     Do you know what the ingredients are in the food you eat everyday?  What about something as common and seemingly simple as microwave popcorn?  Starting off with the plant that the corn kernels come from, it is definitely going to contain GMOs.  "GMO" stands for genetically modified organisms.  GMOs have been linked to many things, including cancer in humans and death in livestock.  Next, as the plant grows, it is showered in pesticides containing all types of carcinogenics and poisons.  These pesticides are linked to serious illnesses and deaths.  Then, the popcorn kernels are fixed for packaging with an overload of additives.  Transfat, proply gallate, tertiary butylhydroquinone, MSG, beaver's anal glands, and diacetyl butter flavoring are just some of the different ingredients that can be added to this quick snack.  These ingredients can cause everything from a rash, to cancer, to Alzheimer's disease.  Finally, the packaging, the bag that the kernels are put into, is lined with perfluorooctanoic acid.  When perflurooctanoic acid is heated, which all microwavable popcorn bags must be before they are able to pop, it has been linked to infertility and is considered a carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency.  The general public has no idea what most, if any, of these ingredients are and the negative effects that they have on their body.  This is the case with most processed and non-organic foods that are manufactured and then consumed.  Not only is there a lack of knowledge of what is in the foods we eat everyday, there is also an unawareness of what goes into the non- organic livestock farmed for consumption and non-organic processed and famed foods.  

     Microwavable popcorn is not the only food with additives that have potential harmful side- effects.  The majority of processed foods will contain at least one additive that can have a dangerous effect on your health.  Some of the most common are: butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), yellow #5, red #3, and propylene glycol alginate (E405).  Butylated hydroxytoluene is found in chips, vegetable oil, cereal, gum, jet fuel, rubber petroleum products, transformer oil, and embalming fluid.  It can cause a negative effect on sleep and appetite, damage to the liver and kidneys, fetal abnormalities, cancer, and growth retardation.  Yellow #5, like many other food colorings, comes from coal tar and can contain up to 10ppm of lead and arsenic.  Along with containing toxins, it can cause thyroid and kidney tumors.  Red #3 has been banned from being used in cosmetics but is still being used in commonly found foods.  It can also cause thyroid tumors, like yellow #5, and cause chromosomal damage.  Propylene Glycol Alginate is used in foods to thicken and stabilize them, while also being used in automatize freezers and airport runway deicers.  A consistent theme of all these commonly found additives is that they all either have, come from, or are also used in things that are known to be toxic to human beings and even most living things.  Components found in airport runway deicers and jet fuel should not ever be also found in the foods that we put in our bodies.  No matter how small the amount, there is still a harmful toxin going into your system that could have very dangerous side- effects on your health.  There are also other common additives that are not toxic, but are still dangerous and can be very harmful to your body.  One of them is partially hydrogenated oils, or artificial transfat.  It causes over seven thousand deaths and twenty- two thousand heart attacks a year and is no longer genetically recognized as safe (GRAS), but is still very present in food.  Another one is sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite.  They are totally harmless to humans, until they are mixed with stomach acid and they form nitrosamines.  Nitrosamines are potent cancer causing cells that are directly linked with brain, stomach, oral, bladder, and esophageal cancers.  It can be found in meats like hotdogs, sausage, and bacon.  

