Bonjour! Are you well today? I hope you are. I have a question for you...
Have you by any chance eaten a genetically engineered food product today? The resounding answer is “most certainly.”
Hello again to you all, my old Friends, Family, Fans, Supporters and Readers of my previous forays into the fascinating relation between food and health. To all my new readers, welcome to my fifth effort in this ancient concept in the world at large, yet a burgeoning field in the U.S.A., the connection between food and health.
This new effort will endeavor to educate you in the mysterious world of food engineering. I would like to explore with you how our food is manipulated by large corporations for world food domination and profits. I do not mean to scare you, just to educate you into the alternative world of genetically engineered food you and I eat every day without being aware. I sincerely hope it will open your eyes to its ultimate effects on our health and that of our children.
To make sure you are clear from the beginning, as a Chef and Food Nutritionist, I am absolutely against it. I am anti-GMOs and proud of it. No one messes with my food and my health. I will not pretend to agree or even argue with the pro-GMO side of the food business which in reality is the world of toxic food degeneration and chemicals. Feel free to read their side of this story somewhere else. I feel that my responsibility to you, dear reader and longtime follower, is to help you understand this issue so you can make an educated decision. After that, what you decide to do with this information is entirely up to you.
Even though I will give you a lot of information, as in my previous books, I will try to make it easy for you to understand without drowning you in scientific mumbo jumbo or fancy and complicated words. As some of you already know, I approach the subject of health and nutrition form the point of view of a food geek and a French chef, otherwise known as a food lover, not as a scientist. I am a romantic food fool.
Before I became passionate about the nutritional aspect of food, I worked in many capacities in the food business for about 30 years. As a chef handling food daily, I expressed my love of food in my craft as a chef and skills in presenting my food in an artistic and appetizing form. In those days, my love for tasty food and pastries were my only guides.
About 15 years ago, I started to make the connection between the quality of the food we eat and the quality of our life and health. It became my new passion and gave a whole new direction to my approach to food.
It is in the name of this love of good quality food that I wrote this book. It came mostly from the outrage I felt when I discovered how industrial food was treated in this country and its negative influence on our quality of life and ultimate costs in dollars and suffering. In my ongoing exploration of the connection between food quality and health, I am willing to explore the dark side of our food world for you. Are you ready to follow me?
Unlike my previous books, this practical manual will not contain recipes. Unless you specifically request them in a follow-up book, I do not see the point of offering recipes based on non-GMO foods. Quality food is food any way you slice it. It should be easy once you know what to do with it. How you put them together should be easy once you know how to select your source ingredients. Feel free to refer to any of my previous books for the healthiest ways to shop and cook tasty French recipes.
Instead I will endeavor to explain the dark side of genetically engineered foods and give you advice on how to avoid them and eat only good quality, nourishing foods.
I will also give you some examples of how GMOs can affect your health. Again, I will not drown you with tons of negative results of eating GMOs, just enough so you will get the picture. There are plenty of great scientific studies, reports and books already available on this subject. I will give you a list of books or reports to read if you are interested in digging deeper. Remember, the title is “GMO 101”, not “101 scientific reasons to avoid GMOs”. Find all the scientific answers you are looking for in the Resources section at the end of this book.
Finally, to help you make sense of this complicated issue, I will give you a long list of GM ingredients hiding in your daily food, groceries, supplements and even skin care and cosmetics to help you avoid them. To complete this effort, feel free to explore the long list (and growing daily) of wonderful non-GMO products verified by the Non-GMO Project.
You are about to enter another dimension, the dimension of food manipulations in secret labs. A dimension not only of toxins and gene manipulation, but of the creative mind of mad scientists. A journey into a wondrous dark land of Frankenfood. Next stop, the GMO Zone! (Inspired from my favorite show of all times, “The Twilight Zone”)
I hope this practical manual will open your eyes to what seems to be a strange parallel world but unfortunately is all too real in our daily lives, I wish you “A Votre Santé” (To Your Health).
Ready? Follow me into the GMO Zone.
– Chef Alain Braux.