Holistic Medicine Is Also Big Pharma Profits

ΩΩLast fall I discovered a world I was unaware of, that is, the anti-vaccination community.  Many readers lost their heads when I endorsed the concept of using vaccinations to deal with the dreaded Viral Kingdom, one of the oldest life forms on earth.  One that mainly lives inside of other living things.  Well, vaccination stories have been in the news lately and I shoved this aside because of other pressing concerns like the dangerous oil crisis, for example.  But it is time to plunge back into the business about how we can protect ourselves from epidemics and debilitating diseases.

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ΩΩOne paradox I will go into lower down in this story is the bizarre schizophrenic attitude of the ‘holistic’ community.  Namely, they are very angry about taking medicines and hate ‘big Pharma’ but they also have a huge ‘Pharma’ themselves only it is totally unregulated by anyone and often entails taking very dangerous supplements.  That is, they are very often pill poppers or snake oil drinkers!  Odd, isn’t it?  Far from being ‘organic’ they are just as addicted to short cut pills as anyone else.

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ΩΩBut first, the miracle of vaccinations: no medical interventions are needed, just a brief and often nearly unnoticed shot in the arm and voila.  No more illnesses.  I can’t think of any better system to avoid communicable diseases.  But there is a catch to vaccinations just as all things are never perfect: they don’t work 100% but if at least 93% of the population has these vaccinations, the diseases can’t spread to those who don’t get the protection directly from the vaccinations.  This is a very simple concept called ‘herd immunity’.

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ΩΩFirst, some very good news on the vaccine front that should make even the people who are scared of vaccinations, happy.  That is, scientists believe they can make vaccinations more perfect and have even fewer side effects:  Vaccinomics: Scientists Are Devising Your Personal Vaccine: Scientific American

The past decade has seen vaccinomics inch much closer to reality. With the completion of the first phase of the Human Genome Project in 2000, and the advent of sequencing technologies that can detect gene variations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), for the first time scientists have the tools in hand to find the key immune genes and genetic networks that play roles in vaccine response.

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Poland envisions a future in which people can opt to have their genome sequences stored on chips in their health insurance cards. At the doctor’s office, computers would scan the chips to determine whether the person’s gene sequences have been linked to vaccine side effects or weak responses. Then the patient and physician “will pick and choose an individualized program that best fits his or her genetics,” Poland explains.

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ΩΩNow, if you are paranoid, the idea of someone keeping a file of your genetics is a scary thing.  Genetic information is just like any other medical information.  In this country, it is still illegal for anyone outside of the health system to access your medical information.  With one proviso: insurance.  Since we insist, or rather, lobbyists in DC insist, on having a goofy and inefficient healthcare system that sucks up tremendous amounts of money, the insurers don’t want to insure people who have  medical problems so they demand to see our medical records before insuring us.  Of course, if we are perfectly healthy, we wouldn’t need any health insurance.

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ΩΩBusinesses want only healthy people so they can have lower premiums, for example.  If we had systems similar to all other sane modern first world nations, this business would never come up at all.  We live in a society, not as atomized individuals.  We have social obligations as well as collective needs but we still can have political individual rights.  Indeed, this is where lobbying short circuits all other collective/social systems: individuals may want various things but if the lobbyists don’t want it, we don’t get it.  If the lobbyists want something we despise, they get it, we vote out the guys who did this to us and then put in new chumps and the lobbyists then buy them off and we get nowhere, fast.

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ΩΩGenetic information is a good thing, by itself.  But it also has dangers, like ANYTHING, thanks to humans abusing all systems and so we have to weigh our desire to survive with our fears that outsiders will violate our privacy and use it to destroy us rather than save us.  The ideal situation would be to have a disposable genetic information system so when we need specific services demanding our genetic information, it can be created and then immediately destroyed after using the data.

