, onion, and cilantro. To make the switch, keep these four ingredients on hand: 1) Thai chili paste (red or green), 2) fish sauce, 3) limes, and 4) coconut milk or coconut milk powder. Use the first 3 in ~1 tablespoon amounts… you can make nearly any dish interesting. These four ingredients can easily transform bone broth into something really nice.

Oxalate in Spices

High Oxalate Spices

Milligrams (mg) of oxalate (culinary portions)

Spice	Per 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml)	Per 10 grams
Turmeric	24	219
Clove	21	200
Cinnamon	20	168
Celery Seed	16	128
Fennel seed	11	129
Curry Powder	12	120
Cumin Seed, ground	10	100
Allspice	10	105
Lemon Peel, dried	10	73
Onion Powder	10	73
Coriander Seed	9	103
Ginger, Dried	8	96

Moderate Oxalate Spices

Milligrams (mg) of oxalate (culinary portions)

Spice	Per 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml)	Per 10 grams
Garlic Powder	0.1	0.7
Almond Extract	0.2	0.6
Mustard, ground powder	0.2	1.7
White Pepper	0.4	3.0
Red Pepper Flakes	1	12
Thyme, Dried	1	18
Mrs. Dash Seasoning Blend	1	19
Ginger, Fresh	2	17.5
Paprika	3	28
Cardamom, ground	3	31
Cayenne Pepper	3	33
Chili Powder	4	31
Oregano, dried	4	45

Oh, Spice Road: Spices in Verse

Pepper black, pepper red,

pepper, pepper

excite me, entertain me,

soothe me.

Conceal, mask, camouflage.

Spice, satisfy me, soothe me.

What longings, what emptiness shall I fill?

What hunger, what boredom, what lack can you displace?

Hunger, hunger what do you want?

Let me run away, travel, find jungle, beach, tropical paradise.

Oh, spice road, take me away from here.

What can you show me? What can you mask?

What fears can you quell? Sadness, aloneness, weakness, death?

Oh, spice entertain me! Oh, spice connect me, me oh spice, warm me, rev me, jolt me alive.

Oh, spice don’t flog me, punish me, or make me fat.

Hunger, hunger what do you want?

November 7, 2017 by Sally K Norton

Will today’s natural foods fix our health problems?

Today’s health crisis. Have you noticed it? Obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer, infertility, behavioral and mood problems, poor sleep, and PAIN. Do you know anyone with any of these problems? Yes, you do, even if you are not aware of it. And, the suffering is happening at younger and younger ages. Our kids are in trouble, we’re all in trouble.

It is expensive to be sick. Both time and money are sucked out of our lives, not to mention the fun. And what about the bigger picture all around us? Perhaps you’ve noticed that poor health is threatening social and economic stability, world-wide.

Eating Better?

So, what are we doing about it? Eating better? Going “natural”? Yes, we are indeed eating more veggies and less meat, less fat too. We’re swearing off gluten and milk, going for alternative low-carb or gluten-free breads, alternative “milk”, and fake cheese. Is this going to save us? I say no. Hear about one reason why this approach is not a great solution: in this video about oxalate toxicity from natural foods.

My Ancestral Health Symposium Presentation

In September, I had an opportunity to offer an address to the Ancestral Health Society. This presentation argues that many of today’s health foods are having the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than making us healthier, the superfood food craze could, like the holy war against saturated fat, be launching another public health calamity, as expensive and unpleasant as the current diabetes and obesity explosion.

Here are some highlights from this talk:

Bags of chocolate covered almonds on a supermarket produce shelf.

Chocolate is now “produce” at Walmart

Low-level toxicity and nutrient deficiencies make us sick.
One of the most potent toxins that people regularly ingest in the contemporary diet is oxalate.
Oxalate causes nutrient depletion AND toxicity in the body.
Oxalate, when purified, can rapidly kill a person.
It was even the poison of interest in the very first experimental toxicology study published in 1823 in England, because it caused several accidental deaths in the early1800s.
Many of the plant foods we like to think are good for us have enough oxalate to harm our health in much more subtle ways.
These natural foods might even cause mechanical abrasion to your digestive tract do to the “needle effect”.
Oxalate can collect in your tissues.
The availability of high oxalate foods we see today is unprecedented.
Today we are eating oxalate in amounts that cause us to begin accumulating oxalate in our arteries, bones, thyroid, breasts, and kidneys.
When you eat “normal” levels of oxalate, you “maintain” and grow the oxalate deposits that have already started in your body.
Medical and nutrition authorities have virtually no awareness of the threat of biological toxicity posed by over-exposure to oxalate and its precursors. They are not paying attention to the increase in our use of high oxalate foods.
Going low destabilizes oxalate in the body, and helps it move out.
Going low can prevent and even reverse a lot of common complaints, as proven by thousands of reports from real people in the real world (members of the VP Foundation, Participants in the Trying Low Oxalates online groups, my own clients and followers, and many others).

Action Items for You

Please watch the video, it is only 39 minutes and is packed with helpful images and information that will make you want to share it and watch it a second time.
Please give it a thumbs up.
Share with those you love.
Let me know what you think.

… and

Skip the swiss chard and almonds.

The fewer toxins in your body the better, even the natural ones!

“From a practical point of view, it would be better to avoid oxalate-rich foods than to take measures to neutralize the effect of oxalic acid, especially when other sources of green vegetables are available.”

—Hoover and Karunairatnam (1945).
Oxalate content of some leafy green vegetables and its relation to oxaluria and calcium utilization.
The Biochemical Journal 39, 237.