Free Republic

A proposed Maryland bill would restore the right of the states’ citizens to participate in cow shares, or cow boarding, to obtain raw milk. Maryland citizens lost the right to raw milk via cow shares in 2006, when the appointed director of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene redefined the word “sale” to include agistments. A hearing on the bill is scheduled for January 28 at 1:00pm at the Lowe House Office Building in Annapolis. Cow shares or cow boarding refers to a practice in which people buy shares in individual animals for a portion of the milk...

(Colo, IA) A teacher in Colo, Iowa, decided to eat only at McDonald’s for 90 days to see what it would do to his health. The result turned out to be a good lesson for him and his students. “I can eat any food at McDonald’s I want as long as I’m smart for the rest of the day with what I balance it out with,” said science teacher John Cisna said That was the theory Cisna laid out for three of his students at Colo-Nesco high school this past fall. Ninety days of Mickey D’s for breakfast, lunch and...

Would you rather sip on unpasteurized milk or a cold glass of soda? Do you prefer Saturday lunch at a fast food joint or a farmers market? Regardless of your choices, your food freedom -- your right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, share, cook, eat, and drink the foods you want -- is under attack. Here are ten food freedom issues to keep an eye on in 2014. 1: FDA May Ban or Restrict a Growing Number of Food Ingredients. The FDA has proposed banning oils containing trans fats, an ingredient found in foods like coffee creamers and muffins....

One child had a BMI measurement of 35, which for a six-foot man would mean weighing 19st. Britain's obesity epidemic, which sees NHS hospitals dealing with 1,000 cases every day, is a reversal of the traditional problem when children were undernourished. Increasingly social workers find youngsters being fed a high-fat, sugary diet, which can be just as bad for their health. The phenomenon is known as "killing with kindness" because the child craves the unhealthy food and a loving parent feels unable to say no. Professionals say they have to make complex decisions in care proceedings and a family's gross...

<p>McDonald’s has some healthy advice for its workers – don’t eat at McDonald’s.</p> <p>The fast-food behemoth recently posted the jaw-dropping tip on its Web site for employees, warning that the very same burgers and fries they sling for their legions of customers are hazardous to their health.</p>

Q uestions about the health benefits of vitamin supplements have been percolating in the medical establishment for decades — even as the multivitamin industry has grown to a multi-billion powerhouse in the U.S. This week, the respected journal the Annals of Internal Medicine put its well-heeled foot down. "We believe that the case is closed — supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults with (most) mineral or vitamin supplements has no clear benefit and might even be harmful," the journal said in an editorial. "These vitamins should not be used for chronic disease prevention. Enough is enough." Here's Dr. Edgar Miller...

The National Institutes of Health is spending over $224,000 to study how to introduce healthy child menus in an effort to alter the “ordering behavior” of kids in restaurants. A research project awarded on Nov. 26 to San Diego State University will attempt a “restaurant-based intervention,” coupled with a marketing campaign aimed at children to fight obesity. The school has been given $224,250 for an “exploratory intervention” study that will specifically target Latino children, which the researchers say have the highest rates of obesity. The project will first observe children’s “menu ordering and consumption behaviors” in 12 restaurants, followed by...

According to the Obama White House, the first family consumed a Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, honey-baked ham, cornbread stuffing, oyster stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, greens, green bean casserole, dinner rolls and macaroni and cheese.Then, the family washed all that down with nine kinds of pies: huckleberry, pecan, sweet potato, peach, apple, pumpkin, banana cream, coconut cream and chocolate cream.For years now First Lady Michelle Obama has been pushing her program called "Let's Move" for more exercise and better foods. She wants Americans to eat healthier, homemakers and schools to prepare her healthier recommended meals and to require restaurants to...

The disease-fighting punch of green tea is largely due to its high concentration of epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a substance with more antioxidant activity than vitamins C and E and other nutritional heavyweights. The other side of the green tea story: Even if you are consuming green tea, the truth is that you might not be getting what you pay for. Some bottled green teas and even green tea supplements contain only trace amounts of EGCG. Meanwhile, the amount of EGCG in other green tea–based products can vary by more than 240%. These and other findings, from the scientists at ConsumerLab.com,...

If you send your child to school in Manitoba with roast beef, potatoes, carrots, an orange and some milk, you should prepare yourself for the inevitable accusations of negligence, a $10 fine and having your kids force-fed Ritz crackers to make up for your lack of parental ability. That's right. Meat, vegetables and dairy are all fine and good. But if your kid doesn't get his or her daily intake of saturated fats and processed wheat products, you deserve a scarlet letter branded to your chest. The health blog Weighty Matters posted recently on a Manitoba mother who received a...

