THE HUNDRED-YEAR LIE -- NOW EXPOSED

 

 

 

Elissa Meininger
June 27, 2006
NewsWithViews.com

Last year, when my friend and colleague, Carolyn Dean, MD/ND, said in her tell-all book, Death by Modern Medicine, that 784,000 people died every year in the U.S. from using the products and services of the modern American health care system, I was pretty shocked. Many other people were also.

With that death count still resonating in my thoughts every day, I have just completed reading investigative reporter, Randall Fitzgerald�s new expos�, The Hundred-Year Lie � How Food and Medicine are Destroying Your Health. This book is not for the faint-hearted, either. And it may lead to a few sleepless nights, as well.

Fitzgerald, a former investigative reporter for Jack Anderson, has compiled and digested the meaning of a massive number of events related to food, medicine and our environment in order to be able to tell us about how the world around us is literally poisoning us all to death. By doing so he has thrown down the gauntlet to the drug industry, the processed food industry, as well as the chemical industry for having created this crisis. His relentless pursuit of the truth, to provide detailed evidence, chapter after chapter, to support the proposition that we are a species at risk of distinction, began when he first looked around at his own family and close friends, most of whom were suffering diseases previous generations had never suffered, or had never suffered at such young ages.

The book is divided into three parts, each of which is then subdivided by chapters with tantalizing titles such as, �Wizards of Oz: The Food Industry,� �Sorcerer�s Apprentices: The Drug and Medical Industries,� and �Are We Becoming a Mutant Species?.�

One of the many illuminating chapters I found particularly fascinating, is the 25-page timeline of events that have led up to the crisis we are now suffering. One needs to wonder why in 1900, cancer was the tenth leading cause of death in the United States representing only three percent of all deaths, while these days it causes 20 percent of all deaths. Similarly, in 1900, diabetes was suffered by less than one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population and today it is suffered by almost 20 percent.

Another notation mentioned in the timeline is that at the turn of the 20th Century, asthma and related immune system diseases were basically non-existent, yet today, 150 million people around the world suffer them. �How come?� is the question we should all be asking ourselves -- a question that which Fitzgerald not only raises but then rolls out the answers to in machine gun-like fashion. The timeline is posted on his website under a category called, �The Slippery Slope Index.�

For example, Fitzgerald�s timeline covers the entry into the food supply of all that processed food most of us eat in large quantities. Then, as an example of what that means to the health of the public, he points out that the white stuff we call refined sugar, thanks to processing it from its original form, cane sugar, is now devoid of 90 percent of the nutrients in nature�s original version. Similarly, the milled grain we eat in baked goods, pastas and the like, is now stripped of nutrients such as vitamins E and B. Also listed are the entry into the marketplace of Margarine, promoted as a substitute for butter, and Crisco, the first partially-hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Before these products were introduced around 1910, coronary heart disease was almost unknown.

Citing nutrition expert Joel D. Wallach, Fitzgerald brings to our attention that ninety-one nutrients essential to human health, sixty minerals, sixteen vitamins, twelve amino acids, and three essential fatty acids, are no longer found in the food that we eat. While the processed food industry has responded to this deficiency by sprinkling in some nutrients, Fitzgerald points out that so-called �functional foods� which are �fortified� with dubious nutritional additives, bypass the basic issue. Real nutrition comes from consuming real food � food that has been untampered with in the first place.

While many Americans still live in the fantasy that the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of protecting us from 25 percent of all products on the market, Fitzgerald blows holes in this myth by identifying on page after page, dozens of examples of how no such protection exists.

The biggest eye-opener for me, in regard to the FDA�s failure to protect us, is the fact that the product labels we consumers depend on to make �informed� choices about food, chemical cleaners, pesticides, cosmetics and the like are regulated by laws crafted to keep secret from us basic information we want to know. In fact, 99 percent of the ingredients in any given product can remain absent from labels thanks to the legal protection of �trade secrets,� as these ingredients, by law, can be buried under the generic term, �inert� or �other.� The secret code for cover-up in food labels is either �flavorings� or �natural,� and the absence of any reference to the fact that most of our processed food is genetically modified is also perfectly legal.

