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Post #10 Critical Thinking Process Question Responses

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Post #10 Critical Thinking Process Question Responses

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Critical Thinking Step-by-Step Process  Assignment 1 Chris Parkin

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Definition:
A humans ability to make out certain shapes (like faces) from patterns

Connection:
Clouds are a classic example of patternicity. A cliche in shows or movies is there are two people laying on the grass looking up at the sky just to make out certain shapes from the clouds.

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Definition:
Agenticity is when something that is hard to explain, its explanation is caused by something of higher authority. (Ex. Aliens, Government)

Connection:
The following article tries to explain the creation of crop circles through Aliens or Time-travelers.

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CROP circles are real and contain hidden messages from aliens or human time travellers, a scientist has claimed.

Dr Horace Drew, 61, also suggested that the mysterious phenomena are a method extra-terrestrial beings are using to try and peacefully communicate with the human race.

Dr Drew, who holds a PhD in Chemistry from the prestigious California Institute of Technology, made the claims at the UFO & Paranormal Research Society of Australia last Wednesday.

He revealed that he had a lifelong fascination with UFOs after seeing an unidentified, silver and windowless craft hovering near his home as a 10-year-old in Florida, USA.

He moved to Australia in the 1980s and has been studying crop circles for 20 years, reported news.com.au.

He said that the study of the peculiar plant arrangements had led "to at least one major breakthrough the discovery of a more advanced binary code than our computers currently use."

Additionally, other crop circles "show schematic images of the future for astronomical or human events".

Sceptics say crop circles are most probably made by humans with some even trying to hoax the general public as pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley did.

In 1991 the English pair took credit for most of the crop circles found in southern England since 1978 and even tricked dedicated crop circle enthusiasts as part of hoax with the media.

Dr Drew says he has developed at least two theories regarding crop circles. The first is that they are messages left by technologically advanced alien species trying to communicate with us.

He said: "When [humans] want to talk with dolphins we put little bubble circles under the ocean with a generator. We watch the dolphins come up and play and investigate, and we study them."

He added: "[US Presidents] have never said to a dolphin 'take me to your leader, I want to sign a treaty with you' and [the extraterrestrials are] not interested in making a treaty with us. They are ahead of us like we are ahead of the dolphins and the whales."

His second theory is that the messages "are not even for us" and that they are left byhuman time travellers from the distant future as directional markers.

He said: "There are definitely humans living there in about 5000 years with time travel capability. They're coming back and flying all over Earth. [The crop circles] seem to just say 'this is a certain day' and mark it.

"So the trouble is we don't know space time physics enough to understand what's happening. It's beyond our knowledge."
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368.

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Scientist claims crop circles are hidden messages left by aliens or human time travellers

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CROP circles are real and contain hidden messages from aliens or human time travellers, a scientist has claimed. Dr Horace Drew, 61, also suggested that the mysterious phenomena are a method extra-terrestrial beings are using to try and peacefully communicate with the human race.

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Definition:
Something that can not be explained usually because of a lack of evidence.

Connection:
The follow video shows the final moments of Elisa Lam. She was found dead in a water tank of a hotel. The investigation still remains unresolved of how she ended up in the tank, as there were no signs of physical trauma or assault.

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Definition:
Ideological Support can be a claim that is morally, ethically, or politically correct to support their idea.

Connection:
The following video shows the clash of two different ideologies. Black Lives Matter was created to raise awareness of the many killings of black people with no justice served to the murderers. All Lives Matter was created as a counter argument to Black Lives Matter showing that we should be looking at the immoral killings of all people. Some say this is another form of racism designed to deviate from the point that Black Lives Matter is trying to make.

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Definition:
A Red Herring is a subject that is purposely brought up to distract from the original topic.

Connection:
As silly as the following video might be, It gives a great example of how the common person may process information. Most people don't want logically thought out statements on certain topics, they just want simple answers that they can agree with. Even if the simple answer is a Red Herring designed to distract from the real issue.

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Post #4 Red Flag: Suppression by Authorities

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Post #4 Red Flag: Suppression by Authorities

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Definition:
Suppression by authorities are claims that large organizations like governments and corporations are hiding information and actions to benefit themselves.