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ΩΩNow on to the vaccination wars:  Whooping Cough Epidemic in California: Lax Vaccination May Be to Blame – ABC News

“Whooping cough is now an epidemic in California,” said Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health, in a statement. “Children should be vaccinated against the disease and parents, family members and caregivers of infants need a booster shot.”  As of June 15, a total of 910 cases had been confirmed in the state. Another 600 suspected cases are currently being investigated by local health officials, the statement indicated.

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…Dr. Blaise Congeni of Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio said he wasn’t surprised, as higher-than-usual numbers of pertussis cases have been reported across the country.  “We are having an outbreak in Ohio,” though not as severe as in California, he said.

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Oregon public health officials have also reported an unusually high number of pertussis cases in that state….He said that the overall rate for PBEs among the state’s roughly 7,200 schools is about 2 percent. But rates are much higher in some schools. Records for 2009 indicated that close to 175 schools had PBE rates of 20 percent or more. A few had rates above 70 percent.

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ΩΩThe points of entry for the Viral Kingdom is in religious fanatic communities such as the Ultra Orthodox Jews, the Amish and other similar communities who congregate in tight groups or in very liberal or extreme rightwing communities that have a lot of paranoia or a touching belief in ‘holistic’ medicines.  This is why the outbreaks of easily-controlled very contagious diseases, if you vaccinate everyone, are in specific places, over and over again.  NYC and LA have fair-sized anti-vaccination communities and both are entry points for international travelers and the combo is very dangerous.  Ohio has farming communities like the Amish and thus, even though they are socially more isolated than the NYC or LA communities, they still get and spread these diseases to a lesser extent.

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ΩΩOnce the West Coast states made it very easy to evade vaccinating children and still have them go to school, vaccination rates are collapsing just as they are in Europe.  Europe has a very activist ‘holistic’ political community that is working tirelessly to undo modern medical systems and replace it with a fantasy system that will revert things to the good old days of low survival rates, high death rates of children…for example, Charles Darwin’s father was a well-known physician and Darwin was an upperclass Brit who feared communicable diseases so much, he refused to have his family live in London.

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ΩΩNearly half of his children died of communicable diseases by age 15.  While eating and drinking only healthy stuff and living in the countryside at a fine estate!  Plenty of sun and plenty of exercise. He was one of the first Brits to have a verandah like the ones he saw overseas, installed so the family could eat outdoors.  Still, his children died.  Europe, with its below the 2.0 replacement threshold birthrate, cannot afford epidemics.  Many of the religious fanatic communities have high birthrates so they seem to not care about losing a quarter of their children to diseases.  But the rate of vaccination in Europe is dropping as it did in Japan, too.  And both are on a population collapse cycle which is of great interest to me.

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ΩΩThat is, I firmly believe that humans have a very powerful death wish built into our psyches by evolution!  Why this happened can’t be proven, it can only be guessed at.  The concept of death/caves/wealth is extremely deep, held universally by all humans and runs alongside paranoia about the sun dying during an eclipse.  We are fascinated by extinction events even as we mindlessly kill off many species due to human overpopulation.  And the idea that we are overpopulating the earth haunts many people who also claim they are protecting their children and so they avoid protections that really work while rushing into ones that have zero utility.  Why is that?

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ΩΩWe are basically paradoxical creatures.  We somehow escaped Mother Nature’s iron rule, that is, temporarily escaped. All other living things simply eat, sleep, have sex and then insure the young survive (either through having lots and lots of young or protecting and nourishing them) so that the precious genes we carry are carried onwards through time.  All the complex courting games of many animals is an attempt at finding the fittest mate so the chances of future survival of the genes is more likely.  All animals do this automatically.  They all want to have the best mates, the strongest offspring and the most surviving genes.  It is totally and completely unconscious.  They do this naturally.

