This is the fruits of liberalism.

Mmmmmm.....long pig. Best slow smoked with fruit wood.

I've thought of this one many times over the years.
To me it would make sense for candy companys to spread these tales.
Virtually no one uses baked goods, popcorn balls, fruit or any other "Treat" anymore unless it's a perfectly wrapped, factory packaged treat.

To me it's a no brainier who benefited from these stories.

I thought there was some speculation that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was probably a pomegranate.

I mean. if that tree was real. and the devil was real. then it would sorta been the devil's fruit. briefly. If any of that was real.

To me, this is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. I understand why some Christians and Christian organizations are trying to fight these culture wars, but it is completely futile. What difference does it make which flag is flying when the culture has basically completely rejected biblical Christianity. The moral decline that is happening is the bad fruit that comes out of that. If you chop off the fruit and branches, they will just grow back because you haven't dealt with the root system.

It is in the best interest of media, news and politicians to keep this poisoned fruit of racism alive. There is big money in it. They don't want you to truly know the 'other'.

Daryl Davis is doing a good job.

Could be good.
Racism is just one poisoned fruit of the tree of ignorance.
If you take the time to know the 'other', you may realize there is no significant difference beyond appearances. People of other races and cultures may be more similar to your mindset and morals than people of your own, individuals are individuals.

Your video, Fruits and vegetables before and after domestication, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Here's the study he's talking about in the video: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311889?query=featured_home&#Results=&t=articleBackground

It looks like a legitimate study, but being correlational it should be taken with a grain of salt *snare drum, splash cymbal* As corrolation cannot show causation.

They seem to control for various factors like age, cholesterol level and previous hypertension too, so they don't appear to be fudging any results.

Perhaps I could argue they aren't measuring salt intake, but rather sodium excretion, and estimating intake based on urine samples. So there is potentially a huge difference in diet - a lot of the participants were from Asia, where they don't tend to use table salt (they use soy sauce instead) And even though it's still high in sodium, soy sauce could be going through a different process inside the body. (Similar to how sugar doesn't cause an insulin spike when it's in fruit form, but does when it's refined form). It's possible that the salt from soy could be passing through the body rather than settling in the blood stream. I'm just speculating. Or perhaps they are also eating other foods which are protective against moderate salt intake, allowing more of it to be excreted than absorbed.

Either way it's very interesting to me :-)

What I would like to see is a study on foods, rather than ingredients to get a better picture. Because humans don't usually eat individual minerals, and combinations of minerals seem to act differently in the body.


I guess what it's all saying though is if you are healthy, then 3-6g of salt is fine, but once you are at risk of CVD you need to back off in order to reverse the damage. But CVD is of course not the only disease people need to be careful about (although it is the #1 we should be worrying about), but salt also feeds various cancers etc.

I've been growing white strawberries (called pineberries, because they are supposed o taste like pineapple, but don't) for years. They spread into my aquaponics bed and took off. They grow and spread like wildfire, but we weren't impressed with the fruits, so I use them as ground cover mostly.

Thanks. I thought it was about time to make a push, what with Trump and all the low hanging fruit to be sifted. Now that I'm gold star does that mean I'm entitled to the French Breakfast Puffs?

**EDIT**
I'm finding other sources that say that sterile "terminator seeds" are a patented technique, but that Monsanto has promised not to use it. Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx

So it appears that my info below is wrong. I will try to talk with my family and get the full story. That being said, I'll leave my original comment and the followup below unaltered.
*********


My firsthand knowledge of this stuff was from more than 10 years ago, and also when I was pretty young (early 20's). So I did some web searching to try to get updated since your question is a very interesting one:

http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/about.html

According to that, Monsanto is the company behind "Roundup Ready", and their corn (and other crops in the line) do use sterile "terminator seeds". It also mentions that farmers "must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto" each year.

I was never in the decision-making structure of my family farm, but I did remember that we couldn't just buy the Roundup Ready seed *once* and then hold a small amount back as seed for the next year and continue to get the benefits.

I'm not 100% sure exactly how the modification for sterility works -- I don't know if the plant will sprout if you plant the sterile seeds and just fail to produce any ears / fruit, or if it just won't germinate at all. I do remember that we had to be quite careful to fully clean out the corn grown from the GM seeds from our storage bins, and better yet to store our non-GM corn to be used for future seed in entirely different bins. That was done to make sure that we didn't end up planting any of the sterile stuff.

I'm sure that the seed dealers that sell the GM stuff really push farmers to buy and plant it every year, as hinted to in that link. But you certainly don't *have* to. On the other hand, if you go back to non-GM seed for a year or two or more, you can't use a strong herbicide like Roundup if you have an unexpected outbreak of weeds or other pest plants -- the Roundup would kill the non-GM crop along with everything else.

Basically, I don't specifically begrudge companies like Monsanto for their practices concerning these GM crops. The "terminator seeds" are controversial, but don't seem like a big deal to me. If you could buy GM seeds once and then just hold back some of your harvest for next season's seed, they'd only get your money once AND we'd probably lose the original strains. So I see that as kinda win-win, especially if you don't 100% buy into their sales department urging you to use GM seed every single year.

I don't want to sound like a shill for Monsanto -- some of their other practices are pretty shady, particularly political lobbying. But from the perspective of my family farm, the GM corn that we use was/is a real beneficial thing. Significantly less pesticide/herbicide use over time, and it allows for expanded low/no till farming. Before herbicides, tilling was one of the only ways to kill off pest plants. But, it also makes the fields lose some moisture and nutrients. Expanded farming and ubiquitous tilling was largely the cause of the "dust bowl" dirty 30's. Anyway, I'd say that a lot of good has come out of modernized techniques and technology like GM crops.

Trivia:

While not exactly proven (correlation is not causation), the wide spread introduction of refrigeration for food storage probably was the reason behind the gross decline of GI Cancer as a major source of death before the 1930s...

"Until the late 1930s, stomach cancer was the leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Now, stomach cancer is well down on this list. The reasons for this decline are not completely known, but may be linked to increased use of refrigeration for food storage. This made fresh fruits and vegetables more available and decreased the use of salted and smoked foods. Some doctors think the decline may also be linked to the frequent use of antibiotics to treat infections. Antibiotics can kill the bacteria called Helicobacter pylori (H pylori), which is thought to be a major cause of stomach cancer."

American Cancer Society...

The mechanism appears to have been the move away from pickling/smoking...and towards fruits/vegetables/etc which an in-home refrigerator let you use...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1971721/?page=1

I find the reddit thread to be more logical. I pretty much tossed out credibility for the video, and the freethought link, when I noticed their primary source were people from the 'Delta Paranormal Project'. Plus, I mean, statements like "...Mississippians know better than to taste the bitter fruit fertilized with the blood of atrocity." and "excruciating conditions akin to Nazi concentration camps" don't exactly lend themselves to rational discourse.

I believe we did create camps to most likely protect the former slaves from a hostile populace of southerners angry over the loss of the war and the freeing of the slaves. There is a good likelihood that 1000 or so freed slaves died from conditions in those camps. I can almost guarantee that if they had been left to wander the area unprotected, you would have likely been able to walk across the Mississippi River on the bodies of dead former slaves killed by a vengeful local populace.