So when it comes to Subway sandwiches, you'd think you were pretty safe, right?  I mean, if you had to trade up from a fast food burger and fries, that's where you might go.

But a recent article by a woman who calls herself "Food Babe" will stop you in your tracks.

In her efforts to eat "real food", she decided to ditch the processed stuff.  It was an interesting journey, to say the least, but nothing could have prepared her for what she found in her local Subway shop.

"Eat Fresh" At least, that's what she thought she was getting.

But when she decided to look under that plastic shield, she was absolutely stunned at what she found.

And while she goes into remarkable details about the chemicals that have been added to the ingredients used in those sandwiches to preserve their shelf life in the store, the details she gives about one of the ingredients in the bread are jaw-dropping.

Like many of us, we've eaten there, multiple times, and probably like "Food Babe" had absolutely no idea that this is what we were getting:

"The 9 grain wheat bread might look and smell freshly baked but it contains close to 50 ingredients including refined flours, dough conditioners, hidden MSG, refined sugars, etc.

Could bread this processed ever be real food?

Certainly not, when it includes a chemical ingredient called azodicarbonamide, which is banned as a food additive in the U.K., Europe, and Australia, and if you get caught using it in Singapore you can get up to 15 years in prison and can be fined $450,000.  Azodicarbonamide is more commonly used in the production of foamed plastics, however, it is allowed in the United States as a food additive, a flour bleaching agent, and a dough conditioner that improves elasticity of bread.

The U.K. has recognized this ingredient as a potential cause of asthma if inhaled, and advises against its use in people who have sensitivity to food dye allergies and other common allergies in food, because azodicarbonamide can exacerbate the symptoms."

It certainly makes you stop and think about what we have done to the U.S. food supply for the sake of profit margins.  And what we need to do to dig ourselves out of this chemical-heavy kitchen.  Researchers increasingly refer to certain chemicals that can promote weight gain as "obesogens."  Our grandmothers certainly didn't have that term, but now that we have it, books have been written about it, and increasing amounts of science are highlighting their effects.

Want to learn more? Then check out Food Babe's article on 100 Days of Real Food or her blog, FoodBabe.

To learn more about the chemicals going into our food supply and what you can do to protect the health of your loved ones, please visit the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

If you eat and pay taxes, you might want to know about “The Farm Bill.”

Remember the bailout that we funded for the banks?  Well, the same thing is happening in our food system.

And today, seventy leading chefs, authors, food policy experts, nutritionists, CEOs, and environment and health organizations sent an open letter to Members of Congress urging lawmakers to modernize the Farm Bill and make nutritious and healthy foods more affordable to all Americans.

According to a July 2011 poll , 78% of Americans want healthy food to be more affordable.  Not surprising when you consider the rates of diseases like diabetes, asthma and cancer that we are seeing in the health of our loved ones.

If you are one of the countless Americans who has ever stopped to wonder why fresh fruit is so expensive and processed and packaged food is so cheap, it’s largely because of the “Farm Bill” and the way that we currently allocate our taxpayer resources in our national food budget.

How it stands right now is that as taxpayers, we are writing checks and that money is being used as taxpayer funded payments called “subsidies” to support the growing of corn and soy, crops used to make our processed foods. Few of the dollars that we send in are used to support other foods in any meaningful way.  In other words, our current system keeps the foods that use these ingredients, mainly the cheap processed foods, cheap, while making everything else seem expensive.

Can you imagine if  instead of funding the junk food, we funded other foods?  Like apples and carrots for example?  We could afford to carry them in schools, at home and in hospitals. Our food companies would use more of them in their products, as they’d be cheaper to source, and we would benefit from the nutritional differences.

Sound too good to be true?  It is, right now.

And some might argue (and they do) that we need our current subsidy system to avoid mass starvation.  How else are we going to feed the world?  But interestingly, just this week, according to the World Health Organization and Business Week, there is so much extra food floating around the globe that not only is it increasing rates of obesity, but we also waste a third of what is produced, it’s simply thrown away. As a result, obesity is a far greater threat facing the globe than starvation, and malnutrition is affecting both.

In other words, we have subsidized a food system that is making us fat, sick and undernourished.