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ΩΩThey also die.  Humans, on the other hand, can protect the weak and keep many more offspring alive and we often kill the strongest and best rather than the weakest.  That is, we wage war against each other and in the process, kill off the bravest and strongest members of the community.  One of the paradoxes of humans is this process of weeding out the genetic best while allowing the genetically weak to proliferate.  The Nazis, when trying to understand this evolutionary information, decided to do a typical paradoxical human thing: send out the best and strongest and have them die trying to kill off the genetically weak (as the Nazis defined ‘genetically weak’).  That is, the Nazis began, long before they killed even one Jew or one Gypsy, to eliminate everyone with schizophrenia starting with Hitler’s own aunt living in an  asylum. The Nazi attempt at engineering a better human was a classic Cave of Wealth and Death moment: it did the exact opposite as Hitler hoped.

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ΩΩHitler was also anti-modern medicine.  He believed in ‘holistic’ hocus-pocus.  He believed that if he had a certain diet, he would be the picture of hale and hearty health.  He was, of course, entirely insane and as time passed, became more and more insane.  Even as he convinced himself that his brain controlled his body and by thinking the right things and doing the right things, he could defeat his own genetic and cultural defects and this made things twice as bad than if he left things alone and didn’t try all these goofy ideas.  Several million humans would have not been cruelly murdered, too.

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ΩΩFanaticism is very dangerous.  It takes over the emotional part of the brain which is where the most powerful death forces reside and in the grip of fanatical beliefs, humans tend towards doing dangerous or deadly things while simultaneously piously claiming they are trying to stay alive.  This does happen in the mainstream healthcare community which is not immune to these paradoxical interior forces.  This is why rational thinking, a very precious and rare thing, has to be applied in great force.

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ΩΩMrs. Huffington who rules the Huffington Post, is a typical Hollywood type diva.  She hates modern medicine and believes in magic.  The movie/TV fantasy machine does this to people.  I know, I have family members who are part of this Hollywood business machine.  And I think they are crazy.  Anyway, her online publication is home to every quack and every holistic lunatic on earth.  Here is a typical example of what passes for an editorial there: Dr. Larry Dossey: Creating Disease: Big Pharma and Disease Mongering

You may think there is enough disease in the world already, and that no one would want to add to the diseases that we humans must deal with. But there is a powerful industry in our society that is working overtime to invent illnesses and to convince us we are suffering from them.

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Thanks to people like this ‘Doctor’ we have plenty of communicable diseases which plague humanity and won’t go away since a good sized group of fanatics won’t get vaccinations.  Thank god the dreaded smallpox disease was eliminated before the anti-vaccinationists could stop that global program.  What the doctor here is complaining about is all the goofy medicines for various conditions which we could do with out but prefer to deal with via medicine because frankly, we like to.

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That is, the cosmetic/feel good/smell good business ALWAYS has been tremendous!  Since day one when the first human put the first comb to the hair or used berry juice to make decorations on the skin or strung sea shells together.  The art of perfume making goes back to the earliest civilizations.  Dousing oneself with bear grease is incredibly ancient.  As is doing magical performances to fix diseases.  The Witchdoctor business is very ancient indeed and is one of the main drivers for observing the stars, moon and planets which were believed to control everything on earth including germs.

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This effort is known as “disease mongering,” a term introduced by health-science writer Lynn Payer in her 1992 book Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick…. The trick was to inflate a common, everyday condition to the level of pathology, which, if not attended to, could blight one’s prospects for personal happiness and success….. Among these “illnesses” are erectile dysfunction, female sexual dysfunction, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), restless legs syndrome, osteoporosis, social shyness (also called social anxiety disorder and social phobia), irritable bowel syndrome and balding.

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ΩΩWow.  This article rages on and on but the list of things that doctors are ‘inventing’ and the ‘curing’ according to the Huffington Post gang, is quite revealing.  That is, I have in my own family, people with bipolar problems, for example.  This plagues the members of my family that hangs out in Hollywood and work as actresses!  This also causes them to abuse illegal drugs and go crazy at regular intervals.  Indeed, Hollywood is infamous for the emotional and mental instability of the people who work there.  The death and bankruptcy rate of Hollywood people is very high.  Often, they die from abusing their own bodies in various ways, long before reaching retirement age.