Connection:
The following article shows what the whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed to the world. It gives many examples of the American government and its allies secretly using loop holes to spy on its citizens and other nations.

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Handout/Getty Images

In June 2013, The Guardian reported the first leak based on top-secret documents that then 29-year-old Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency. At the time, Snowden worked as an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii.

That leak would certainly not be the last. In the years since, journalists have released more than 7,000 top-secret documents that Snowden entrusted them with, which some believe is less than 1% of the entire archive.

Now, with the film "Snowden" premiering Friday, it's worth taking a look back at what secrets Snowden actually revealed. We've compiled every single leak that came out in the first year of the Snowden saga, though there were many more that came later.

Snowden downloaded up to 1.5 million files, according to national intelligence officials, before jetting from Hawaii to Hong Kong to meet with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. After he handed off his treasure trove of documents, he flew from Hong Kong and later became stranded in Moscow. His future was far from certain, as the journalists he trusted started revealing his secrets.

Here is everything that Snowden's leaks revealed between 2013 and 2014:

* With a top-secret court order, the NSA collected the telephone records from millions of Verizon customers. - June 6, 2013

The Guardian

* The NSA accessed and collected data through back doors into US internet companies such as Google and Facebook with a program called Prism. - June 7, 2013

* An 18-page presidential memo shows Obama ordering intelligence officials to draw up a list of overseas targets for cyberattacks. - June 7, 2013

* Documents reveal the NSA's Boundless Informant program, which gives the agency near real-time ability to understand how much intelligence coverage there is on certain areas through use of a "heat map." - June 8, 2013

* The NSA was hacking computers in Hong Kong and mainland China, few of which were military systems. - June 13, 2013

* Britain's GCHQ (its intelligence agency) intercepted phone and internet communications of foreign politicians attending two G-20 meetings in London in 2009. - June 16, 2013

* Top-secret procedures show steps the NSA must take to target and collect data from "non-US persons" and how it must minimize data collected on US citizens. - June 20, 2013

* Britain's GCHQ taps fiber-optic cables to collect and store global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories, and calls, and then shares the data with the NSA. - June 21, 2013

* The NSA has a program codenamed EvilOlive that collects and stores large quantities of Americans' internet metadata, which contains only certain information about online content. Email metadata, for example, reveals the sender and recipient addresses and time but not content or subject. - June 27, 2013

* Until 2011, the Obama administration permitted the NSA's continued collection of vast amounts of Americans' email and internet metadata under a Bush-era program called Stellar Wind. - June 27, 2013

* The US government bugged the offices of the European Union in New York, Washington, and Brussels. - June 29, 2013

* The US government spies on at least 38 foreign embassies and missions, using a variety of electronic surveillance methods. - June 30, 2013

* The NSA spies on millions of phone calls, emails, and text messages of ordinary German citizens. - June 30, 2013

* Using a program called Fairview, the NSA intercepts internet and phone-call data of Brazilian citizens. - July 6, 2013

* Monitoring stations set up in Australia and New Zealand help feed data back to NSA's XKeyscore program. - July 6, 2013

* The NSA conducts surveillance on citizens in a number of Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and others. The agency also sought information on oil, energy, and trade. - July 9, 2013

* The Washington Post publishes a new slide detailing NSA's "Upstream" program of collecting communications from tech companies through fiber-optic cables to then feed into its Prism database. - July 10, 2013

* Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, BND, helps contribute data to the NSA's XKeyscore program. - July 20, 2013

The Guardian

* NSA analysts, using the XKeyscore program, can search through enormous databases of emails, online chats, and browsing histories of targets. - July 31, 2013

* The US government paid Britain's GCHQ roughly $155 million over three years to gain access and influence over its spying programs. - August 1, 2013

* Seven of the world's leading telecommunications companies provide GCHQ with secret, unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. - August 2, 2013

* The NSA provided surveillance to US diplomats in order to give them the upper hand in negotiations at the UN Summit of the Americas. - August 2, 2013

* The NSA sifts through vast amounts of Americans' email and text communications going in and out of the country. - August 8, 2013

