Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Hundred-Year Lie - Randall Fitzgerald

Great book. Dispels a lot of thinking that is either wrong or simply ignorant. It is a nice high-level look at our society, which allows you to see the bigger impact that has happened through the years in small steps. HIGHLY RECOMMEND

Some Random Points from the Book
I would call this book a historical documentary. It goes through the roughly the last 100 years (1906 to present) showing the how our society has bought into several lies.
  1. The government (FDA) will protect me from harmful substances. NOT true! The FDA relies on studies from the manufacturers, showing that a product is "safe". Chemical companies are not morally upright. They are a COMPANY that seeks to make profit and will meet the written requirements of the FDA but not the spirit of the requirements.
  2. The chemicals produced for plastics, pesticides, food additives, and medicines have been tested to be safe. It was startling that he reports that of the thousands of chemicals on record, only about 15% have health and environmental impact data.
  3. Synthetics are better than natural options because they have SCIENCE behind them. I have been through the higher education system in science at a Research-1 university, and I can tell you that science is not impartial. It is very much like companies, out to get the funding and the recognition for research and not about people. Coming back to the book, the author's big problem is that science looks for a single chemical within a food (like vitamin E) and synthesizes that one chemical. However, the synthetic is often not identical to the natural version at some molecular level.
There are a number of other myths that the author addresses, but these are the key ones I wanted to mention. The book was quite sobering because of the overarching societal picture it paints.

Another key thing the author mentions repeatedly is synergies. For example, food has a synergy of components that make it easier to absorb the nutrients (like vitamin E). As well, the particular combination of nutrients in a given food makes it more effective at nourishing because it bolsters multiple systems within the body. On the negative side, synthetic chemical have synergies also. Chemical A (Teflon perhaps) and chemical B (pesticides found in tap water) may not cause significant harm if they were in the body individually (but it was never meant to be in the body). However, put chemical A and B in together and they cause havoc (anyone up for some chemical AB cancer?). Often this occurs when A and B are both lower in concentration than their individual government limits. It is impossible to test for all the potentially dangerous synergies between the hundreds of thousands of synthetic chemicals we currently produce.

This brings us to the food and medical industries. For thousands of years, humans have survived and done quite well with whole foods as their diet and natural remedies for sickness. Over the last 100 years, we have traded whole, natural foods for processed foods that have all (or almost all) of the natural nutrients stripped out and synthesized, chemical nutrients put in. Guess what, food additives are not food. They contribute to the chemical load in our body and do not provide sufficient nutrition. The food industry has plenty of lobbyist in Washington, constantly trying to convince authorities that cocoa puffs are heart healthy because they contain whole grain. Without proper nutrition, the bodies natural defense system, the immune system, cannot properly function and cells cannot properly function.

The human body is an incredible biochemical system that does a great job of maintaining itself with the proper building block (nutrients). However, the medical field on the back of the pharmaceutical COMPANIES now communicates that sickness and disease are a result of a synthetic chemical deficiencies, for which they have many options. When was the last time your doctor really helped you consider your diet and what nutrients you are getting. Has anyone ever had a doctor suggest you get blood work done to see what nutrients you have in your system. Probably not. Proper diet (i.e. one with real foods that take time to make like a couple generations before, which I will mention had almost non-existent rates of cancer and mental illness) is just too inconvenient when compared to the "magic bullet" pills. The author points out that drugs are designed to mask the symptoms in hopes that the immune system will take care of the underlying problem. When the immune system can't overcome, the drugs become life sentences. Going back to the synergies concept, drugs are often designed to affect one specific process in the body. This why there are often a cascade of side affects. We are putting CHEMICALS into our body that nature never intended to have there.

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