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.

The Misconception of Natural Sweeteners

Lots of things are natural, meaning they occur in nature. Arsenic, cyanide, uranium, deadly nightshade. That doesn't mean you'd want to eat them, or even come into contact with some of them. I don't know how many articles I have read decrying the evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and yet saying that regular sugar is fine. Now, I'm not saying that HFCS is the same as sugar, it's not, by a long shot, however, neither of them are good for your health. Other naturally occurring sugars are no better, like honey. Sugar is sugar, and the glucose spikes your blood sugar while the fructose portion damages your liver and raises your triglyceride levels. That includes the fructose in fruit.

We have articles in newspapers like this one, since it's Valentine's day:

"But let's not make fructose the only bad guy here. The real problem is our consumption of all added sugar. Naturally occurring sugars like fructose, found in fruit, and lactose, found in milk, are valuable nutrients."

Overall, this article is better than most, but still has some problems. It fails in that it differentiates the fructose in fruit from the fructose in HFCS. There's not one iota of a difference, with perhaps the exception that if you ate a piece of fruit you might get less than if you ate something laden with HFCS. The problem is, our modern fruit has been bred to be bigger and sweeter. The sweeter it is, the more fructose is in it. Also, the fructose found in sucrose (table sugar) is also the same to your cells.

The problem is, they can't let go of the notion, that "everybody knows it's common knowledge" notion, that fruit is good for you. Five hundred years ago everyone knew the earth was flat too, and the center of the universe to boot. We all know what happened to Galileo when he dared to suggest otherwise.

"Does this research mean that eating fruit will increase your risk of heart disease and diabetes? Absolutely not."

That statement may be blatantly false, considering the study out of New Zealand that I wrote about last week, that I might add no American media picked up (good thing I didn't hold my breath).

Another newspaper article, also acts like natural sweeteners aren't a problem:

"While the massive amount of high-fructose corn syrup consumed by many people isn't a great choice, a more moderate amount of natural sweeteners can be a wonderful complement to a healthy diet."

What exactly is their idea of "moderation"? Eating 100 lbs of sugar a year versus the current 150+? Taubes wrote about this in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and it seems from some reports by doctors who were in Africa and other colonial places a hundred years ago that a sugar intake of approximately 60 lbs was the cut off point of "too much". After consumption rose above that level, and after a time frame of about 20 years consuming such levels, they saw diabetes and metabolic syndrome begin to develop, along with all the other western diseases that go along with them. And really, it might be that a lower consumption just means it takes longer to develop metabolic problems in some people, or maybe even in most people. I doubt seriously the authors of these news articles imagine that we really might need to restrict our sugar intake to a minuscule amount to avoid developing disease.

The first article I cited did have a great line in it:

"If we really looked like what we eat, most Americans would look like kernels of corn."

There's the truth if I ever read it.