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Health101.org

presents

Time to Clean Out the Misinformation
By Don Bennett, DAS


It's springtime! Time to do some serious house cleaning. But not the house you live in; I'm talking about the house that houses you; the 'ole noggin. What if you found your home cluttered with dangerous stuff. Wouldn't you want to get rid of it? Sure you would; but first you have to know it's there. If you're like most folks, your head is filled with gobs of misinformation; information that's simply not true. How did it get there?

When a product becomes an industry, powerful marketing and PR firms do their best to convince you to buy and use that product. Many industries produce products that have been found to be hazardous to your health to one degree or another. When this discovery is made, instead of voluntarily taking that product off the market (as would happen in a perfect world), some companies do their best to create information that suggests that the product is actually good for you. It's this information, or more accurately, disinformation, that influences your decision-making, and can negatively impact your health.

The media plays a part as well. Here are some examples of how the media contribute to misinformation.

Time magazine's January 21, 2002 issue caught my eye. The Science of Staying Healthy boldly graces the cover. "Want to keep the doctor away?" it asked. Sounds good! "New discoveries can help prevent everything from obesity to cancer to heart disease." These are the major killers of our time, so I was very interested in these "new discoveries." Would diet figure prominently, as it should? Read on.

The article on childhood obesity says...

"Kids are born with a sweet tooth, but they have to learn to enjoy other tastes."

Strike one. No they don't! All they have to do is have access to healthy sweets, and not things like candy, pie, ice cream, cookies, gummy bears, etc. Humans are designed to run on carbohydrates (despite what you may have heard to the contrary). The best source of fuel for the human body is fruit. So a "sweet tooth" is a normal, natural thing, for a child as well as an adult. The trick is to satisfy it with a natural food, offering that food as a meal, and not just as a treat or a snack.

Why has childhood obesity risen so much? The dairy industry has tried to make you believe it's because of soda. But the facts don't bear this out. We had no obesity epidemic in 1970 when children were consuming far more soda than they do today. What do they consume more of today? Cheese and other dairy products. No mention of this is made in the article. Instead it advises "limiting children's access to treats and junk food, especially soda and fruit juice." Fruit is the best food for a child, but no mention of this is made. Fruit is considered just a snack, and something that will "spoil your appetite" for dinner. If you want to be as healthy as you can be, fruit should be dinner!

Have you heard of "Adult onset diabetes"? Now it's afflicting children! (So now it's just being called "Type 2" diabetes.) And no mention of this is made in the article. Contributing factors to diabetes: too much fat and dairy products, and not enough needed nutrition. Again, no mention made of this.

Why do kids over-eat? Cooked foods provide less nutrients than their uncooked counterparts. If you're eating because you need nutrition, and you're eating cooked food, you're probably getting too many calories. And does the article mention that grain products contain opioids; addictive substances? No. Does it mention that dairy products contain casomorphines? No. It's tough to stop eating fattening foods that have addictive properties, especially when you don't know the facts.

The article, Can We Learn to Beat the Reaper? asks the question, "Can we live longer?". The very first sentence says...

"Give the body half a chance and before you know it, it tries to die."

How absurd! The body tries to do the opposite, until it breathes its last breath. Then the article goes on to say...

"If it's not cancer, it's heart disease; if it's not heart disease, it's a stroke. With all the ways the body can do itself in, you would almost think it wanted to end it all. The fact is it does."

The fact is, it does not! Your body wants to survive, and moreover, it wants to flourish. How do I know? Easy. If you give it the opportunity to flourish, it will.

Then the topper...

"All the gains in length of life have been achieved by treating diseases that used to kill us in youth or, at best, in what we now consider middle years."

This piece of false information would be funny if it were not for the fact that it was such a well-crafted piece of disinformation. The four biggest reasons for today's increased life expectancy are:

1. Better sanitation;

2. The advent of refrigeration (no more spoiled food and deaths from botulism);

3. Life-prolonging treatments and drugs (but these deal with diseases and conditions which, if you instead addressed the underlying causes, you'd live even longer than with the medical intervention. And while these interventions may prolong life, they foster a lessened quality-of-life);

4. The recalculation of the "ALE" (Average Life Expectancy).

At one time, the ALE included all deaths. If you died at two days, it was factored in. But when the ALE was found to be falling, something had to be done. After all, medical science was doing "wondrous" things, and there were new drugs appearing monthly, so the ALE couldn't be shown to be falling. So it was decided to discard all deaths under one year of age when calculating the ALE. It doesn't take a mathematician to understand that when you take the lowest numbers (which in this case are really low) out of a list of numbers, the average number will be much higher. Then the media compared the ALE of ten years before this deception, to the new ALE, and behold... We're living longer! And the public assumes this is due to the medical/pharmaceutical industries. Why do they believe this? Well, let's look again at what Time Magazine said...

"All the gains in length of life have been achieved by treating diseases that used to kill us in youth or, at best, in what we now consider middle years."

Of course, the public never knew of the mathematical chicanery. If the media had compared the ALE one day before the change in the method of calculation to the day after the change, it would have looked like a miracle happened overnight.

Then there's the article on walking which says...

"Walking is a great way to lose body fat."

Sorry, but no it isn't. It's a so-so way. While great for other things, for weight loss, it's not. A great way to lose body fat is eating what Nature intended. In reality, exercise is the least effective way to lose and maintain weight. And here's another gem...

"The older you get, the harder it is to maintain your weight simply by restricting what you eat."

Restricting? Caloric restriction is the absolute worst way to control your weight. If you're restricting caloric intake and eating cooked foods, you're in effect also doing nutrient restriction big time; cooking denatures proteins, damages vitamins and fats, and renders minerals unusable. So caloric restriction may be good for your exterior physical image, but your interior cells and organs will age prematurely due in part to a sub-clinical lack of nutrition. (What you intake in the form of toxic and damaged substances and empty calories contributes to ill-health too.)

So now you see how one's noggin can become filled with misleading misinformation, also known as "trash info". Isn't it about time to take out the trash?

 

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