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ΩΩIt is one of the many paradoxes of life that the community most bent on spreading ‘holistic health’ happens to be the exact same community with an atrocious death rate due to all sorts of psychological and health problems brought on by their lifestyle choices!  Far from being healthy, Hollywood is very sick.

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ΩΩThe list here includes osteoporosis.  This is an age-related problem.  I know personally, up close, people who lived organic, healthy lives and grew their own food, etc, but once they reached 80 years of age, got…osteoporosis.  These people live, often times, to this great age due to  medical interventions that were impossible even 35 years ago.  Eating well and living a good life is good and extends one’s life but much of the survival rates we see today are due mainly to modern medicine especially vaccinations.

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ΩΩThe other things on the doctor’s list above are cosmetic.  Balding men are,  like women with wrinkles, discriminated against.  We have a ‘youth’ culture belief which requires tremendous amounts of medical interventions in order to hide the visual effects of aging.  So we have this restless and paranoid group of people centered on Hollywood and the fashion world starving themselves to look thin and having many interventions including using tanning beds, etc, trying to look young and turning into zombies with rigid faces and a population of fat, unhappy people who need surgical interventions to cut down on the calories which are due to industrialized food production systems…both are in trouble.

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ΩΩHysterics in Hollywood howling about vaccinations being evil are the exact same idiots who run off to a cosmetic doctor to get botulism germs injected into the face so they can erase natural wrinkles!  Just for example.  YUCK.  Talk about UNNATURAL.  Looking at Mrs. Huffington’s smooth, seamless and ageless face and I suspect very strongly, she happily sucks down botulism injections while giving a platform for anti-vaccinationists to howl about how terrifying simple injections are to humanity.  That is, she is a typical Hollywood hypocrite.

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Doctors paying to hear anti-vaccine views in Oregon – USATODAY.com is due to this: Dramatic rise in whooping cough cases in Jackson Co. Oregon| KDRV

Even if you were vaccinated as an infant, the county is asking everyone ages 11 to 64 to get a Tdap. The Tdap is a booster shot vaccination needed later in life because immunity can wear off during adolescence.  Officials say there has been an anti-vaccine trend in Southern Oregon.

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ΩΩThe CDC wants to know how people reason out things.  Of course, reasoning out things is one of the most painful processes humans can embark on.  That is, we can’t really do it.  The rules of science try to minimize human delusional thinking but this is very hard to do since we naturally fall effortlessly into delusional thinking.  We are ALL delusional.  We can hope to riddle out this matter or that thing but in the end, the dangers of delusions are very hard to avoid.  Just as we know that most of us, if we don’t work in Hollywood and thus have a good chance to survive past 65 years, will end up totally delusional before dying after 80 years of age, 99% of the people at 65 who know this information will still attest that THEY won’t become senile!  Nope, each individual imagines they will be that 1% who retain their minds even when 100 years old.

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ΩΩThis is statistically impossible but the individual clings to the rare stories of intelligent, cognizant super-elderly instead of preparing for senility.  So it is with vaccinations: people will, even in the teeth of an epidemic that is killing people, cling to beliefs that tell themselves, ‘I will live forever if only I do this thing or that thing.’  Since this is a religious, not intellectual, matter, any information that counters these beliefs will be violently and emotionally rejected.  This is why so many of my readers stormed off in a rage when I suggested that vaccinations protect us from epidemics.

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ΩΩClick here for the Vaccine War | FRONTLINE | PBS Video: this video by Frontline caused a huge row in their comments section.  Just as with my own blog, the anti-vaccinationists were furious and attacked everything Frontline has ever done while yelling, ‘I will never watch your show again!’  Of course, preservation of one’s beliefs requires not taking on contrary information!  This happens in all belief systems!  It happens to be a feature of all beliefs: they exist only in a vacuum where there is zero feedback from any other belief systems or even real facts.  This is why ‘miracles’ are a core element in all belief systems.  Suspending the iron laws of Nature is epidemic within all religions and beliefs.