* Internal NSA document reveals an agency "loophole" that allows a secret backdoor for the agency to search its databases for US citizens' emails and phone calls without a warrant. - August 9, 2013

* NSA collection on Japan is reportedly maintained at the same priority as France and Germany. - August 12, 2013

* The NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, according to an internal audit. - August 15, 2013

* NSA analysts revealed to have sometimes spied on love interests, with the practice common enough to have coined the term LOVEINT, or love intercepts. (It was unclear whether this report came from Snowden docs.) - August 23, 2013

* Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept emails, phone calls, and web traffic, The Independent reports, citing Snowden documents. Snowden denies giving The Independent any documents, alleging the UK government leaked them in an attempt to discredit him. - August 23, 2013

* The top-secret US intelligence "black budget" is revealed for 2013, with 16 spy agencies having a budget of $52.6 billion. - August 29, 2013

Martin Grandjean

* Expanding upon data gleaned from the "black budget," the NSA is found to be paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year to US companies for access to their networks. - August 29, 2013

* The US carried out 231 offensive cyberattacks in 2011. - August 30, 2013

* The NSA hacked into Qatar-based media network Al Jazeera's internal communications system. - August 31, 2013

* The NSA spied on former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto (then a candidate). - September 1, 2013

* Using a "man in the middle" attack, NSA spied on Google, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, and the Brazilian oil company Petrobras. - September 2, 2013

* A US intelligence "black budget" reveals Al Qaeda's effort to jam, hack, and/or shoot down US surveillance drones. - September 3, 2013

* A joint investigation by ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian finds the NSA is winning its war against internet encryption with supercomputers, technical know-how, and court orders. - September 5, 2013

* The NSA has the ability to access user data for most major smartphones on the market, including Apple iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Google Android phones. - September 7, 2013

* The NSA shares raw intelligence data (with information about American citizens) to Israel with an information-sharing agreement. - September 11, 2013

* The NSA monitors banks and credit institutions for a comprehensive database that can track the global flow of money. - September 16, 2013

* Britain's GCHQ launched a cyberattack against Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian telecommunications company. - September 20, 2013

* The NSA spies on Indian diplomats and other officials in an effort to gain insight into the country's nuclear and space programs. - September 23, 2013

* The NSA's internal "wiki" website characterizes political and legal opposition to drone attacks as part of "propaganda campaigns" from America's "adversaries." - September 25, 2013

* Since 2010, the NSA has used metadata augmented with other data from public, commercial, and other sources to create sophisticated graphs that map Americans' social connections. - September 28, 2013

* The NSA stores a massive amount of internet metadata from internet users, regardless of whether they are being targeted, for up to one year in a database called Marina. - September 30, 2013

* The NSA and GCHQ worked together to compromise the anonymous web-browsing Tor network. - October 4, 2013

* Canada's signals intelligence agency, CSEC, spied on phone and computer networks of Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy and shared the information with the "Five Eyes" intelligence services of the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. - October 7, 2013

REUTERS/Sarah Conard

* The NSA collected more than 250 million email contact lists from services such as Yahoo and Gmail. - October 14, 2013

* NSA surveillance was revealed to play a key role in targeting for overseas drone strikes. - October 16, 2013

* The NSA spied on French citizens, companies, and diplomats, and monitored communications at France's embassy in Washington and its UN office in New York. - October 21, 2013

* The NSA tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. - October 23, 2013

* The NSA spied on Italian citizens, companies, and government officials. - October 24, 2013

* The NSA monitored the phone calls of 35 world leaders and encouraged other government agencies to share their "Rolodexes" of foreign politicians so it could monitor them. - October 25, 2013

* The NSA spied on Spanish leaders and citizens. - October 25, 2013

* The NSA stations surveillance teams at 80 locations around the world. - October 27, 2013

* A joint program between the NSA and Britain's GCHQ called Muscular infiltrates and copies data flowing out of Yahoo and Google's overseas data centers. One slide boasted of "SSL added and removed here!" with a smiley face. - October 30, 2013

* The NSA spied on the Vatican. (The Panorama website did not cite Snowden as the source.) - October 30, 2013

One slide boasted of "SSL added and removed here!" with a smiley face.

