Death By Supermarket (32 page)

Medicine discarded nutrition along with the focus on disease prevention. Instead, the focus has been on treating disease after it occurs, primarily with drugs, and unfortunately, more recently the focus has shifted to preventing disease with drugs. However, you can’t hit one health issue with a sledgehammer and expect to feel and be well because all drugs have an impact on your body’s homeostasis. Whenever the body perceives an abnormal state, its coordinated adaptive responses attempt to return it back to homeostasis, or the status quo.

When the baby boomers started aging, antiaging medicine began to
emerge that focused on nondrug, preventative modalities such as balanced nutrition, stress reduction, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, nutraceuticals/dietary supplements, and exercise. Antiaging medicine is generally viewed by mainstream medicine as a vanity-driven, fringy, wayward cousin to real medicine. But lo and behold, as a result of the advances in antiaging medicine, another branch of preventative medicine sprang up, spearheaded by clinical nutritionists who broke ranks from the traditional dietitian mentality of old—those dietitians who planned the Ensure-corn-flakes-coffee hospital meals described earlier. Clinical nutritionists and a growing contingent of enlightened physicians are developing a new medical approach based on the philosophy that many health problems (including obesity) can be resolved or at least significantly helped by this same protocol.

This new frontier in medicine takes us back to Hippocrates, who focused on the effects of food, occupation, and environment in the development of disease. Today’s new breed of enlightened health practitioners understands that seeking to balance the entire body is the key to optimal wellness. And the primary factor in overall balance is keeping or bringing hormone levels into balance.

People tend to think of menopausal women in connection with hormone imbalance. But as you now understand, many diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers are the result of prolonged highinsulin levels caused by eating too much sugar, eating a low-fat diet, stress, dieting, drinking too much caffeine and alcohol, using tobacco, ingesting aspartame, using steroids, having a sedentary lifestyle, using recreational drugs, and taking too many OTC and prescription drugs. Stress, sugar, and stimulants have also resulted in cortisol imbalances (adrenal burnout). Overeating goitrogenic (thyroid inhibiting) foods like soy and chemical exposure have resulted in a rise in hypothyroidism. Millions of children who were raised on sugar, soy, and chemicals are medicated for depression and other neurological disorders, which are imbalances of brain neurotransmitters. Factory-food-eating men and women are going into early
andropause and menopause. And twenty-something women—raised on factory food, diets, and drugs—have the estrogen levels of menopausal women.

When your body’s various systems (endocrine, immune, neurological, and so on) are not operating at capacity, there are health consequences. If you’re fat and unhealthy, it is guaranteed that your endocrine system is not operating as smoothly as it could and that you have some type of hormonal imbalance, whether it is insulin, sex hormones, melatonin, thyroid, cortisol, or other.

This doesn’t mean that you should rush out and self-prescribe. Since all systems of the body are interconnected and hormones are the chemical messengers, it stands to reason that we would want to be hypercareful about the hormones we take. If you’re fat and sick, your first course of action should be to attempt to rebalance your endocrine system by stopping eating all factory food and eating only real food. Then if you still suffer from symptoms of hormone imbalance—or if you’re over the age of say, forty—you are likely to need BHRT.

Unfortunately, in the richest country ever, there are millions of poor people who couldn’t dream of getting BHRT. The poor are left to self-prescribe, if they can afford it, with the “herbal hormones” we see on TV The middle class can afford health care and so end up with doctors who think that Premarin is a hormone. It’s only people with money in this country who can afford real, bioidentical HRT. If you’re one of the lucky few, its important to find a qualified, enlightened practitioner who you feel in sync with and who can prescribe BHRT and monitor your results and symptoms.

The examples in this chapter of “preventative” drugs demonstrate how industry has clutched American consumers in the death grip of an unhealthy symbiotic relationship in which they are fattened up on factory-food and “treated” for subsequent obesity and disease with diets and drugs. And to keep us in this relationship, these industries play on our emotions.

PART NINE
Madison Avenue and Us

IN 1968, AT AGE 18,
I was swept into the mass exodus of the love generation overland from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the jungle in Ceylon I met my lifelong friend Jitka Gunaratna, then a Czechoslovakian expatriate, fishing with a safety pin and a shred of coconut. It was less than a year after the infamous Prague Spring, and Jitka, who had been in Czechoslovakia during the Russian invasion, was still reeling from that horrible event. As we ate her fish, she cried when she reiterated the story to me.

Twenty-five years later, Jitka visited me in Santa Barbara, where I caught her in front of the TV watching a chemical company ad about caring for some bird. “You’re not crying, are you?” I asked her.

“Well, I see this advertisement on CNN International and I find it so touching,” she sniffed. “I always cry.”

“Jitka,” I said darkly, “aren’t you the little Czech girl who also cried when Russian tanks rolled over your fellow citizens in the Wenceslas Square in Prague in 1968, and cried again when that Communist regime decimated your country?”

“Uh-huh,” she admitted, smiling sheepishly as she wiped away a tear.

“You
, of all people, should understand the meaning of
propaganda.”

“But it’s so heartwarming,” she insisted. “Those birds.”

Propaganda works. In fact, a campaign of effective propaganda that
plays on our emotions has ensnarled us in an unhealthy symbiotic relationship with the medical establishment, the government, and the food, diet, and drug industries.