Some food corporations and production groups, especially those who grow soy and corn believe that these handouts are necessary to guarantee stable prices, a food supply and to protect food crops from steep price declines.  Apparently, they may not be aware that the global banks and Wall Street can wreak havoc on food prices by trading what are known as “collateralized commodity obligations” in which they bundle up a whole bunch of these assets in order to profit off of the trades. But how could they be aware of these derivatives?  They are hardly regulated.

But back to the "Farm Bill," the bill would also provide an estimated $9 billion a year to continue a long-standing insurance program that benefits only farmers of commodity crops.  In other words, farmers are paid to buy and grow corn and soy.  They won’t get the same level of insurance if they grow something else, like apples, carrots or tomatoes.  In the current system, with the subsidies and insurance promises, the system only pays farmers to keep growing corn and soy crops.  There is no safety net if they choose to grow anything else.  Who can blame them?  Times are tough.

Which is why today’s letter to Congress is so important.  It calls for an end to this lopsided allocation of taxpayer resources and our lopsided funding of the food system and asks for an end to the bailout of Big Ag that allocates $140 billion to companies engineering corn and soybean seeds from which so many of the ingredients now found in our fake, fast and processed foods are derived.  Right now, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “about one-third of the subsidies awarded under (last year’s) program went to just 4% of farmers.”

According to the letter sent to Congress today, Americans "are deeply concerned that it would continue to give away subsidies worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to the largest commodity crop growers, insurance companies, and agribusinesses even as it drastically underfunds programs to promote the health and food security of all Americans”.

Mass starvation?  It seems that mass malnutrition in an increasingly obese world in which too much food is being produced, thrown away and wasted seems more likely.

It also seems that the Farm Bill, this taxpayer funded piece of legislation, “is out of step with the nation’s priorities and what the American public expects and wants from our food and farm policy.”

And while this funding of the status quo might be good for the chemical companies and for those whose products have to be purchased  by our nation’s farmers in order to grow these two crops, it doesn’t seem to be benefiting the millions of stakeholders in the food supply, nor the farmers themselves, nor the growing number of obese and overweight Americans who rely on cheap, processed foods to feed their families in quite the same way.

A better "Farm Bill" would fund a diverse and healthy food system, especially in light of the fact that a growing number of us and our national economy are being impacted by obesity, diabetes, cancer, allergies and autism, diseases and conditions that are increasingly being shown to have a link to diet and nutrition.

So while you may not have heard of the “Farm Bill” until recently, this Senate bill is arguably one of the most important pieces of legislation Congress will consider this year, and it is set to go to the floor in the coming week.

And if you haven’t heard about it, you’re not alone.  But “unless we – meaning all of us who eat and pay taxes – demand Congress fundamentally change the way it writes the next farm bill, I can guarantee the interests of agribusiness will once again come out on top,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of EWG. “We have a real opportunity to compel members of Congress to work on behalf of our health and the environment if they hear from all of us now.  Eaters - it's time to get in the game."

Let’s go, America.  Game on.

CALL TO ACTION: The Farm Bill—the most important legislation when it comes to your food- is about to be voted on in the US Senate. Now is the time to stand up and fix our broken food system. Together, we can create a food system and a Farm Bill that is fairer, healthier and more sustainable for all Americans http://tiny.cc/ff26ew

As originally seen onPrevention.com
Last week, the Mount Sinai Children's Environmental Health Center (CEHC) released a list of the top ten toxic chemicals suspected to cause autism and learning disabilities.

This list can't come soon enough, as last month, the CDC reported that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) now affects 1 of every 88 American children -- a 23% increase from 2006 and a 78% increase from 2002.

And while there is controversy over how those numbers are reached, it still is worth repeating.  There has been a 78% increase in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in the last ten years.  At the same time, the CDC also reported that ADHD now affects 14% of American children.

As these disorders continue to affect more children across the U.S., researchers are asking what is causing these dramatic increases.  Some of the explanation is greater awareness and more accurate diagnosis. But clearly, there is more to the story than simply genetics, as the increases are far too rapid to be of purely genetic origin.