* Australia's intelligence service has surveillance teams stationed in Australian embassies around Asia and the Pacific. - October 31, 2013

* One document reveals tech companies play a key role in NSA intelligence reports and data collection. - November 1, 2013

* Britain's GCHQ and other European spy agencies work together to conduct mass surveillance. - November 1, 2013

* Strategic missions of the NSA are revealed, which include combatting terrorism and nuclear proliferation, as well as pursuing US diplomatic and economic advantage. - November 2, 2013

* Australia's Defense Signals Directorate and the NSA worked together to spy on Indonesia during a UN climate change conference in 2007. - November 2, 2013

* The NSA spied on OPEC. - November 11, 2013

* GCHQ monitored the booking systems of 350 high-end hotels with a program called Royal Concierge, which sniffed for booking confirmations sent to diplomatic email addresses that would be flagged for further surveillance. - November 17, 2013

* Australia's DSD spied on the cellphones of top Indonesian officials, including the president, first lady, and several cabinet ministers. - November 18, 2013

* The NSA spied on millions of cellphone calls in Norway in one 30-day period. - November 19, 2013

* The British government struck a secret deal with the NSA to share phone, internet, and email records of UK citizens. - November 20, 2013

REUTERS/Jason Reed

* A NSA strategy document reveals the agency's goal to acquire data from "anyone, anytime, anywhere" and expand its already broad legal powers. - November 22, 2013

* The NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malware designed to steal sensitive information. - November 23, 2013

* The NSA gathers evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a plan to discredit Muslim jihadists. - November 26, 2013

* Working with Canadian intelligence, the NSA spied on foreign diplomats at the G-8 and G-20 summits in Toronto in 2010. - November 28, 2013

* The Netherlands' intelligence service gathers data on web-forum users and shares it with the NSA. - November 30, 2013

* A draft document reveals Australia offered to share information collected on ordinary Australian citizens with the NSA and other "Five Eyes" partners. - December 1, 2013

* The NSA siphons billions of foreign cellphone location records into its database. - December 4, 2013

* Widespread spying is revealed in Italy, with the NSA spying on ordinary Italians as well as diplomats and political leaders. - December 5, 2013

* Swedish intelligence was revealed to be spying on Russian leaders, then passing it on to the NSA. - December 5, 2013

* A document reveals the extent of the relationship between NSA and Canadian counterparts, which includes information-sharing and Canada allowing NSA analysts access to covert sites it sets up. - December 9, 2013

Blizzard

* Intelligence operatives with NSA and GCHQ infiltrate online video games such as "World of Warcraft" in an effort to catch and stop terrorist plots. - December 9, 2013

* Piggybacking on online "cookies" acquired by Google that advertisers use to track consumer preferences, the NSA is able to locate new targets for hacking. - December 10, 2013

* The NSA has the ability to decrypt the common A5/1 cellphone encryption cipher. - December 13, 2013

* The NSA secretly paid the computer security firm RSA $10 million to implement a "back door" into its encryption. - December 20, 2013

* A document reveals how Britain's GCHQ spied on Germany, Israel, the European Union, and several nongovernmental organizations. - December 20, 2013

* With a $79.7 million research program, the NSA is working on a quantum computer that would be able to crack most types of encryption. - January 2, 2014

* Using radio transmitters on tiny circuit boards or USB drives, the NSA can gain access to computers not connected to the internet. - January 14, 2014

* The NSA scoops "pretty much everything it can" in untargeted collection of foreign text messages for its Dishfire database. - January 16, 2014

* The NSA scoops up personal data mined from smartphone apps such as Angry Birds. - January 27, 2014

* A GCHQ program called Squeaky Dolphin monitors YouTube, Facebook, and Blogger for "broad real-time monitoring of online activity." - January 27, 2014

The NSA scoops "pretty much everything it can" in untargeted collection of foreign text messages.

