Socialized Illness

Or how what they really want is to medicate all of us for perceived diseases. Just ask the AHA:

"90% of women have at least one risk factor for heart disease," Mary Michaels with the American Heart Association said.

See, it's crap like this that really pisses me off. If you read between the lines, what they're saying is, you probably have high cholesterol (meaning above an abnormally low level) and therefore you need medicine so you don't drop dead of a coronary. Well guess what sherlock, as my father used to say, you ain't getting out of this life alive. So, how do you want to go? If 90% of women have risk factors, could it be because we get old and die. And is this 90% at any given time, or that 90% will have a risk factor at some point in their life. Because I find the prior hard to believe, and the later makes me go "well duh." But, I bet they pulled these numbers out of their ass. Or better yet, their "risk factors" are codswallop.

They want to medicate us for imagined illnesses, and for "risk factors". Why do you think they prescribe statins?

And this article here vilifies fast food as dangerous for heart attack victims. It found that heart attack patients who ate fast food "were also more likely to have unhealthy levels of fat in their blood."

Do you know what fat in your blood is? Triglycerides. Do you know what determines triglyceride levels? Carbohydrate intake. These people could eat fast food, they'd merely need to toss the bun and skip the fries. They're still advocating the wrong things, saying eat more whole grains and more skim milk. And it ain't ever going to change as long as there's money to be made.

What I want to know is, what would you rather die of? A heart attack? Or cancer? Because some of the drugs they want to medicate you with, like statins, have a chance of cancer as a side effect. And they don't do anything for heart disease anyway.

Personally, a sudden heart attack at 90 is probably the best way to go. I watched both of my paternal grandparents succumb to cancer. The last time I saw my grandmother, she looked like she'd just gotten out of Auschwitz. That's not hyperbole either.

Diet Coke causes...

... what? Or another reason why news articles on science in this country are so lackluster.

News organizations are all over the latest finding that diet coke will kill you! I'm not about to say that diet coke is good for you by any stretch of the imagination. However, what I want to know is, how much did the corn industry pay them to write this (from MSNBC):

"The increased likelihood of vascular events remained even after Gardener and her colleagues accounted for risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Pointing the finger more squarely at diet drinks, the researchers found no increased risk among people who drank regular soda." [emphasis mine]

Regular soda is full of High Fructose Corn Syrup. We all know that sugar causes inflammation, which in turn probably causes most cardiovascular disease.

What I want to know is, why they take a survey of 2500 people as proof of anything. A survey shows nothing. You can't control for variables. In fact, there's no control for variables because it's not a clinical trial. In other words, this isn't science. However, it's touted as being "scientific." Maybe the people who drank diet coke were like I used to be, consuming copious amounts of pastries and candy. The pastries and candy have nothing to do with their consumption of diet coke, but may be the cause of their cardiovascular disease.

The only way to find out if a substance is harmful or not, is to do a double blind clinical trial, where you have everything identical in two groups of people (or lab rats) and assign one group the product they want to test (the variable) and the other a placebo (the control).

At least the LA times isn't on the fear mongering band wagon and pointed out that correlation doesn't equal causation. I think most of these news stories are simply to scare everyone into eating in whatever manner the government wants us to eat.