THEM

THEY are numerous. THEY are wealthy and powerful beyond belief. THEY have the ability to make people do anything they want them to do, when and how they want them to do it.

THEY are the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the food giants, and the press. This is not a Conspiracy theory, since the only "conspiracy" involved is the desire for the greatest possible profit and the largest market possible. I am also not going to list numbers, statistics, or specific events. I am merely going to narrate for you a scenario, and expect you to extrapolate from that what you will. Facts, statistics, and physical proof are out there, especially on the internet. Feel free to research to your heart's content.

The medical industry has the responsibility for keeping America healthy (presumably). But today's medical practitioners don't do much to get people healthy. They do do a lot to keep their patients coming back repeatedly, however, soothing and tut-tutting over the patients' frustrations at never getting "well."

Nowadays, being healthy is becoming more and more a condition that is entirely up to the individual, but most people don't know that. They haven't learned to take responsibility for their health, so they blindly hand that responsibility off to a professional prescription-writer and test-result-interpreter, and wonder why they can never seem to get well and feel really good.

Most of what ails America's health today can be traced back to a faulty, synthetic diet. Our parents were raised on good basic nutrition, before the earliest stages of this transformed regimen, and suffered the least, eating a nutritionally sound diet which included raw whole milk, lots of meat, poultry, butter, cream, and fresh vegetables and fruits grown by the family itself. By the time our generation came along, the number of manipulated and synthesized items in the American diet had increased exponentially. And the generation we are now raising is the most unfortunate of all, for their diet will consist almost completely of manufactured, synthesized, and processed foods.

Today's generation, unless they live on a family farm or have members who are educated in real nutrition, must subsist on a very nutrient-poor diet. Years of constantly eating empty foods and devouring chemicals, polyunsaturated fatty acids, sugars in numerous forms, and artificial vitamin supplements have produced a population that not only is sick all the time, but is probably obese, and generally has hypertension, diabetes, and heart problems. Years of constantly being harrangued by nutritional charlatans in the medical industry to eat these foods has led to a nation of nutritionally deprived sheep, blindly obeying their slightest suggestion because the "authority" is a god who wears a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck.

If America is the "healthiest" nation in the world, then the world is at death's door, because no other country on earth eats the nasty, chemical-riddled, synthetic diet that Americans do. No other nation even comes close to consuming the amount of vile poisons that Americans do. And no other nation on earth has so many doctors, hospitals, clinics, and medications (more than 24,000 prescription drugs alone) to treat all the diseases and disorders that result from this onslaught.

Nobody profits from this pitiful situation like the medical industry (unless it's the food giants and pharmaceutical conglomerates). Profit is good. Profit is a great motivator. Profit in its proper context is one of the things that made the United States the freest country on earth. But the profiteering that goes on in these related fields at the expense of the health of the population of this country is so obscene that it borders on outright Conspiracy to commit murder for profit. (I'm hoping this is the only time I'll have to use the word "conspiracy" here.)

Years ago, a trip to the doctor's office cost five dollars. If your doctor practiced in a rural area, he might even take produce in payment for his services. If his patient was, say, a mechanic, he might accept work on his car as his fee. But he knew how to heal, and his patients almost always got well, and medical costs to the patient were minimal. In those days, doctors were called "healers," because their patients often got completely well. But doctors in those days weren't confronted with the array of recent diseases and conditions that plague Americans today. There was one form of diabetes. Hypertension was virtually unknown, obesity was much less prevalent, and myocardial infarction was so rare that when the EKG machine was invented, it was ignored, since it was only for finding the rarest of heart disorders.

I don't believe all doctors are bad. I don't even believe most of them are. But I do believe that virtually all of them who are employed by HMO's and other conglomerates are suborned by the system. For them, to defer from the party line (to actually cure someone, for instance, or refuse to push the drug of the day) could result in their being fired and blackballed. So most of them, ethics aside, have to go along to get along, or they have to get out of the business.

Because medicine stopped being an altruistic service to help mankind, to care for one's neighbors, and to heal the hurts of the population a long time ago. It stopped when it became a business. Then, it became an even bigger business, until it was consuming a very large part of America's income.

