Did you know that in the United States alone, there are more than 400,000 child migrant workers between the age of 5 and 18 that work in fields picking fruit and vegetables? Children, who often work 14 hours a day for 6 months out of the year, harvest 25% of the food that Americans eat. 

The Harvest, a new film from Shine Global in collaboration with executive producer Eva Longoria, documents the sad reality of child migrant workers. The film follows the lives of three children, Zulema, Perla and Victor, as they are taken from their homes and schools and forced to travel with their families from South to North, following the harvest seasons.

All three children are shown packing up their belongings and saying good-bye to their friends, then traveling in search of migrant work. Zulema drives with her family to the Midwest to pick strawberries and cucumbers and eventually moves North to follow the apple harvest in the fall. Her family lives in a cramped and dirty migrant camp, with barely enough room for her and her mother, let alone her siblings and grandparents.

Smartphones are nearly ubiquitous in this day and age, and we’re excited to see so many nutrition, fitness, and wellness apps on the market! If you’d like to find out how your phone can be turned into a tool for your personal health, check out this next segment in our Integrative Nutrition Reviews series.

Fitness

RunKeeper - iOS / Android

Enter activity manually, or use the GPS feature to track your run automatically. The app will save information about how far you went, your pace, calories burned, and your route and upload them to RunKeeper.com. It even integrates your phone's music, and makes it easy to share your accomplishments with friends online. (Free)

C25K - iOS / Android / Blackberry

Never run a day of your life? No problem. This app already has your gradual training for a 5K all planned out. With GPS support, music integration, and alerts to let you know when you need to switch between walking and running, you'll be a regular runner in no time. ($2.99)

If you are on a gluten-free diet, or you have celiac disease, you know that reading cookbooks, cooking magazines or anything of the sort can be tough. It’s no fun looking at pictures of beautiful, delicious food that you can’t eat!

Enter Easy Eats, the newest digital food magazine to hit the web.

At first glance, the cover that features delectable glazed doughnuts scattered with rainbow sprinkles might have gluten-free eaters running for the hills. However, the tagline will, without a doubt, pull them back in: "It’s good to be gluten free."

Editor-In-Chief Slivana Nardone, whose most recent gig was Editor-In-Chief of Rachael Ray magazine, decided to create the online magazine after her children were both diagnosed with gluten and dairy intolerance.  As a cookbook writer, former bakery owner, and food lover, she created Easy Eats to prove to her children (and everyone else) that it’s good to be gluten free! As Slivana says "My intentions all originate from the same place: positivity. Yes, you can eat mac and cheese. Yes, I will make cupcakes for your school birthday party."

This is part of our new Integrative Nutrition Reviews series, where we will consider books, movies, and other media related to health, food, and personal wellness. If you'd like to suggest a particular book or movie for Integrative Nutrition to review in the future, please comment!

"Let food be thy medicine." - Hippocrates, Father of Western Medicine

Hippocrates' message is intimately familiar to the Integrative Nutrition community, but what was once obvious to the ancient Father of Western Medicine is increasingly forgotten amongst modern eaters.

The 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives hopes to remind us.

The 90-minute film relates the medical findings of two doctors, T. Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn, both over-seventy years old but still vibrant and active. After years of research in health and nutrition, the MDs (who incidentally both grew up on dairy farms) found themselves on the fringes of their medical communities when they determined that their most effective treatment for the world's most common diseases was no pill or surgery, but the vegan diet.

Study after study, and patient after patient, the doctors found that not only could they treat the symptoms of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer with a vegan diet, but even reverse high-cholesterol and blood pressure, cure diabetes, and in some cases, send cancer into remission.