The next time you pick up some nice plump chicken or turkey breasts at the supermarket, labeled “All Natural,” look further and see if it is also “enhanced.”
Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast.
USDA regulations allow poultry suppliers to “enhance” their products with injections of salt and water and still call them “all natural.” This additional salt water does add flavor to the meat, and makes it look nice and plump, but at a cost to your health and budget.
Too much salt in your diet can be a serious detriment to your health. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the maximum recommended daily amount of sodium you should consume is no more than 2300 milligrams (that’s 2.3 grams) for healthy adults, and only 1500 milligrams of sodium if you are diabetic, have high blood pressure or kidney problems, or are African-American, middle aged or older.
A serving of “enhanced” poultry can have up to 540 milligrams of added salt. For a healthy young adult, that amounts to about 25% of your recommended maximum intake. For those in risk categories, it is 36% of your recommended allowance. Not noticing that the chicken thighs you have purchased (or consumed at a fast food restaurant) are already eating up much of your recommended maximum can easily lead to dangerous levels of sodium in your diet.
Hidden Salt in “All Natural“
Yet how many people know that “all natural” and “enhanced” chicken or turkey have these large amounts of hidden salt?
In addition, whatever price per pound you are paying for that poultry includes extra salt and water, about 15% of its total weight. It has been estimated that Americans are paying more than $2 billion per year for this salt water in their chicken consumption. Turkey is also often sold “enhanced,” adding more to this yearly cost to consumers for what is mostly water.
Only “organic” chicken and chicken that is not labeled “enhanced” do not have this injected salt.
So carefully look at that package of poultry you are thinking of buying. Is it “enhanced?” Can you afford the extra sodium in your diet? Does paying for all that salty water make sense?
There are other ways the poultry we eat is enhanced in one way or another. Over the past 80 years American full grown turkeys have increased from an average size of 13 pounds to 29 pounds, due to selective breading for bigger and bigger birds. All this growth, particularly in their breasts, has made it impossible for most full grown male turkeys to have sex with females, giving rise to the widespread need for artificial insemination of poultry. But that’s a whole ‘nuther story.
Social networking and the deprogramming of a society
Deprogramming refers to measures that claim to assist a person who holds a controversial belief system in changing those beliefs and abandoning allegiance to the religious, political, economic, or social group associated with the belief system. The dictionary definition of deprogramming is “to free” or “to retrain” someone from specific beliefs.
When the day comes in a nation that has a certain select group discussing things like reprogramming other groups in order to know a “truth” of some sort, then we might be finding that nation on the course of entering irreversible tyranny. (Xinjiang internment camps comes to mind)
Currently we have social networks disputing nearly everything that anyone says that doesn’t fall in line with the socialist group think that has taken over the internet. Your thoughts and opinions are censored and/or removed … sometimes the person expressing the opinion is banned, doxxed, and shamed, even to the point of losing his or her job for not following the dictates set forth by our so-called “enlightened” society. The term “enlightened” is usually promoted extensively by some of the most unenlightened and regressive people on the planet.
Lately, social media has allowed, and at times even rewarded, some certain discussions related to reprogramming the masses to exist on their platforms.
These are the very same sort of discussions that circulated in Germany before the fall of the Kaiser (which increased greatly under Germany’s new Chancellor Adolf Hitler). What to do about various groups was topic of the day amongst native Germans as they struggled to find a way to form a more perfect German Union. Germans found blame in anyone other than themselves for their own moral, societal, or political shortcomings and they were somewhat hell bent on having someone pay.
Hitler came along and helped Germany to it’s ultimate total defeat in the end.
In 1933, Hitler established a Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels. The Ministry’s aim was to ensure that the Nazi message was successfully communicated through art, music, theater, films, books, radio, educational materials, and the press.
As was the case in 1933, so shall the case for the so called “enlightenment” of today be —
Imagine the sort of discussions they (the Germans) must have had:
Controlling or eliminating adverse views?
Control the speech?
Who decides what the truth is? Who decides what hate speech is?
The Nazi’s had an answer to both of these questions and through coercion with regard to truth and speech, they were able to undermine the very fabric of the nation.
I’ve got friends on both sides and in between. I’ve never heard of a conservative going to such great lengths so as to describe a sort of “final solution” for their non-conservative counterparts.
I have never heard any of my less than conservative left leaning friends speak in such a way as this either.
Truth is a pretty subjective term, and as such, we would be pretty hard pressed in determining just exactly what truth might be. Political “opinion” isn’t truth, but there are the many out there that think that it is. We are a Representative Republic, and according to our Constitution, we are all Sovereign Individuals — Each, according to his or her own measure, are free to define their own truth. Essentially, we have 350 million people in this nation and that might add up to 350 million truths.
Pumping the truth out 24/7 is what Joseph Goebbels did — All for the supposed “good of the nation”. We have to remember as well that Germany wasn’t really in to the whole Individual Sovereignty deal, so it was up to the government to tell the people just what the truth was.
Are we so willing to allow the social networks of the day determine our truths?
It’s not up to platforms like Twitter or Facebook to define truth. People need to be allowed to express their own truth … something both Twitter and Facebook very actively forbid.
In Nazi Germany the truths of the many were a threat to the narrow truths of the few. Germany effectively eliminated all truths, differing opinions, belief systems, and anything else that didn’t align with it’s own government agenda.
We look at the posts on social media and wonder how some of these people are even able to breathe. The fact that they never really ever studied history is extremely evident.
The whole business of deprogramming anyone, for any reason, left or right, is unconscionable. We don’t live in a totalitarian society. We live in the United States of America, not mid 20th century Germany.