Now, the bottom line is always the bottom line, and the medical industry, intent on more and more profit, actually keeps its victims ill in order to keep them coming back repeatedly, never healing, always "treating."

The days of the enviable American diet are so far in the past that only a few older people really have any personal experience of it. The days of America's robust good health are also lost somewhere in the dust of progress. But the days of the medical industry's headlock on the population have arrived with a vengeance.

The next group of THEM that is responsible for much of America's physical ills is the pharmaceutical industry. These are the big boys. They play for keepsies, and they play rough. Some of the things I will tell you here will be difficult to prove without lots of statistics, but since I am known for having an opinion or three, I'm going to stick my neck out and state some things without proof. You can read or not.

Do you know that the average elderly person in America takes at least 10 different prescription drugs every day? Suppose Zeke and Gladys are both taking ten pills a day, and each pill must be taken twice, two at a time. Suppose also that Zeke and Gladys both take a different list of pills. (Does this sound to you like the HEALTHIEST country in the world?) They will be taking thse pills for the rest of their lives, never getting any better. Now. Who do you suppose is receiving the profit from all these pills? Don't make me have to tell you...

Just know this: The pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in your illness. The longer you have that illness, the longer they can crank out pills to treat you.

Notice that I didn't say "heal" you. That's because the pharmagiants don't want to heal you. They want to treat you. Forever. From now on. Endlessly. Why should they cure you? If they cure you, you stop going back to your doctor or pharmacy, stop getting new prescriptions, stop refilling old ones, and the pharm boys start to lose money.

There are only a few things that need to be revealed here. Number 1 is the fact above: The pharmaceutical giants are not interested in curing you. They are interested in treating you for the (short) rest of your (miserable, medically lucrative) life. (Does your doctor ever talk about "healing" you? Does he ever talk about "curing" you? I thought so...)

Number 2 is this: There are over 24,000 prescription drugs in common usage today. With the exception of some Antibiotics , not one of these drugs actually heals whatever disease it is prescribed for. Not one. They are not designed to heal, they are designed to treat you forever, and to cause you to return to your doctor and your pharmacy repeatedly, indefinitely.

Number 3: The bottom line, as I have stated frequently before, is always the bottom line. The pharm boys are in this game to make money. Lots and lots and LOTS of money. Lucre. Loot. Moola. Dough. Shin plasters. Fins. Bucks. You get my drift. Don't get between these guys and their money.

Number 4: And, whatever you do, don't use any natural, alternative treatments, or, heaven forbid, eat a healthful, natural diet. If you do these things, you risk doing the very thing in number 3 above that I told you not to do. Since natural herbs, oils, compounds, and foods are not patentable, the pharm boys don't make a cent off any of it (unless they can tinker with it, add a bunch of proprietary chemicals and colorings and make it their own). So, it stands to reason that if you are treating yourself with stuff they can't earn any money from, you risk getting between them and their dough.

These guys make so much money in a year that it's almost uncountable. Lots of people--lots of people who can never get well under their doctors' care--are paying into medical plans that must finance this medical adventurism for the privilege of being treated indefinitely by the chemicals, compounds, potions, injections, and pills cranked out by the pharmagiants by the ton every year. The imagination simply can't wrap itself around the variety and abundance of these treatments, most of which cost pennies to produce but cost the insurance companies such vast amounts that the poor, unwell patient, who faithfully pays his insurance premiums, is skewered from both ends: He pays the insurance company to buy the pills the pharmaceutical companies manufacture to not heal him so he can take more, different pills that the insurance has to purchase, and so on, ad infinitum.

American food manufacturers are as opportunistic as any other large business entity when it comes to profits. How do you get the most profit for the least amount of expense? Try using extremely cheap and synthetic raw materials, then crank up the price until the consumer simply refuses to pay. Obviously, the difference between "expenses" and the price consumers are willing to pay is what is known as profit. Considering what is in the U.S. Standard American Diet (SAD), they learned their lessons well in Business school.

