Prisoners do Hard Time on Soy and Water
Sylvia Onusic, PhD
Format: Download Video of Slides & Audio

What do Barack Obama, Rod Blagojevich, Monsanto, Archer Daniel Midlands, the University of Illinois,the Weston A. Price Foundation, and all prisoners in the Illinois prison system have in common? Soy. The U.S. farm bill funds the production of a heck of a lot of genetically modified (GM) soy requiring Roundup Ready, a toxic herbicide produced by Monsanto. Creative marketing has come up with many ways to use the excess GM soy by targeting every sector of the U.S. population–from infants consuming soy formula, to school children eating soy at school lunches, to the general population consuming many processed foods containing soy (even tea bags), even to prisoners whose diet is 40% or more soy.

Rod Blagojevich, former governor of Illinois, now in federal prison himself, began a human experiment when he decided to lower the cost of prison food by extending the menu with soy. Illinois is the headquarters of Archer Daniel Midlands, a wealthy company which heavily promotes and sells soy products. The University of Illinois has a soy center dedicated to developing recipes using soy for institutional and personal consumption. In addition to paying for the soy, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) uses prison labor to manufacture and cook the soy entrees that are served at every meal.

The Weston A. Price Foundation is supporting medical testing and a law suit which ill prisoners have filed against IDOC and Wexford Health Systems. Prisoners have become extremely ill on the daily ration of soy and their health problems have been deliberately ignored by the prison medical personnel. Prison doctors and the supervising dietitian, in their depositions, have testified that they know little about soy and its harmful anti-nutrient effects. So what does Barack Obama have to do with all this mischief? Please come to the presentation to find out!