How can anyone be surprised that the processed foods, which are full of tons of chemicals that really were never intended to be ingested or which our bodies have absolutely ZERO need for, screw up our systems? Common sense should tell us that.
One can't be paranoid or scared. But there are tons of alternative to opening a box or a bag!!
Just look at what is listed on a pouch of "mashed potatoes". It about makes me gag just to read it. I can make mashed potatoes at home with three ingredients. All of them easy to pronounce. And none of them containing crap that isn't even food.
BGH has been associated with the earlier onset of puberty for quite some time. It makes sense to me ... if you're shoveling hormones into a cow to make it produce tons more milk than it normally would of course those chemicals are going to show up in the milk.
Another thing is that part of those cows regular diet is also huge doses of antibiotics which they don't get because the are sick, they get them because the huge cow factories [sorry, can't even call them farms] are so full of filth that it's considered more efficient just to drug them up so that nothing can make them sick. But wait. If you're fed antibiotics constantly, you become immune. So then you have to take more and stronger kinds.
Everything that an animal eats is passed right along to you. There are very strong ties between the squalid overuse of antibiotics in the farm factory industry and the super-bugs which people catch that are very very resistant to antibiotics given to humans. People's bodies are getting just as saturated with them as the animals.
Look at the huge (and growing) dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico which is a direct result of chemical runoff from the lush fields of the mid-West into the lakes and rivers which feed into the Mississippi. Fields which grow the grain we feed our animals and our families. And then try to tell me that stuff doesn't / can't / won't have an effect on us ...
There are tons of really good, fact-based books out there about what is going on with our food. Read
The Omnivore's Dilemma for a truly insightful look at what goes on when Michael Pollen tries to see just what it takes to get food on our table. Its incredible. And sad.
I realize that it would impossible to grow every morsel of food that we put into our mouths ourselves in our backyards. Or even to know the person that did grow it. But there is a huge difference between making good, sensible food choices and blindly shoveling whatever you come across in the grocery store or fast food restaurant into your mouth and not expecting any repercussions from doing so.
Z