We are a fast food nation. Consumed by convenience. Trapped by omnipresent cheap food.  Plagued by widespread excess weight and obesity, most alarmingly among our kids. Racked by epidemic levels of type 2 diabetes, now showing up even in children.

Food Inc., the new documentary film opening in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco this Friday, June 12, offers chilling insights into the dilemma of eating low cost but high-calorie, sugar-laden foods from an increasingly monolithic food industry. We witness a Latino family--with a diabetic father--struggle to eat healthy foods. Problem is they just can't afford to.  And we see a high percentage of high school students raise their hands to indicate how many have one, two, or more family members with diabetes.

The CDC estimates that 1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset, or childhood diabetes.  Among African Americans and Latinos, the rate will be 1 in 2.  Comparable numbers exist for Type 2 diabetes, with an alarming rate of children now developing what had been the adult-onset version of this epidemic.  The consequences are well documented: blindness, amputations, kidney dialysis, heart disease and early death.

Food Inc, the upcoming documentary movie opening this Friday is already developing a pre-open buzz. It has disturbing information that can frighten you and revelations of sinister collusion that may outrage you but nothing in this film may move you as much as the story of Kevin Kowalcyk.  In 2001, a healthy two-year old ate a hamburger and died twelve days later. Diagnosis: E. coli O157:H7, the pathogenic form of the normally benign E. coli bacteria found in the gut. Source: the tainted hamburger meat.  Result: his mother, Barbara Kowalcyk, and grandmother, Pat Buck, have devoted their lives to advocate for safer food.
    
Foodborne illnesses such as E. coli 0157:H7 and salmonella sicken an estimated 76 million Americans each year; 325,000 get hospitalized; and 5000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many are children.
 
Food Inc. posits that factory farming, ever seeking cost-saving efficiency, is the major culprit.  As recent headlines dramatically reveal, E coli 0157:H7 is often spread by fecal matter, both at slaughterhouses and from farm run-off into the water and onto nearby agricultural crops.

Ever wonder where your food comes from?  Especially fast food?  What the animals have been eating?  Their antibiotics?  How they've been handled, or manhandled?  Which pesticides get used on crops?  How about genetically modified crops? And how all this affects your health?  Then have I got a film for you: FOOD INC.  

Robert Kenner's thought-provoking, sometimes shocking documentary on industrialized food and factory farms tackles all these big, messy questions in neat chapters, investigating cows, pigs, chickens, corn, and soybeans.

It may be time to ban BPA from anything that touches your lips and those of your children, and anyone else you happen to love. It's increasingly clear that bisphenol A (BPA), a compound used to harden plastic used to make bottles and food containers, poses risks, especially to babies and children.

The latest study, from Harvard School of Public Health, shows just how quickly the compound goes from bottles to bodies. College students drank from hard plastic polycarbonate bottles made with BPA. Levels of the compound in urine rose by two thirds in a week.