Most foods on American grocery shelves are highly processed, highly refined, heavily fortified with chemicals and preservatives , loaded with sugars of several kinds, and packaged brightly and cleverly. They are, most of all, convenient. Americans love convenience, and I swear; Americans will eat ANYTHING if it is convenient and comes in a cute package. (Let's don't go there, ok?) Nutrition--REAL nutrition--is the farthest thing from their minds. The package will proclaim, "FAT FREE! VITAMIN FORTIFIED! NO COOKING NECESSARY!" and the consumer thinks, "This is what I need: a nutritious meal that I don't have to spend a lot of time preparing."

What these consumers don't see is the deliberate planning behind that convenient little package of fat-free, vitamin-fortified food that has deliberately targeted people who will think these exact words whenever they enter a grocery store. They don't see the deliberate use of packaging as a lure. They don't see the willful adulteration of food with chemicals and sugars. They don't see the sneaky marketing-polls and the computerized tracking of spending habits. They don't see the obscene profits these companies make on foods that don't even provide a nutritious diet to laboratory animals.

They don't see the actual processing of the food, in which it is often denatured to the molecular level into a base product that is unrecognizable as food, then colored, flavored, shaped, and fortified to make it resemble the original food. Not only does this process make the raw material go much farther (very cost effective), but it also extends the shelf-life of the food and allows the grocers to buy large quantities before the "sell-by" date is reached. They don't see the chemicals and additives, colorings, preservatives , and flavor enhancers that are proven carcinogens, that frequently go into the making of a processed food on the grocery shelf.

And they don't see that the refining, processing, and production of these ersatz foods render the foods so anti-nutritional that vitamin supplements are one of the biggest-selling items in the country. If the SAD was such a nutritious and healthful diet, why do so many people have deficiency diseases? Why are so many people obese? What has caused the 40-year upswing in type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and Depression that exactly corresponds to the addition of these artificial foods to the diet and the displacement of natural foods?

Why do people eat these things when every grocery store not only carries real meat, poultry, and fish, and raw vegetables and fruits? In a word: Convenience. Americans have been taught by the food industry that "convenience" equals "nutritious," and American consumers have no reason not to believe these claims because the manufacturers go to great lengths to protect their reputations as reliable and trustworthy purveyors of good nutrition.

But, as in all things pertaining to food, the bottom line is still the bottom line. People must eat. It's like breathing--you can't not. So, you are a captive consumer. And, because you are their captive, they can do anything to you, and you will have to take it. With a few small exceptions, they have the only game in town. You either buy their products, or you go hungry. You want convenience, they give it to you, wrapped around a nutritional time bomb that is set to go off by the time you reach age 60. Every one of the diseases mentioned above is diet-induced, regardless of what your doctor tells you. Every one of them can be reversed by adjusting the diet to remove as many of these fake foods as possible and to replace them with more natural foods, such as meat with its attached fat, free-range chicken and eggs, home-grown vegetables, and raw whole milk, cream, and butter from grass-fed herds.

If you eat a continual diet of high-carbohydrate (commercial foods are loaded with sugars and starches of all kinds), nutritionally barren food (most fortifying vitamins and minerals used in commercial foods are chemical and/or synthetic imitations), wrapped in those pretty, clever, and appealing wrappers, I can virtually guarantee you that by age 60, you will have at least one of the above mentioned chronic diseases, if not all of them, and then some. And when this happens, you will become the property of the medical industry and the pharma-giants until you die, especially if you continue to eat the convenient foods in the cute wrappers.

When our grandparents were growing up, they ate raw, natural diets. Heart disease was virtually unknown. The only people who had pinched faces and crooked teeth were the ones who ate a highly-refined, carbohydrate heavy refined diet. And the healthy ones were fertile. Today's young people are infertile. Fertility clinics are doing a land-office business. The increase in the number and frequency of Caesarian-section births is astronomical. Premature births occur at earlier and earlier gestational ages. Think this isn't related? Inspect nutritional backgrounds on infertile people. Check the facts. As the "X-Files" motto says, "The truth is out there." Go find it.

Look to the past. Regain the present. Nourish the future.

For more information on eating the way of our ancestors: www.westonaprice.org