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ΩΩThe present experiment in ‘holistic health’ is a counterforce to the numbing system of modern technical medical care.  One thing that amuses me is how every single ‘holistic’ person I know rushes off to get heartless modern technical medicine when facing death.  Then rush back to their happy holistic home when the crisis is fixed by mean Big Pharma/modern medicine doctors!

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ΩΩI have eaten yogurt since the 1969’s when I had to cook it myself, using goat’s milk from our nanny goats.  Milking goats is fun.  They have horns.  I milk sheep, too.  I like goat and sheep milk especially when it is made into cheeses.  The healthy side of all of this has been perverted by the holistic health community’s witch doctors to produce ‘big pharma-style’ fake medicines exploiting simple information about yogurt: Be skeptical of claims about probiotics and prebiotics – Los Angeles Times

Jamie Lee Curtis promises in TV adds that bacteria-laced Dannon yogurt will improve colon regularity. Other companies sell little pills full of living microbes and even supplements promising to feed those microbes what they most like to eat. Probiotics and prebiotics — from bacteria-infused beverages to microbe-filled chocolates — are gaining in popularity, even as some scientific studies find they don’t always live up to their claims….People can easily get useful bacteria from fermented foods, such as sauerkraut and miso, Smith says.

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HAHAHA.  I not only made my own yogurt, I made my own sauerkraut, too! And beer!  From scratch!!! HAHAHA.  Yup, people can grow and make their own foods.  Imagine that.  But most people do NOT want to do this.  Then would far rather pop a pill or drink something simple that is made in….hold onto your hats here…FACTORIES!  Nearly all of the ‘holistic’ medicines sold in stores is made in factories!  DUH.  Not only that, to get customers, they make these factory-produced ‘health foods’ so they have all the bad stuff that people like in ‘non-health foods’.  This always has amused me.

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I recall the first ‘health bar’ foods in Berkeley in the early 1970’s back when I was milking goats, etc.  These were nuts and raisins.  But to increase sales, they added a candy core that was ‘organic’ and then chocolate and so on until it became just as nasty as any candy bar!  This is normal.  Humans want the illusion of health, not the hard work behind it.  Try milking a goat!  I will show anyone how to do this (a lost art…you caress the tits while bumping the full udder with the fist, imitating the baby goat’s method of getting milk).

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….However, some scientists remain wary of the claims made by probiotics manufacturers. And since the Food and Drug Administration does not regulate probiotics, proof of efficacy is often sketchy. Last year, Dannon settled a lawsuit with yogurt buyers who asserted its ad campaign made false promises.

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“Be skeptical,” advised Dr. Michael Starnbach of Harvard Medical School. The bacteria that have inhabited a person’s gut for decades will not easily give up their place to newcomers, he said. Prebiotics, he says, seem logical — but there is not much in the way of scientific data on them yet.

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ΩΩFor the most part, much of the incoming data will show that eating the ‘good stuff’ is good but TAKING PILLS is stupid.  And of course, the Holistic Big Pharma factories will howl that they are producing a real medicine while cranking out really stupid pills and drinks or even toxic garbage.  And since they are unregulated, they can do this in a very nasty way.

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Probiotics – Financially Motivated Health Scam or Beneficial Bug?

In the June 7, 2010 article, “Snake Oil in Your Snacks. Food Masquerading as Drugs Have Become a $160 Billion Business,” Matthew Herper and Rebecca Ruiz of Forbes says that the world’s biggest food companies are stuffing foods full of beneficial bacteria promising to, “boost immunity; protect your heart and digestive system and help you sleep.”

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See?  Simple foods anyone can produce—I have done it!—are turned into ‘medicine’ which then is compressed in factories into pills or injected, again, in factories, into all sorts of foods.  For example, I have and can bake pro-biotic cookies.  That is, I use yogurt in the cookie dough.  Easy to do.  But will this be ‘probiotic’?  I don’t know if it makes the slightest difference but I like the TASTE so I do it for that reason.