Back in 1966, when professor Timothy Leary was launching himself as a psychedelic visionary, a media-savvy friend gave him some advice: “The key to your work is advertising. You’re promoting a product. The new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce—beauty, fun, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical romance. Word of mouth from satisfied consumers will help, but get your rock and roll friends to write jingles about the brain.”
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This sounds vaguely familiar because if you look at the emotional tactics companies use to get us to eat, diet, and take drugs, it involves all of the above-mentioned strategies. For example, Americans are ga ga goo ga over celebrities. They’re beautiful, fun, sexy, romantic. You could even say their images provoke philosophic wonder and religious revelation (to some). And so they are used prolifically to woo us into consuming products. But the reality is that professional athletes, movie stars, celebrities, and musicians don’t know what’s best for us just because they’re on an athletic field or court, on TV, in a movie, or on a musical stage. Historically, actors, athletes, buffoons, fools, jesters, singers, musicians, jugglers, and other entertainers were societal outcasts, tolerated only to the extent that they could amuse and entertain. Today celebrities have enormous power that translates into lucrative spokes-pitching deals. Even though no celebrity would accept an endorsement contract to pitch gas-guzzling cars, urge us to blast our airconditioners in a heat wave, take longer showers, or leave lights blazing in our homes, there are still many celebrities—who are already earning obscene amounts of money in their professions—who sign contracts to woo us into eating factory food with promises of good health, beauty, fitness, satisfaction … and fun. One that jumps out was the deal J.K. Rowling made giving Coca-Cola the global marketing rights for the
Warner Brother’s Harry Potter franchise, which has earned her millions of more dollars, even though she’s already worth one billion dollars.

Aside from celebrities (human or cartoon), the food industry uses blatant seduction. For example, the Denny’s breakfast ads that air on prime time TV, wooing us with powdered sugar French toast and oozing syrup so that we’re psychologically primed to go to Denny’s ASAP in the a.m.

Product manufacturers twist science and semantics to assure us that their products are healthy. The General Mills website, which is dedicated to “health,” maintains that, “On average, U.S. shoppers place at least one General Mills product into their shopping cart each time they visit the grocery store.” Some of these products are: Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Fiber One, and Cheerios. General Mills’ mission is “to nourish every one by making their lives healthier, easier and richer.” They claim, “More frequent cereal eaters tend to have healthier body weights and lower Body Mass Index [BMI] measures. It’s true of men. It’s true of women. It’s true of kids. And that includes people who eat presweetened cereals.” So let’s see. If 68 percent of the population is overweight or obese, and on average, shoppers place at least one General Mills product into their shopping cart each time they visit the grocery store, and these frequent cereal eaters have healthier body weights, then how does that compute? If you go deeper into the site, you’ll find the kid cereals. “Big G cereals are delivering millions more servings of whole grain every day.” They urge moms to “Give Your Kids More of What They Need To Be Their Best”: Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs.”
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The mangling of science takes extreme forms such as the Glucerna candy bars and shakes that are pitched to a population of diabetics in danger of going blind and suffering amputations with such messages as, “Including Shakes, Bars, and Cereal in your meal plan is a smart way to help get the right kinds of carbs every day.” Their website assures diabetics that “the Glucerna product advantage comes from the unique blends of slowly digested carbohydrates and key ingredients scientifically designed to help meet the needs of people with diabetes.”
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Without exception, companies that claim their products are healthy back up their claims with voluminous scientific research. But either the claims, such as whole grains are healthy and slowly digestible carbs are necessary to salvage a diabetic’s life, are, in fact, true but not applicable to highly refined, sugary cereal, shakes, and candy bars; or the claims, such as the anticancer and other health claims made by the soy industry, have been produced by studies paid for (directly or indirectly) by the industries that stand to profit.

The food industry, aided and protected by the government, does everything in its considerable power to convince consumers that industrialized products are natural food. And now that the organic movement is sweeping the nation, they are doing everything in their considerable power to take over that movement.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Americans were already catching the scent of an ill wind blowing in our food industry. In an effort to protect themselves and their children, they joined the organic food movement, shopping in more expensive health-food stores and local farmers’ markets. This increased demand increased supply, and more and more people were able to find organic food in their areas. Now the food industry’s goal is to render the term “organic” as meaningless as the word “natural” has been since the recipe for granola got away from that hippie girl way back when.

Organic labeling for dairy products, for example, generally means that the product is free of antibiotic, herbicide, pesticide, growth hormone, chemical fertilizer, and genetically modified organism residues, and that animals have outdoor access to pastures and are fed 100 percent organic feed. But, as it turns out, “organic feed” does not necessarily mean that the animals are fed a species-appropriate diet or that they spend all their time, or even a majority of their time, or any time at all, in the pasture, even though the nutritional value of the milk crucially depends on these factors.

Horizon Organic Dairy (owned by Dean Foods, the largest milk supplier in the United States) controls between 57 and 85 percent of the organic
retail market (varying in every state).
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Their own labeling declares that their milk is ultra pasteurized (sterilized). Numerous watchdog agencies have reported that Horizon Organic has circumvented the organic regulations and that their cows are not pasture-grazed, but rather (according to the Center for Global Food Issues, a watchdog group that conducts research and analysis of agriculture and related environmental concerns) Horizon operates industrial organic dairy-processing centers called “dry lots, where thousands of Horizon cows never see a blade of grass.”
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