How raw milk moms helped end Michael Schmidt’s hunger strike

From David E. Gumpert, on The Complete Patient blog:

Michael Schmidt at Weston A. Price Conference. Photo via The Complete Patient blog.

“Ontario dairy farmer Michael Schmidt ended his hunger strike more than a week ago, but he just ate his first solid food yesterday, at the banquet dinner of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Wise Traditions Conference in Dallas.

He didn’t partake in the sable, pot roast, vegetables and poached pears with carob sauce gobbled up by the 1,300 conference participants. After a week of just sipping on vegetable broth because he had no appetite, Schmidt finally felt well enough to have some raw steak and butter—suggested fare from several medical practitioners who have been consulting with Schmidt on getting back into a regular eating routine.

“I didn’t feel like eating food,” he told me this morning. “Last night at the banquet was the first time I began to feel like eating.”

Food as “sugar delivery vehicle”

From Mike Johnson, an “off-topic” post on his “the Online Photographer” blog:

Photo by Ctein, Sugar and Cream, Ben and Jerry's, Vermont, 2010, via the Online Photographer. Click image to go there

“I quit eating sugar last April. Aside from a modest slip on Halloween, I haven’t had any “overt” sugar since then. It’s been an interesting experience.

In an increasingly industrialized food supply, sugar is the perfect industrial food. It’s moderately addictive or habit-forming, in that heavy consumption triggers cravings; it has a high perceived value despite being easy and cheap to produce (astonishingly, more than half of the huge corn crop in the U.S. now goes to the manufacture of high-fructose corn sweetener); it can be used to “enhance” a wide variety of foods as an additive; it’s easy to transport and store because it doesn’t spoil; and most people are genetically predisposed to find it appealing, even when they’re not aware that they’re eating it.