Remember the days, not that long ago, when you never encountered the word “gluten”? Unless you were an ambitious baker, it was a rare word, like threnody, or anchorite. No more. Gluten today is nearly up there with yoga and latte, and way more common than twerk. I know people who do not have celiac disease — if you are one of the 1 percent of Americans who suffer from celiac disease, letting gluten pass between your lips is not an option — who banished gluten from their diets just because, and so do you. They report feeling “so much...

We recently posted Julie Borowski’s video entitled, “Get the Government Off My Donuts.” Sure, it sounds silly and stupid in light of stories about the turmoil in Syria or the persecution in North Korea. Donuts…seriously? Who cares? How shallow is that! Well, despite Julie’s silly donut scarfing demonstration and the light-hearted title, the point of her video wasn’t actually about getting the government away from her donuts. It was about freedom. Nothing shallow about freedom.The FDA taking steps to ban transfats in food doesn’t seem important in light of what’s happening in places like Syria, but the root of Syria’s...

A first-of-its-kind survey of pediatric waiting rooms finds that parents often give their kids junk food and sugary drinks, seemingly unaware of efforts like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to educate parents on the do's and don’ts of healthy eating. While the first lady gets credit in the new junk food study from the University of Texas Medical School at Houston for making childhood obesity a national issue, the analysis shows that her message and those of similar campaigns haven’t reached the Americans the White House is most focused on: poor, minority kids. “The question arises whether these programs are...

Thanks to the dubiously identified "buddy" of Redditor DJDanaK, the world now knows what "raw McRib meat" looks like, stripped of its plush bun, special sauce, and sliced onion. Since many manufacturers produce boneless, mechanically separated "rib" products, the exact provenance of this particular mystery-meat specimen is the subject of ongoing debate deep within the Reddit trenches at this very moment.

Recently, I was the lead author on a paper demonstrating that about 40 years and many millions of dollars of US nutritional surveillance data were fatally flawed. In most research domains, such a finding might be monumental; yet in nutrition epidemiology—the study of the impact of diet on health, hereafter referred to simply as “nutrition”—these results are commonplace. In fact, there is a large body of evidence demonstrating that the systematic misreporting of energy and macronutrient intake renders the results and conclusions of the vast majority of federally funded nutrition studies invalid. So what is going on? Is such research...

Prohibition: Washington is moving to ban trans fats. The obvious question, of course, is what will it ban next? If it can outlaw trans fats, it can outlaw anything. Is taking away choice what we want government to do? Trans fats, also called partially hydrogenated oils by many, have been in our foods for decades. These artificial fats help extend shelf life and in some cases simply make food taste better. Activists, though, tell us they're not healthy. We're not going to debate the issue. The health concerns of trans fats are not the point. But this is: Where does...

McAllen, Tex. — They were already running late for a doctor’s appointment, but first the Salas family hurried into their kitchen for another breakfast paid for by the federal government. The 4-year-old grabbed a bag of cheddar-flavored potato chips and a granola bar. The 9-year-old filled a bowl with sugary cereal and then gulped down chocolate milk. Their mother, Blanca, arrived at the refrigerator and reached into the drawer where she stored the insulin needed to treat her diabetes. She filled a needle with fluid and injected it into her stomach with a practiced jab.“Let’s go,” she told the children,...

Nutrition is full of all kinds of nonsense. The worst examples are listed here, but unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are the top 13 nutrition lies that have made the world both sick and fat. Eggs are so incredibly nutritious that they’re often called “nature’s multivitamin.”The nutrients in them are enough to turn a single cell into an entire baby chicken.However, eggs have been demonized in the past because they contain a large amount of cholesterol, which was believed to increase the risk of heart disease.But the truth is that despite being high in cholesterol,...

Once, pasta and bread were store cupboard staples. Now, many of us are replacing them with ‘healthier’ gluten-free foods. But are they really better for us? ... The new ubiquity of gluten-free products certainly makes life much easier for sufferers of coeliac disease, an auto-immune response to wheat where the body believes wrongly that gluten is attacking it... But coeliacs make up only one in 100 of the population ... Nutritionist Ian Marber agrees that yeast, not gluten, may be the real culprit... Marber acknowledges that gluten intolerance does exist, but probably in fewer cases than is generally believed. ......

The change doesn’t affect Kraft’s plain elbow-shaped macaroni and cheese with “original flavor.” Kraft’s new recipes, which begin shipping early next year, will be for its macaroni and cheese varieties that come in the SpongeBob Squarepants, Halloween and winter shapes. Two new shapes will also be added. The company said it plans to replace the artificial dyes with spices such as paprika for coloring.