Summer is the season of outdoor activities, like going to the lake, hiking to a creek, or claiming your spot on the strand for a beach day. It’s also the best time of year to have a backyard cookout and gather around the grill. There’s a communal aspect to cooking over the open flame, even if that flame is from a modern propane grill. 

As much fun as grilling is, health experts say that there are many mistakes that people make when doing so. In fact, grilling your food increases your exposure to high levels of cancer-causing compounds. Heterocyclic amines (HCAs) form in meat muscle tissue during high temperature cooking, for example, grilling. There is strong evidence that high consumption of HCAs increases the risk of colon and stomach cancers. At the same time, HCAs can also damage DNA, and may increase the risk of lung, liver, breast, and prostate cancers. 

Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself from HCAs and other carcinogens that come from grilling food. Make sure to avoid these grilling mistakes, some of which are lesser-known, that threaten your health!

You Don’t Clean Your Grill Regularly

When grease, grime, char, and other dirt builds up on your grill grates, you increase the risk of fire while cooking. Additionally, all of that grime can affect the flavor of your food. Don’t be a grill purist and say that, “the grime enhances the flavor,” because it doesn’t. When you regularly clean your grill, you kill off mold and bacteria that may affect your food’s nutrition. Finally, it also reduces the risk of food contamination that can result in sickness. A great way to clean your grill is with an onion or lemon.

You Use Bottled Marinades

It’s hard to resist the marinades that you see in the store. They taste delicious, but bottled marinades are very unhealthy because they are replete with sodium, sugar, fats, preservatives, and other processed ingredients. Make sure that you read the nutritional label and ingredient list on these marinades, as they probably contain problematic ingredients. Thicker marinades, for example, tend to be rich in high-fructose corn syrup, which is more prone to charring. Charring can increase your exposure to carcinogens, so opt for thinner marinades that you make yourself. Many dietitians like to include rosemary in marinades because it is a carcinogen-neutralizing herb. 

You Char Your Meat

Sure, char marks are what people want when they grill food, but you don’t want your meat to develop a lot of char on the exterior. Whether you char your fish, poultry, or beef, you allow HCAs and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to form. According to research, these compounds are mutagenic, which means that they can alter your DNA and increase your cancer risk. Most PAHs form when fat and other juices from meat drop onto the open flame, causing the flames to increase in size and shoot chemicals back up onto the meat. 

You Opt For Well-Done

There are so many jokes about people who ask for well-done burgers or steaks. Chefs think that it is blasphemy and ruins the meat. As it turns out, people who cook their meat until it is well-done have a 15% greater risk of high blood pressure than people who eat medium or medium-rare meat. Additionally, burning or blackening your meat can increase oxidative stress, insulin resistance, and inflammation in the body. Health experts say that you can lose up to 40% of B vitamins and other minerals by overcooking your meat. Overcooking your vegetables, be it on the grill, in the oven, or on the stove, also leads to nutritional loss. 

You Grill Harmful Meat

What do we mean by “harmful meat?” Well, grilling factory-farmed meat is one of the worst grilling mistakes you can make. The reason for this is because drugs and antibiotics are so present in agriculture and turn up non-organic meat. According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety And Inspection Service, medications like ivermectin, flunixin, penicillin, and ciprofloxacin are at higher levels that violate current regulations. Researchers identified that these medications increase the risk of allergic reactions, kidney damage, and neurological problems. If you grill meat, opt for grass-fed/grass-finished, organic, free-range, or wild-caught options to avoid these chemicals.

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There are women all over the world changing the way we view food. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women represent 43% of the world’s agricultural labor force and 47% of the global fisheries labor force. These are hard working women and they produce more than half of the world’s food!

Did you know that female farmers could help lift 150 million people out of poverty if they had access to the same resources as men? That is roughly a 15% decrease in worldwide hunger. Women also comprise the majority of smallholder farmers in Africa, and women primarily lead the households all around the world.

In case you haven’t noticed, the impacts of climate change have become more evident. The world will need to put strategies in place to help decrease world hunger and lessen the damage to the environment. Let these female farmers have access to whatever resources they need to help care for people and the planet.

We’d like to thank all of the women in food and agriculture for their dedication to making the world a healthier and better place. In honor of International Women’s Day, here are some influential women who are making a difference.

Debra Eschmeyer

You may remember her as the executive director of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign. She was also the Senior Policy Advisor for Nutrition Policy during the Obama presidency. She helped promote healthier eating in schools via school cooking, gardening, and better procurement of food. She is now the Vice President of Communications and Community Affairs and Danone North America, where she helps to create healthy foods by using sustainable agriculture.

Gabriela Cámara

This chef from Mexico City opened her restaurant, Cala, in San Francisco and hired former convicts to comprise 70% of the staff. She did this to prove that you can vanish high turnover rates of restaurant staff by paying your employees above minimum wage and treating them well. Additionally, she is steadfast in her goals of creating a more cultured environment via the food she makes.

Jill Isenbarger

As the CEO of Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, Isenbarger has dedicated her her company to creating sustainable ways to grow food. The company helps to train farmers on how they can implement these practices for healthier produce. She also served as the chief of staff at The Nature Conservancy for over ten years!

Elizabeth Kaiser

In Sebastopol, California, Kaiser is implementing a new standard of sustainability on Singing Frogs Farm. She and her husband take a non-mechanized, no-till approach to farming, and the no-till method is becoming more popular because it helps to increase yield per acre. Her goal is to empower the next generation of farmers to create a healthier future.

Diane Hatz

Diane Hatz is dedicated to promoting awareness about problems in American food systems. Her company, Change Food, works to bring food and farming experts together to discuss changes that are necessary for Americans to lead healthier lives. Hatz also co-founded the Glenwood Institute for Sustainable Food and Farming, in addition to starting the Sustainable Table Program while working for GRACE Communications Foundation.

These women, in addition to many more, are making giant steps towards a healthier future. We celebrate them not only today, but every day! Change can happen as long as we are determined!

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The post Here’s Why We Love These Influential Women In Food appeared first on Dherbs - The Best All Natural Herbal Remedies & Products.

Monsanto’s pesticides are sprayed on crops all over the world. These chemicals are associated with massive decrease in the bee population. Toxins also become airborne and if surrounding residents inhale them, they can develop health conditions. Could that all changed with one man’s patent?

Mycologist (fancy term for a person who studies fungi) Paul Stamens developed a patent in 2006, but it has received very little attention and exposure. The reason for this is because his patent could be “…the most disruptive technology we’ve ever witnessed,” said executives in the pesticide industry. Disruptive means good for the world, but very bad for the pesticide industry.

Paul has harnessed the power of nature to create a SMART pesticide. This natural pesticide is extremely safe and can control over 200,000 species of insects. He is calling it a “magic” mushroom. It keeps insects away from the crops without having to spray nasty chemicals on the crops.

Paul does this by taking entomopathogenic fungi (fungi that destroy insects) and morphing them so they do not produce spores. This attracts the insects and when they eat the fungi, they turn into fungi from the inside out. Pretty cool, right?

We live in a world where chemical pesticides are an integral part to modern agriculture. If you tolerate this, then you tolerate the destruction of the environment. Monsanto is a $16 billion per year business that has unlimited resources. Something that large has the ability to suppress or hide information, which could damage its reputation.

This is why it is important to educate yourself about the benefits of organic, sustainable agriculture and biodynamic farming. And sharing information, like this patent that Paul Stamens invented, only helps shed more light on the alternative possibilities to chemicals, GMOs, and herbicide-sprayed crops.

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