* The NSA spied on negotiators during the 2009 UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. - January 29, 2014

* CSEC, Canada's national cryptologic agency, tested a pilot program with the NSA that captured metadata from users who had logged into free airport Wi-Fi. - January 30, 2014

* Britain's GCHQ waged war on hacker groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, mounting Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks and infiltrating their chat rooms. - February 5, 2014

* The NSA reportedly monitored former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the run-up to the Iraq war. - February 5, 2014

* Britain's GCHQ used "dirty tricks" such as computer viruses and sexual "honey traps" to target adversaries. - February 7, 2014

* The US's "targeted killing" program of drone strikes relies mostly on cellphone metadata and geolocation, rather than on-the-ground human intelligence. - February 10, 2014

* An American law firm was monitored by the Australian Signals Directorate while representing the government of Indonesia during a trade dispute. - February 15, 2014

* The NSA and Britain's GCHQ reportedly monitored traffic to the WikiLeaks website and considered a move to monitor communications going to or from WikiLeaks and the Pirate Bay. - February 18, 2014

* Britain's GCHQ conducts covert operations to disrupt and shape online discourse. - February 24, 2014

First Look/Trevor Paglen

* Britain's GCHQ, using a program called Optic Nerve, intercepted and stored webcam images from millions of Yahoo users, then passed them on to the NSA's XKeyscore database. - February 28, 2014

* The NSA shared intelligence that helped the Dutch navy capture a ship hijacked by pirates off Somalia, and the Netherlands regularly shares information with the NSA regarding Somalia and Afghanistan. - March 5, 2014

* The NSA has an advice columnist similar to "Dear Abby" who writes an "Ask Zelda" column distributed on the agency's internal network. - March 7, 2014

* NSA developed sophisticated malware "implants" to infect millions of computers worldwide. In one example, the NSA posed as a fake Facebook server to infect a target's computer and steal files. - March 12, 2014

* Document reveals that, while many foreign governments share information with NSA, few senior officials outside of the intelligence or defense sphere have any knowledge of it. - March 13, 2014

* The NSA built a system capable of recording "100%" of a foreign country's phone calls with a voice intercept program called Mystic. The Washington Post did not name the countries where the program was used. - March 18, 2014

* The NSA specifically targets foreign systems administrators to gain access to their networks. - March 20, 2014

* The NSA closely monitored the Chinese technology firm Huawei in attempt to reveal ties between the company and the Chinese military. The agency also spied on Chinese banks and other companies, as well as former President Hu Jintao. - March 22, 2014

* Malaysia's political leadership is a high-priority intelligence target for the US and Australia - March 30, 2014

* NSA and Britain's GCHQ discussed various methods of deception, use of propaganda, mass messaging, and pushing stories on social media sites - April 4, 2014

* The Norwegian Intelligence Service is developing a supercomputer, called Steel Winter, to decrypt and analyze data from Afghanistan, Russia, and elsewhere. - April 26, 2013

Ars Technica

* Britain's GCHQ asked the NSA for "unsupervised access" to the NSA's vast databases. It was unclear whether the request was granted. - April 30, 2014

* The NSA physically intercepts routers, servers, and other computer networking equipment before it's exported outside the US, implants "back door" surveillance tools, then repackages them with a factory seal and ships them out. - May 12, 2014

* The NSA is intercepting, recording, and archiving virtually every cellphone call in the Bahamas and one other country, which The Intercept redacted. It also reveals metadata collection on Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines. - May 19, 2014

* After giving journalist Glenn Greenwald a 72-hour warning to reveal the nation redacted from his previous report on mass surveillance of an entire country, WikLeaks reveals the country in question is Afghanistan. - May 23, 2014

* The NSA harvests millions of faces from web images for use in a previously undisclosed facial recognition database. - May 31, 2014

Author's note: I've tried my best to be thorough in sifting through the hundreds of leaks that have come to light thus far. I have not included Snowden's movements, legal situation, or any of the political drama surrounding the leaks. This timeline only shows the many reports stemming from documents the ex-NSA contractor handed over to journalists.

If I have missed any leaks in the hundreds of news stories on these items, that mistake is mine alone.

This post relied upon a similar timeline from Al Jazeera America, as well as a catalog at Lawfare Blog, and an article at the National Journal.

SEE ALSO: 'This is his last chance' - Snowden wants a pardon, but it's going to be a big uphill battle

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This is everything Edward Snowden revealed in one year of unprecedented top-secret leaks

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In June 2013, The Guardian reported the first leak based on top-secret documents that then 29-year-old Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency. At the time, Snowden worked as an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii. That leak would certainly not be the last.