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People ate my cookies because they liked them.  Cooking with good ingredients is good!  But injecting this stuff as it is produced in a factory is not good.  If people want health, they have to cook from scratch.  Not buy billions in manufactured foods that make ridiculous health claims.

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Herper and Ruiz also claim that these large companies are funding, “often deliberately vague” clinical research to justify health claims and to “blur the line between nutrition and medicine.” Steven Nissen, head of cardiology at the Cleveland clinic told Forbes that most claims are “completely unsubstantiated.”

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Another paradox here: ‘holistic’ medical people decry modern science while hitchhiking on the back of modern science.  Using the systems for refining stuff, the factories and the injection methods, they ape modern medicine all the way down the line but do this unscientifically, that is, with often zero proof what they are doing is good or bad or indifferent.  One thing it is: expensive!  They prey on people’s trust, telling them to fear ‘big Pharma’ while luring the poor saps into an identical but more dangerous ‘big Pharma’ production system.

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Thomas Pirko of Bevmark, a consulting company with clients such as Kraft, Nestle and Coke adds that, “If you find the perfect additive, you get rich.” The Forbes article continues to cite reputable sources and renowned physicists such as Daniel Merenstein of Georgetown University who points out that if drug companies made such claims without sufficient evidence, they would be fined.

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The big manufacturing powers who happen to include the ‘holistic’ health factories LOVE additives.  They LOVE supplements.

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The National Institutes of Health, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, NCCAM, says that there is limited available data or clinical research to support probiotic therapy. Furthermore, it says that, “Effects found from one species or strain of probiotics do not necessarily hold true for others, or even for different preparations of the same species or strain.” This is despite, “American spending on probiotic supplements,” having “nearly tripled from 1994 to 2003.”

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ΩΩThis is the latest health fad.  Graham crackers were a holistic health fad, for example.  Now, it is just another food.  With additives, of course.  Fads are fun but even if there is some basis in science, this doesn’t mean it carries through to the additive market.  Stupid things are injected or mixed into everything we eat in order for the sellers to put up ads yelling, ‘This comes with the latest additive that will make you healthy!’  The best food is the least processed and if you grow it yourself.  But people can live long lives eating garbage!  We are garbage guts. That is, we evolved from eating specific things such as insect larva and fruits to eating EVERYTHING we can get our hands on!

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ΩΩLiterally, we can be cannibals and survive.  We can literally eat dirt and survive for a while.  We ranged about the world, stuffing nearly every possible thing into our mouths, things that fly, swim, run, plants, insects, animals, tubulars dug up from the earth, seeds, whatever.  Few animals on earth eat EVERYTHING but humans can and will eat….EVERYTHING. And we survived while doing this, indeed, this is why we now are a major, major biomass on earth!

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ΩΩThe phobias and ticks about foods we eat is coupled with the massive growth of sweetened foods that is causing an obesity epidemic in modern cities.  While the ‘whole foods’ movement is equally delusional worried about eating this thing or that thing while consuming some of the move vile tasting garbage.  My mother-in-law nearly died this year.  Her sweet friends are now coming over with ‘probiotic’ stuff which is disgusting to smell or drink.  One ‘health drink’ claimed to be ‘pro-biotic’ and it was fermented berries!  Ie: alcoholic.  Tasted like cough syrup.

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ΩΩWine was an early ‘medicine’ and was consumed in small quantities until the technology of growing and pressing wines improved and then the Minoan empire had huge wine vats and this led to the creation of the god, Dionysius who got roaring drunk and drinking too much wine is not good for your health and gets you into lots of social trouble so the ancient people made this into a religion, of course.  Ahem.  Humans are funny as hell sometimes!  We love experimenting with stuff and when it proves to be good, we go overboard and it becomes bad.  This is the whole infinity/zero business.  We always do to much of everything.  It is our natures to do this.

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