As a habitual label reader, I am very bothered by the concealment of important information, particularly when it can have life threatening consequences. The last time I allowed a lawn management company to treat my lawn with chemicals the company personnel swore were safe was when I found malformed dead birds all over my lawn and my dog was sick for the next two weeks. I never was able to get a complete list of ingredients in the product, but then again, I don�t need it any more. We cancelled our service contract and we now just mow over the weeds.

And while we are talking about the health of my dog, Fitzgerald offers no mercy for the dog food industry, either. Citing Richard Pitcairn, the famed veterinarian who literally wrote the book on how to feed your cats and dogs with home-cooked meals to avoid commercial foods, Fitzgerald points out that the poisoning of our pets has been going on for so long, that illnesses Pitcairn never saw in younger animals when he came out of vet school in the 1960s, are so common, vets graduating today, think it is normal to see these diseases in young animals. Keep in mind, lots of vets sell the same low quality commercial pet food to you while you�re in their clinics for medical advice for your animal pal.

I was not aware that four of the five largest U.S. pet food companies are subsidiaries of major multinational corporations that are also into manufacturing people food. The dog food departments of these companies collect what is known as 4-D meat (read: dead, diseased, dying or disabled). This meat porridge may also include euthanized animals from animal shelters (still containing the chemical that killed them) and roadkill to which all manner of food additives and preservatives have been added in abundance to complete the recipe.

While I nearly gagged when I read about all this, what really shocked me is that this same meat porridge, once it has been turned into a finished product for my dog to eat, is also used as raw material for the cosmetics industry. Ugh!

On the people side of things, in a chapter entitled, �From the Womb to the Grave,� Fitzgerald breaks down our lives into �our five toxic phases of life,� and then discusses all the different ways throughout our lives we are exposed to toxic substances in what we breath, eat, live near and use as medical products. The accumulation of exposures begins even when we�re still in the womb, and by the time a cluster of toxins are lodged in our systems, a synergistic effect can take place where the collective burden of this synthetic chemical swill can make us sick, when just one ingredient might still be a manageable poison. It is this synergy, this cumulative risk that is, as yet, largely ignored, and that is destroying our health.

Throughout the book, one of the most persuasive ways Fitgerald uses to make his case is to address the many myths we hold near and dear to us that, in fact, blind us to the truth when we hear it. He calls these blinders �Myths We Cherish� which he then lists one by one with details on why we need to remove them.

In the chapter on the drug and medical industries, he explodes the myths that, �The Government Insures that Drugs Are Safe,� �One Dose Fits All,� �Fluoridated Water is Healthy for Us,� �We Get all the Vitamins We Need,� Vaccinations Are Always Beneficial� and �Drugs Have Extended Our Life Spans.�

Fortunately, by the time you have read enough and fear we are all doomed, Fitzgerald provides readers with an eight page �toxicity questionnaire� for you to take to see how many toxins you may have to deal with to clean up your health. He also devotes several chapters of the book to the many ways you can detoxify and what to look for in order to live a more healthy life. Fitzgerald was kind enough to provide the questionnaire on his website so you can start your road to cleaning up your health today.

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The Hundred-Year Lie � How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health is one of those books that not only needs to be read by every thinking person in America, it also needs to be in the hands of political leaders and policymakers who have been controlled by the very industries that have created the massive health crisis Fitzgerald so clearly exposes.

��..our freedom to choose is dependent upon a right to treat our bodies as private property that we own and control�..I believe we each should have a private property right to keep our bodies free from trespass by toxins. Our private property rights should extend to keeping the air our bodies breathe clear of toxins, the water we drink free of toxins, the food we eat clean of toxins. To accomplish that, to make informed decisions and choices, we all need the freedom of access to relevant information about the quality and purity of what our body absorbs.� --Randall Fitzgerald, 2006

Resources:

1. The Hundred Year Lie website:
2. ACT FOR HEALTH FREEDOM NOW Purchase books, videos and merchandise to help finance the NWV website.
3. The Hundred-Year Lie - How Food and Medicine are Destroying Your Health by Randall Fitzgerald
4. Death By Modern Medicine by Carolyn Dean, MD ND
5. VIEW AND PURCHASE "We Become Silent" a new movie on Codex and Free Trade by Kevin Miller
6. For State, National and International Political Action.

� 2006 Elissa Meininger - All Rights Reserved