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Definition:
All natural is the idea that if a product has an "all natural" label to it, that it is safer or more healthy than other products.

Connection:
The follow website article explains how companies will use "natural" to distract misinformed customers that their product actually contains preservatives and other lab created chemicals.

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Story at-a-glance -

Many companies will use deceptive but legal loopholes to hide the unhealthy nature of the foods they want you to purchase.

Words like "pure" and "fat-free" may sound healthful, but due to lack of standard definitions and outright creative application of these words, they're oftentimes far from what you'd consider truthful.

Labels like "all-natural" and "organic" can also be sorely misleading. The first means virtually nothing when it comes to processed foods, and the only organic label worth paying attention to is the USDA Organic seal.

Nutritional facts can be off by up to 20 percent before breaking any regulations, and currently you have no way of knowing if a food contains genetically modified ingredients as labeling is not required.

The best way to avoid being misled is to limit or eliminate foods that require a listing of its ingredients in the first place, which leaves you with fresh (preferably organic) WHOLE foods.

By Dr. Mercola

Are the words written on food packaging honest?

Many corporations hire lawyers to carefully craft words that are just barely on the side of being legal. The Yahoo health site has collected eight common package proclamations that are red flags of "crafty" advertising.

These include:

Flavored Pure: Nectar: Fat free: Some cooking sprays are "fat free" only if they are sprayed for a fraction of a second to produce a microscopic "serving".While 'nectar' may sound particularly wholesome, it's really just a fancy name for "not completely juice." These "diluted juice beverages" may contain more high fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners than fruit puree."100 percent pure" products such as orange juice can be doctored with flavor packs for aroma and taste.: Both artificial and natural flavors are actually made in laboratories, and natural flavors are not necessarily healthier than artificial ones.

The Importance of Deciphering Food Labels

It's unfortunate, but reading food labels isn't as easy as you might think. In addition to determining what ingredients are in the food, you also need to have the foundational knowledge of how to decipher certain verbiage used to describe them. The words listed above are just a few of the words that can be used to mislead you.

Below, I'll review a few more label items that are often used in deceptive ways, or that may lead you to buy a product you'd otherwise avoid:

1. Vitamin and mineral claims

2. The "All Natural" label

3. The "Organic" label

4. Misleading nutritional facts

5. Dangerous ingredients not required to be listed on any food label

Beware of Vitamin and Mineral Claims

In an effort to optimize your diet, you may reach for so-called fortified foods; products that proclaim to be more healthful due to their vitamin or mineral content. Unfortunately, foods fortified with "extra" nutrients are nearly always processed, and the nutrients added are typically synthetic; neither of which will promote your health.

Likewise, most commercial vitamin supplements are synthetic vitamins that have been robbed of all of the co-factors and accessory micronutrients that they naturally associated with. In turn, just like refined foods, they can create numerous problems and imbalances in your body if taken for long periods of time. They can also act more like drugs in your body. At the very least, they won't be as beneficial as high quality food and whole food-based supplements are.

When it comes to foods fortified with minerals, matters can get even worse. Be particularly wary of foods fortified with iron, such as many breakfast cereals, as some of these have been shown to contain actual iron filings, which is not the ideal way to supplement your body with iron.

What Does the "All Natural" Label Really Mean?

When it comes to processed food bearing this label, it means virtually nothing... This is because there's no standard definition for the term "all natural" when used on processed foods, which leaves it wide open for creative interpretation. The term is only regulated on meat and poultry, for which an item labeled "natural" may not contain any:

Artificial flavors

Colors

Chemical preservatives

But in the processed food arena, a "natural" product can be virtually anything; it can be genetically modified, full of pesticides, made with corn syrup, additives, preservatives and artificial ingredients...

If You Want Organic, There's Only One Label that Can Assure it

Similar problems pester the organic label. There's really only one organic label out there that means anything as far as organic food is concerned, and that's the USDA Certified Organic label.

This seal, which is governed by the USDA's National Organic Program (NOP), is your BEST assurance of organic food quality. (As a side note, it's also the international gold standard for personal care products that contain organic agricultural ingredients, because the ingredients in USDA certified beauty products are certified organic for food, adhering to much stricter standards as they are intended specifically for human consumption.)

