Around the world, people in both developed and underdeveloped countries are face a range of health problems. To name only a few: bird flu, the threat of a worldwide influenza pandemic, obesity, dis-ease like drug-resistant tuberculosis that are flown across nation borders in just hours into a susceptible populace, mad cow disease, e-coli infections of green-leaf crops, serious dis-eases carried in processed meat (causing major recalls), carcasses of pets about irradiated food, cloned (bio-engineered) plants and animals, gene mixing from one species to another, and on and on. These threats should concern all of us, as consumers and as citizens, not merely as patients and physicians.

But what governmental agency will competently manage such developments and challenges, AND work to protect us from danger? Can you really trust the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Health and Human Services to watch out for your interest, down at the personal, human level of you, the consumer? Will you blindly accept their judgments, which are usually influence by the very corporations and industries they regulate? Do you think they are doing a good enough job for you (remember, they work for you)?

If you do an Internet search of medical journals, you will quickly see that from at least the mid-1970s onward clear evidence has been found of the links between certain foods or nutrients and either the inhibition or promotion of certain dis-ease or illnesses. Although this information has been known to professionals for many years, it has taken decades to come out in the popular media so that we as consumers are able to make informed choices.

How much information about the quality of our foods has been hidden from us as well? I would like to pause here to address the current situation in the food industry. That would take several pages, so I will only mention a few of the more impending problems. For starters, consider mad cow disease and how it came about.

Today, the processing of millions of cows for meat and various byproducts creates an enormous volume of unusable carcass parts in America, year after year. Someone in the meat-packing industry must have been watching the 1973 sci-fi movie SOYLENT GREEN, a movie set in the future. In that future the government dispenses food rations from the Soylent Corp., which produces them in ta different color each day--Soylent Red one day, Soylent Yellow the next, and so on. Soylent Green is the newest color to be added to the process. At the end of the movie we find out that Soylent Green is actually made from--wait for it!--human cadavers. The abundance of dead people can now be harvested as a new, plentiful resource to feed those living.

*To be continued....

By: Tom Woloshyn

Categories: Health [t]

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