     Most, if not all, processed foods have some type of grain or plant that is grown out of the ground, on a farm.  Non- organic foods are berated with pesticides or modified to produce the pesticides themselves.  There are many different forms of pesticides.  They are herbicides that kill plants, insecticides that kill insects, fungicides that kill fungus, and rodenticide that kill rodents.  They are poisons created to kill living things, that are being fed to humans in small amounts.  Ninety- eight percent of the pesticides that crops are showered with, do not even end up where they are meant to go.  A few of the harmful ingredients found in most pesticides that we come in contact with in our food and through the air are: ammonia, arsenic, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, and methanol.  Ammonia causes burning in the eyes, nose, throat, and respiratory tract and can result in blindness, lung damage, or death.  Ammonia is also what the providers of low- grade meat use to "clean" it before selling it to the fast food restaurants to try and avoid E. coli.  Arsenic can cause skin, lungs, bladder and kidney cancer, enlargement of the liver, brain damage, and loss of sensation in limbs.  It can also cause a change in the pigmentation in skin, severe vomiting, issues with blood circulation throughout the body, damages to the nervous system, and death.  Ethylene oxide causes irritation in the eyes, skin, mucous membranes, and problems in the functioning of the brain and nerves.  It can cause an increase in miscarriages in women, leukemia, stomach cancer, pancreas cancer, and Hodgkin's disease.  Formaldehyde is a carcinogen, it irritates eyes, throat, causes coughing and wheezing, nausea, and skin irritation.  Methanol causes weakness, dizziness, headaches, vomiting, blurred vision, blindness, and death.  All of these things are being sprayed and injected into crops that are then sold to us in various forms of food.  Scientists from Harvard University and the University of Montreal completed a study that found that these harmful toxins that vegetables and fruits are being coated with, can double the chance of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) appearing in children.  There was also a study done by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that showed that children who live in homes where their parents use pesticides are two times as likely to develop cancer in their brain than those who live in homes where pesticides are not used.  Not only does it cause harm to the people eating it, it also causes harm to the people who have to grow the crops and be around the pesticides constantly.  The farmers who work on these agricultural farms have been told that if they will not work directly with the pesticides, then they will lose their job.  The forced contact with the pesticides has caused a significant increase in signs of cancer, infertility, and many other deadly side effects in the famers.  There are more than three million pesticide poisonings and more than twenty- two hundred thousand deaths due to pesticides that occur each year.  It also is not just adults working directly with the pesticides.  Seventy percent, or one hundred and thirty- two million, of the children working worldwide are forced to work with the harmful pesticides.  Not only is it poisoning the humans who consume, work with, or are exposed to them, it is polluting the environment.  It pollutes the water, the air, hurts beneficial insects, worms, contaminates the soil and destroys it of essential plant nutrients, and weakens plants root and immune systems.  Along with the environment, it poisons household animals, the animals living in the polluted water, and animals that eat worms and bugs that are poisoned.  Over four hundred coastal regions were declared "dead zones" because of runoff fertilizer, containing pesticides, causing toxicity by releasing ammonia into the water and sucking the oxygen out of the area.  This kills off marine life and makes it impossible for any to inhabit that area.  The amount of space taken up by dead zones is equal to the size of the United Kingdom, which is ninety- four thousand and fifty- eight square miles.  By polluting the air, it is exposing people to these toxins even more that they already are by consuming it.  The California Department of Health Services, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and the Public Health Institute did a study and found that children of women who have been exposed to organochlorine pesticides have six times the chance of having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) than those who were not.  In poisoning beneficial insects, it is also poisoning the animals that consume them.  It's causing a breakdown in the food chain.  If insects are being poisoned and dying off, they cannot fulfill their job in the system, and that part will go undone.  Then by poisoning their predators, it's continuing the domino effect of making the food chain and roles in an ecosystem weaker.  The same goes for  poisoning the soil and destroying the worms.  Without healthy and viable soil with nutrients, it is impossible to grow any crops.  The pesticides are dwindling away the natural nutrients in the soil and killing off the organisms that help put nutrients back into it.  The overuse of fertilization from farmed animals who are being fed food made of mostly GMOs and drenched in pesticides, is also causing a significant amount of harm to the soil. 

The majority of the world gets antibiotic shots or medication to cure their bacterial caused infection or illness.  What most people do not know is that the animals they eat are also getting those shots, but with some different ingredients and for different reasons.  They are not given these antibiotics daily to keep them healthy, but to make them grow bigger, fatter, and in certain animals produce more milk.  These animals are loaded up with too much medication that has some very problematic chemicals in it.  The antibiotics injected into the animals contain high amounts of the most carcinogenic form of arsenic, a synthetic- estrogen called diethylstilbestrol (DES), a growth hormone called recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), and other types of antibiotics that are not needed.  The Food and Drug Administration recognizes that there are 30 potentially harmful antibiotics still on the market and being used on animals. Diethylstilbestrol was once given to pregnant women to try and help prevent miscarriages, but was discontinued when it caused vaginal cancer in the daughters of the women who took the pills.  Despite the effect it had on humans, it is still being injected into the animals that are being sold as food to humans.  Also, the increased exposure to estrogen, synthetic or organic, significantly increases the risk of breast cancer.  Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone causes a bacterial infection in cows utters that make them produce more milk and in less time.  It also causes deformities in the utters and produce puss, which does get into the milk sold to consumers.  The overconsumption of antibiotics that are not needed is causing a built up immunity and resistance to antibiotics and is the biggest threat to human health.  This is increasing the chances of contracting an incurable infection or illness.  More than seventy- five percent of the antibiotics they are being used on these farmed animals are not even digested, and are disposed of through waste that is used as fertilizer that then further contaminates crops and water.  In the United States, eight times more antibiotics are sold to factory farms than hospitals.  This is completely disproportionate to other places around the world.  Half the antibiotics sold in China go to factory farming and only one- third in Germany.  

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a growing problem.  While they do have positive effects to them, they have far more negative ones.  They have caused the increase of pesticide and herbicide use, food allergies to significantly increase, cancer, and the percentage of Americans with three or more chronic illnesses to rise six percent in only nine years after being introduced.  There have been toxins from GMOs found in maternal and fetal blood.  The most common herbicide used, Roundup, has been linked to sterility, hormone disruption, birth defects, and cancer in humans and birth defects in amphibians, endocrine disruption, and organ damage in animals.  They have an even bigger negative effect on the environment.  They cross pollinate which makes it difficult to keep foods organic and natural, reduce the biodiversity, and can pass on herbicide tolerant genes to weeds.  While hurting human and animal health and the environment, it is also hurting the economy.  It hurts organic farmers because their product is being contaminated with pesticides that are blown over and GMOs cross pollinating.  The production of GMO seeds is a monopoly.  There is only one company, Monsanto, who produces ninety percent of the GMO seeds and they also make sure they are only resistant to one pesticide, theirs. In 2013, they became practically unstoppable when the Monsanto Protection Act was passed.  This act basically means that if GMOs prove to be causing more health problems or are more harmful that previous thought, there is nothing that can be done to stop the production of them.  If immunity from just about anything trying to stop them was not shady enough, in 2012 they spent forty- six million dollars to prevent Proposition 37 from being passed.  This proposition would have made it mandatory to label foods that contained GMOs.  Why would they be so against that if there was nothing wrong with them?  Not passing this act made the United States the only developed country in the world that does not require the labeling of GMOs.  As of March 16, 2016, the DARK Act was rejected by the senate.  The passing of this bill would have made the labeling of GMOs optional.  While big corporations still use ways around it, like barcodes and other things that the majority of consumers would never know was there or any different from other packaging. 

While it seems like it is all completely hopeless, there are still things you can do to protect yourself from GMOs, pesticides, and unwanted antibiotics.  The biggest thing is to buy organic foods.  It is not only doing your health and body a favor, you are helping the economy and break down monopolies.  There are a lot of organic companies that label their foods to let the consumer know what all they are getting.  If you're going to eat non-organic food, educate yourself with what all is in what you're eating and learn the possible effects it can have.  Reaching out to your senator, signing petitions, and protesting are a few more aggressive tactics to ending the secrecy of what is going in your food.  Even though the DARK Act was rejected, and that shows a big shift in the education and caring of Americans, there are still ways around it.  The S. 2621 Bill was proposed and it requires the labeling to be clear and obvious to all consumers.  By contacting your senator, you can let him know you would like him to support that bill.  There are many forms and already composed letters that you can send so it is very easy.  The same goes for petitions.  They are easy to find online and can be signed quickly and efficiently.  Protests require more dedication and are less in variety and availability.  There are so many things that can be done to stop the intake of these toxins and stop the damage being done to the environment.  From something as small as just educating yourself and doing research to see what the ingredients of your favorite snack could do to you, to going out and protesting the big corporations that are causing the majority of the problems.