There are three "tiers" within the USDA organic label:

Products labeled "100% Organic" must contain only organically produced materials

Products labeled simply "Organic" must contain at least 95 percent organic ingredients

The label "Made with organic ingredients" can contain anywhere between 70 to 95 percent organic ingredients

Farmers and growers of organic produce bearing the USDA seal have to meet the strictest standards of any organic label. USDA certified organic livestock must have access to the outdoors and cannot be given antibiotics or growth hormones. And in order to qualify as an organic crop, it must be grown and processed using organic farming methods that recycle resources and promote biodiversity.

For example, crops must be grown without:

Synthetic pesticides

Bioengineered genes

Petroleum-based fertilizers

Sewage sludge-based fertilizers

Organic products also cannot be irradiated, are not allowed to contain preservatives or flavor enhancing chemicals, nor can they contain traces of heavy metals or other contaminants in excess of tolerances set by the FDA. The pesticide residue level cannot be higher than 5 percent of the maximum EPA pesticide tolerance. (For the complete National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances under the USDA organic label, see this link.) So remember, if you see anything that says it's "organic," it must specify "USDA Certified Organic" to be meaningful.

What You Need to Know about Nutrition Labels

Other factors that can make labels less than helpful include the nutrition facts and the stated serving size.

It's important to understand that while the FDA does check food labels, they only check to see whether or not the Nutrition Facts panel is present. They rarely ever verify that the nutrition facts are true and accurate. Furthermore, the government allows foods to contain 20 percent more diet-damaging ingredients than the label lists before taking enforcement action. So while certainly a useful and important start, reading the Nutrition Facts panels on foods may not be as reliable an indicator of a food's nutrients as you may think.

The FDA also allows processed food manufacturers to use absurdly tiny serving sizes on their labels, which can lull you into a false sense of security when it comes to determining how much of each stated nutrient or toxin, like trans-fat, you're actually consuming. If the serving size is small enough then trans-fats can fall under the minimum requirement for labeling them, meaning they are left off the label entirely despite the fact they are present in the product. Needless to say, this tactic is intentionally employed, to make the product appear more healthful than it actually is

It is deceptive labeling tricks like these that can leave you eating things you would rather avoid.

Another example well worth mentioning here is the lack of any requirement to label genetically modified components in packaged foods, even though this is mandated law in the entire European Union. In the US, you simply will never know if GM foods are present in your processed food, but more than likely they are-especially if the product contains soy or corn, or any derivative thereof...

Fortunately, we now have a practical plan to end this disaster. By educating the public about the risks of GM foods through a massive education campaign, and launching a ballot initiative in California for 2012 that will require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods and food ingredients, the plan is to generate a tipping point of consumer rejection to make GMOs a thing of the past. To learn how you can be part of this important movement, please see The California Ballot Initiative: Taking Down Monsanto.

How to Choose High-Quality Foods for Yourself and Your Family

While reading labels on everything you buy is important, when it comes to food, you're far better off limiting or eliminating foods that require a listing of its ingredients in the first place. What are you left with? Fresh (preferably organic) WHOLE foods!

Remember, virtually ALL processed foods contain cheap, chemical-laden ingredients that will eventually take their toll on your health. By educating yourself on what 'healthy food' really is, and how not to be led astray by label claims that toe the line in terms of being truthful, you'll be well on your way toward a healthier you.

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Are These Red Flag Words on Your Food's Nutrition Label?

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Many companies will use deceptive but legal loopholes to hide the unhealthy nature of the foods they want you to purchase. Words like "pure" and "fat-free" may sound healthful, but due to lack of standard definitions and outright creative application of these words, they're oftentimes far from what you'd consider truthful.

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Definition:
The Appeal to Authority red flag includes claims that something is true just because someone of higher authority says it's true, without presenting actual evidence.

Connection:
The following video uses humor to distract from its claims that 4/5 dentists recommend its product. In reality every oral hygiene product seems to be recommended by a ratio of dentists without actual statistics being provided.

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Made by Chris Parkin, working individually.