According to the Mount Sinai Children's Environmental Health Center (CEHC) release this morning and data from the research article, "Environmental Pollutants and Disease in American Children (July 2002), "the National Academy of Sciences reports that 3% of all neurobehavioral disorders in children are caused directly by toxic exposure in the environment and another 25% disorders are caused by interactions between environmental factors and genetics. But the precise environmental causes are not yet known". (Note: the first version of this article included a link to the National Academy of Sciences study from 2000 and has been updated to include a link to the July 2002 study).

So while industry can claim that there is little evidence that these chemicals in isolation or in combination (which doctors now refer to as "synergistic toxicity") cause autism, the truth is that there is still very little evidence or the toxicological safety studies.  In other words, there is a gap in the science.

There is a huge gap.  According to CNN, the EPA has tested only about 200 of the 80,000 chemicals in use.

But thankfully, that is changing with the work of the team at Mt. Sinai and the extraordinary leadership, courage and intellect of Dr. Phil Landrigan and the urgent call by experts to reform chemical laws.

To guide a research strategy to discover potentially preventable environmental causes and to arm parents and those hoping to be parents with knowledge, the Children's Environmental Health Center (CEHC) has developed a list of ten chemicals found in consumer products that are suspected to contribute to autism and learning disabilities.

This list was published today in Environmental Health Perspectives in an editorial written by Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, director of the CEHC, Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and Dr. Luca Lambertini, also of the CEHC.

The top ten chemicals are:

1. Lead
2. Methylmercury
3. PCBs
4. Organophosphate pesticides
5. Organochlorine pesticides
6. Endocrine disruptors
7. Automotive exhaust
8. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
9. Brominated flame retardants
10. Perfluorinated compounds

As the Children's Environmental Health Center shares, the editorial was published alongside four other papers -- each suggesting a link between toxic chemicals and autism.  Both the editorial and the papers originated at a conference hosted by CEHC in December 2010.

The first paper, written by a team at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, found preliminary evidence linking smoking during pregnancy to Asperger's disorder and other forms of high-functioning autism.  The next two papers, written by researchers at the University of California - Davis, show that PCBs disrupt early brain development. The final paper, also by a team at UC - Davis, suggests further exploring the link between pesticide exposure and autism.

Ultimately, all five papers call for increased research to identify the possible environmental causes of autism in America's children.

This importance of this call to action can not be emphasized enough, because while our children may only represent 30% of our population, they are 100% of our future and we need to protect them like our country depends on it.  Because it does.

So what can you do to protect the health of your children?  Thankfully, a lot.  And while none of us can do everything, all of us can do something, so choose one, some or all from the list below:

• Eat organic food whenever possible to reduce exposure to synthetic pesticides which by law are not allowed for use in its production
• Open your windows to clear the air in your home from the toxins that can accumulate there
• Take your shoes off as you come inside to keep pesticides on the soles of your shoes from entering your home
• Look for cans and plastic bottles that are "BPA-free"

The landscape of food has changed.  Not only is it available 24/7 and  marketed to us using mobile apps and Internet games, but it is also full of lots of ingredients that just didn't exist when we were kids.   So while our food may look the same, it now contains  artificial, engineered and genetically altered ingredients that are so new that patents have been filed on them in the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Not something any busy eater wants to hear.  Especially a busy parent who is doing his or her best to simply get the kids to eat.

But we are quickly learning that the ingredients in our foods - the good ones that include vitamins and minerals and the ones that have the potential to cause harm - have a lot to do with the health of our families.

And if you are just getting started on trying to eat a little cleaner or reduce your families exposure to artificial ingredients, you may be hearing about something called "genetically engineered foods."  If you haven't heard about them, you're not alone.  While countries around the world labeled these ingredients when they were introduced in the 1990s, we didn't here.

So a lot has changed in our food in the last decade, and given the juggling act that most of us perform on a daily basis, coupled with the fact that these new ingredients were never labeled, it's no surprise that we are only just beginning to have this dialogue around the labeling of these ingredients here in the United States.  States like California, North Carolina and other have taken a lead on it.  But the dialogue is now being held at the national level, with millions of citizens calling on the FDA to do the same.  So we put together a short Q&A, working  with researchers who have not accepted funding from or developed patents for the corporations developing these new products, to pull together this information for you.

FACT SHEET: GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOODS