Many people are afraid of trace amounts of poison, especially in their food and water; failing to understand that the amount of poison is what really determines a food’s safety, not that the toxin exists.

Image via Wikipedia

We routinely tolerate toxic chemicals in the food we eat every day. Even organic fruits and vegetables contain extremely toxic chemicals. For every gram of artificial pesticide residue we consume, we eat over 22 pounds of natural toxins found the vegetables themselves.

As an example, I’ve prepared a sampling of a carrot’s ingredients; other than carbohydrates, fat, water, fiber, and protein, a carrot contains 371 measurable compounds, many of them extremely toxic to humans.

Listed below the ingredients list I have compiled a listing of the chemical properties of these chemicals. You’ll see that the chemicals in carrots are used as sunscreens, pesticides, tranquilizers, contraceptives, decongestants, refrigerants, preservatives, soap, sedatives, and rat poison. Many are carcinogenic and toxic to the heart and central nervous system.  We are able to ingest carrots and receive a net health benefit because the poisons are found in small amounts. As you can see, carrots are anything but “chemical free.”

A carrot contains:
ALANINE, ACETONE, ACETALDEHYDE, ALPHA LINOLENIC ACID, ALUMINUM, ARSENIC, ASARONE, ALPHA TERPINENE, BORNYL ACETATE, BORON, BROMINE, BUTYRIC ACID, CADMIUM, CAMPHOR, CHOLESTEROL, CHOLINE, CHROMIUM, COBALT, CYSTINE, CYSTEINE, ETHANOL, FORMIC ACID, FUMARIC ACID, GLUTAMIC ACID, HYDROGEN CYANIDE, ISOBUTYRIC ACID, ISOPRENE, LAURIC ACID, LEAD, LECITHIN, LITHIUM, LYSINE, MALIC ACID, MERCURY, METHYLAMINE, MYRISTICIN, NICKEL, OXALIC ACID, PHENYLALANINE, PHOSPHORUS, QUERCETIN, SILICON, STEARIC ACID, SULFUR, TARTARIC ACID, TIN, TITANIUM, TRYPTOPHAN, XYLITOL.

If an organic carrot were labeled with this (partial) list of its ingredients, how many of us would purchase one? It contains many chemicals that we might reject including Phytic Acid ( 52,700 ppm; a preservative with E number E391), Xanthotoxin (300 ppb; a drug with the trade name Oxsoralen), Oxalic Acid (56 ppm, a pesticide used to treat bee hives, fatal in humans at 71mg/kg), Methylamine (3,970 ppm, an industrial solvent and DEA controlled substance), and so on.

Carcinogenic, Cardiotoxic, CNS-Stimulant, CNS-Toxic, Contraceptive, Convulsant, Corrosive, Cytotoxic, Decongestant, Deliriant, Disinfectant, Diuretic, Expectorant, Fatal, Flatugenic, FPTase-Inhibitor, Genotoxic, Hallucinogenic, Hepatocarcinogenic, Hepatotoxic, Herbicide, Hormone, Hypnotic, Hypothalmic-Depressant, Immunosuppressant, Insect-Repellent, Insecticide, Irritant, Laxative, Lubricant, Motor-Depressant, Mosquitocide, Myorelaxant, Narcotic, Neuroexcitant, Neuroinhibitor, Neurotoxic, Ozone-Scavenger, Parasiticide, Perfume, Pesticide, Phototoxic, Pituitary Stimulant, Preservative, Refrigerant, Renotoxic Respiration Depressant, Rodent Poison, Sedative, Soap, Spermicide, Stimulant, Sunscreen, Sweetener, Surfactant, Termiticide, Testosteronigenic, Toxic, Tranquilizer, Tumorigenic, Tumor Promoter, Urine-Acidifier, Uterorelaxant, Vasodilator, Vasomotor Stimulant.

SOURCE:
http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/plants.html

The World Health Organization released a statement in 2004 regarding health risks associated with demineralized water. This statement was in response to the growing number of people drinking desalinated water from oceans around the world. There are more than 11 thousand desalination plants in the world with an overall production of more than 8 billion gallons of desalinated water per day.

This is interesting because I grew up drinking demineralized water. We paid for it to be demineralized in a reverse osmosis filter at the supermarket. Most of the people I know drink purified (demineralized) water every day.

According to over 80 studies completed around the world, low mineral water increases health risks for cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases or other health problems. It seems that our bodies need dissolved minerals in fluid and cannot effectively use minerals found in food only.

Simply stated, when we ingest demineralized water, our body is forced to re-mineralize it (using stored minerals in bone) before the water can be passed into the bloodstream. When we are done with the water we have no way to demineralized it, and the minerals are lost in the urine. Mineralized water comes into the body already mineralized and leaves the body without robbing us of essential minerals.

Low mineral water is “aggressive” and corrodes pipes, pans, and anything it contacts, attempting to re-mineralize. It is so aggressive that desalination plants are forced to add some minerals to the water after purification — just to protect their pipes. Low mineral water absorbs metal that it contacts, which we in turn ingest.

Additionally, studies carried out in Texas show that in counties where water mineral content is low, crime and suicide rates rise. The more minerals (and pollutants) in the tap water, the lower the crime and suicide rates. This effect may be related to the amount of trace lithium in the water.

The world health organization has formulated drinking water standards for the third world in order to reduce negative health effects seen in persons using low mineral water. Their standards are as follows:

Total dissolved solids (TDS): Min 100ppm, ideal is 200-400ppm
PH (Acidity): As close to 7 (Neutral) as possible
Calcium: Min 20ppm, ideal is 40-80ppm
Magnesium: Min 10ppm, ideal is 20-30ppm

I’ve taken a look at a lot of mineral content and total dissolved solids (TDS) statistics for bottled waters and have found two that make the cut according to the WHO. Naya and Evian. All others fall short in some area. FIJI water almost passed, but is low in calcium and magnesium (17ppm calcium and 13ppm magnesium).

Naya appears to be mostly unavailable anywhere in the united states, so our only choice left is Evian, one of the most expensive on the shelf.

Recently I purchased two devices which measure the TDS and acidity (PH) of fluids. They are intended largely for aquarium use but work very well for my purposes. Below are my test results:

WATERS:
Distilled water: 0.40ppm TDS, 6.8 PH
FIJI water: 167, 7.65 (bottle claims 209, 7.5)
Evian: 280, 7.18 (bottle claims 309, 7.2)
Deja Blue: 8, 6.2
Fairfield Tap water: 612, 8.75
Hy-Vee spring water: 64, 8.3
Aquafina: 1.2, 7.34
Dasani: 29, 5.75
Essentia: 49, 7.85 (claims to be 9.4 PH)
Pellegrino: 660, 6.7 (claims 960ppm TDS; Interesting that Pellegrino is carbonated but retains a neutral PH. Tooth enamel dissolves at 5.2-5.5 PH, so this stuff won’t degrade teeth.)

New Brita filter, FF tap water: 515, 5.3 — Britta takes a little TDS out and lowers the PH. Lower PH tends to make crappy water taste better – lemon in your tap water serves similar function. Gives it an acidic bite and makes it taste more “crisp.”

Expired Brita filter, FF tap: 510, 7.2

“Washed” Brita filter, FF tap: 573, 6.5 — One website claimed that buying new filters was a consumerist scam and all you need is to wash the filter upside down for 5 mins instead. Pure BS.

In an effort to create water that meets the standards for healthy drinking water set by the WHO, I experimented with various colloidal and trace mineral drops.  Most are worthless, containing almost no dissolved minerals, according to my tests.

I finally found one that was concentrated sea water that works to mineralize the water — but does not contain enough calcium or magnesium. So I ordered some ionic calcium and magnesium, and by mixing all three with purified water I can approximate Evian water’s PH, mineral content and calcium/magnesium content. It’s difficult, time consuming, and the ingredients run about 50 cents per liter — I can get Evian for 75 cents/liter if I buy in bulk, so unfortunately it is still easier/higher quality water to go with the Evian.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sun-Assisted Desalination (technologyreview.com)
• Municipal Water Reuse Market set for Explosive Growth (prweb.com)

GMAC Insurance has released the results of its National Drivers Test for 2009. The test, which measures basic knowledge of driving laws, was given to more than 5,000 drivers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia — and Iowa is near the top of the list.

State Rankings; note: Many states tied for the same position in the rankings.

• 1 IDAHO
• 1 WISCONSIN
• 3 MONTANA
• 4 KANSAS
• 5 SOUTH DAKOTA
• 5 NEBRASKA
• 7 UTAH
• 8 WYOMING
• 8 IOWA
• 8 OREGON
• 8 MINNESOTA
• 12 ALASKA
• 12 NORTH DAKOTA
• 14 VERMONT
• 15 COLORADO
• 15 MISSOURI
• 17 OKLAHOMA
• 17 WASHINGTON
• 19 NEW MEXICO
• 20 NORTH CAROLINA
• 21 VIRGINIA
• 22 INDIANA
• 22 MICHIGAN
• 24 ARKANSAS
• 24 TEXAS
• 26 ALABAMA
• 26 NEVADA
• 28 WEST VIRGINIA
• 29 ILLINOIS
• 30 ARIZONA
• 31 MAINE
• 32 DELAWARE
• 33 NEW HAMPSHIRE
• 34 OHIO
• 35 KENTUCKY
• 36 PENNSYLVANIA
• 37 LOUISIANA
• 38 TENNESSEE
• 38 MISSISSIPPI
• 40 SOUTH CAROLINA
• 40 MARYLAND
• 42 CONNECTICUT
• 43 FLORIDA
• 44 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
• 45 MASSACHUSETTS
• 46 RHODE ISLAND
• 47 GEORGIA
• 48 CALIFORNIA
• 49 HAWAII
• 50 NEW JERSEY
• 51 NEW YORK

Notice that with the exception of Oregon and Washington state, all of the states currently banning cell phone usage for drivers (California, Connecticut, DC, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Washington) are the near the bottom of the list.

Curious how you’d do? Take the test yourself at http://nationaldriverstest.com/

When you’re finished, GMAC will even let you play a video game that teaches you how to avoid elderly people and aliens in the roadway.

Imagine we travel back in time to a primitive cave-dwelling tribe. They have no money and trade pigs for cows, a knife for some honey, etc. The tribe is doing well but is having trouble trading. Sometimes a farmer wants to buy something smaller than one whole pig, and home builders (a new development; cave space is running out) want to sell their products but it’s hard to save up 1,000 pigs to buy a home.

We decide that we will introduce money to their economy. How would we do it? We can’t simply €œprint€ a bunch of coins or dollar bills €“ how would we distribute them to the people?

We can’t give equal shares to everyone in the group €“ some people have no pigs and no huts, while others have large farms with many animals. How do we decide who gets how much money?

We could have the chief buy pigs and honey and cows from the tribespeople in exchange for the newly minted dollars; a pig farmer might sell a pig to the chief for a dollar. This would set the value of each dollar at one pig.

But this system would eventually end up with the chief’s cave containing all the products that the tribe had produced. No one would be able to use the homes, pigs, cows and knives. So how do we get money into the hands of tribespeople without taking all the valuable items and storing them in a cave?

There are a few ways to do it, but we’ll use the method still used today. When a pig farmer grows a pig, he goes to the chief and asks for a loan of one dollar. The chief says €œshow me the pig,€ and issues a loan to the farmer at interest.

Now we have dollars in circulation along with all the goods produced. So as we can see from this example:

Pig = Dollar

Dollars are money, so where does money come from? It comes from pigs and all the items produced by the people. At its most basic level, money is simply a representation of valuable things.

Money cannot come into being without the goods, because money represents the goods themselves. The chief only issues loans to someone who has produced a pig.

This is how the Federal Reserve works. It issues loans to people who have already created something of value, or issues money to people who are trustworthy and in the process of creating something valuable.

In a similar way, a respected tribesperson could ask the chief for a loan to build a house. The house and the money come into being at the same time €“ the money comes into the system only to represent the house that is being created.

In a simple cave-person system it would be relatively easy to track how much money goes into the system €“ the leader would only loan money to people who had already created something valuable, or was certain to create it soon. His purpose in issuing loans would be to mirror the amount of goods created with the amount of money loaned out.

Today the Fed does the same thing on a grand scale. It attempts to look at how much valuable stuff is being produced by the United States, and issue loans (through banks) to mirror the goods produced.

From this basic understanding of the source of money, we can see what would happen if the chief began spending the money he coined; there would be no goods produced to mirror the new money coming into the system.

Let’s imagine that he loans a dollar to the first pig farmer because he has created one pig. Now the farmer has the dollar and the pig. The chief then makes another coin and purchases the original pig. The chief ends up with one pig, and the farmer ends with two coins. Each pig now effectively represents two coins instead of one. This is inflation, or “inflationary spending.”

Similarly, when the Fed overestimates the number of €œpigs€ that have been produced, it allows banks to issue too many loans and the price for each pig goes up.

When one thinks about money, it need not be some mysterious idea. Money is not something imagined, but a very real representation of value €“ value that someone produced.

If you lived in the cave-tribe, each dollar you spend would be there because someone worked to create something of value for the society. The more valuable things the tribe manages to create €“ the more money they will have in society. And remember, each dollar introduced represents real value. It represents a house, pig, or knife that someone created.

All of the complex things we hear about money can be reduced to this simple idea. Wealth is destroyed when we consume something. If we eat a pig, a dollar is destroyed. Wealth is created when we produce something of value €“ something that someone else wants and is willing to pay for. When we grow a pig, we create money.

If I take a raw forest, cut down some trees, and build a house from scratch, I have created money. Very real money; I can now go to the bank (chief), ask for an estimate of my home’s value in dollars (pigs) and receive a loan.

It’s unfortunate that so many of use do not understand the raw source of money. Many seem to be lost in a world where money is seemingly randomly distributed; we don’t understand why some are so rich and some are so poor, and there is a disconnect which causes hardship and confusion about how one becomes rich.

We suspect one acquires wealth by luck, real estate, the stock market, cheating the system, taking advantage of others, or perhaps by playing the lottery.  There is often some voice in the shadows of one’s mind urging him to work harder and save more, but late night television says money is imaginary, that the Fed conspires with the government to steal from us, that one need only open their heart chakra and accept wealth, or that money is created when the government spends (the chief spending money).

From our simple example, it’s easy to see that money doesn’t simply flow to the tribespeople with open hearts, and it is not created when the chief (government) spends it. Wealth is created when people make something or do something that other people want €“ something that improves the lives of the people around them.

Imagine a world with two neighboring towns, Fairfield and Ottumwa. Fairfield makes very high quality chairs, Ottumwa makes very good cheese. What would happen if the chair maker in Ottumwa asked everyone to “buy local,” and get their chairs from him instead of from Fairfield?

His arguments would be familiar:

1. For every $100 you spend in my chair shop, $68 is returned to the community through taxes, payroll, and my own spending.
2. If you don’t buy local chairs, we won’t have a local chair shop anymore.
3. If everyone purchased local chairs we would keep all of our money in the community, which will make us all better off.

All of this is nonsense, and it’s not difficult to see why if we reduce the situation further. Imagine everyone took his advice and stopped trading cheese for chairs. Fairfield’s citizens would no longer have high quality cheese, and Ottumwa would no longer have high quality chairs. Both towns are worse off.

Imagine further that Ottumwa continues to successfully encourage local shopping and succeeds in supporting all of its local businesses. They have a guy who makes dull knives, they have another guy making okay vegetables, and myriad other citizens make everything the town needs. Now let’s compare them to Fairfield, which trades chairs for everything it needs. It trades with Iowa city to get sharp knives, and with Mt. Pleasant to get high quality meat. It gets everything it needs from other cities who also have an exemplary skill, be it knife making or chicken farming.

Ottumwa, whose citizens all buy locally produced products, enjoys only one high quality product — cheese. Fairfield, on the other hand, who’s citizens only produce chairs, enjoy high quality everything.

It is easy to imagine that keeping money close to home is a good idea, but if we remove the confusion of money from the situation and imagine we are simply trading goods with other towns, it is easy to see that when towns trade, everyone enjoys higher quality products at no cost to themselves. We have great chairs, you have great cheese, let’s share!

If trade is removed, each citizen in each town is worse off. The only benefactor of the buy local ideas are the crappy cheese maker in Fairfield or the uncomfy-chair maker in Ottumwa; they become rich when locals feel guilty about trading with their neighbors.

There is no benefit to “keeping money in the community.”  The statement is absurd, akin to saying “keep chairs in the community,” which would be pointless.  Trading chairs to other towns doesn’t hurt Fairfield residents.  It isn’t as if there are a limited amount of chairs, and we must pass them around amongst ourselves in order to have a healthy economy.  To the contrary, the more chairs that leave the community via trade, the better off all of us will be.

Additionally, the term “local” is subjective in nature.  How far does one need to go before a product is not “local” anymore?  Would it not make more sense to view the entire world as “local” and compare the value and quality of each product in that light, rather than believing that buying from your neighbor three doors away is better than buying from the one three blocks away?

Let’s go further with our simplistic example and imagine that our neighboring town, Batavia, has no skills and no products. Its workers are uneducated and there are no industries there. Everyone is living in huts and foraging for food.  Fairfield’s chairs are the best in the area and that people in Chicago are traveling to purchase chairs from us. We need to produce more. What is the answer? We set up a chair factory in Batavia. Unfortunately everyone there wants to work in the chair factory, but none have skills, all need to be trained from scratch (high quality chair making is complicated, delicate work) and all of them virtually beg for a job instead of their continued foraging and dumpster diving.

The factory in Batavia helps the citizens there, and it helps the people in Chicago, who want better chairs, and it helps Fairfield, which is able to enjoy more and more high quality products when it trades away its chairs. Eventually, the low pay rates in Batavia will rise as workers there become skilled, save money, and move to thinking about making something of value instead of wasting their lives looking for food and shelter.

Buying products made in Batavia supports the Batavians, the Fairfield residents, and all residents of the entire surrounding area who wish to own Fairfield’s chairs.  Without the Batavian factory, Batavians would forage for food, Fairfield would have less money, and the people of the surrounding area would have lower quality chairs.

Obviously this is a simplified example.  Batavians being forced to work in horrible conditions, the pollution involved in transport, and other problems are not discussed in order to present an understanding of trade in its pure form.  The complications of modern globalization are a topic for another day.