How Our Food and Health Systems Are Killing Us

Mask of Deception

Directed by Phillip Rainford and Gail Blundell (2013)

Film Review

Mask of Deception, whose title is somewhat misleading, is best described as an Australian public service documentary about ways our food and health system are killing us. Overall I think viewers will find it useful to have all the major health risks covered in one place.

Unfortunately the film finishes a bit raggedly, with a diffuse attack on the Australian health care system and its long waiting lists, shortage of nurses, and efforts to suppress natural food supplements. The call for civil disobedience at the end seems to come out of nowhere.

Sadly western medicine has grown into an industry dedicated to marketing pharmaceuticals. In a a health system geared towards health promotion and disease prevention, our doctors would be warning us about these health risks instead of handing us prescriptions.

Some of the specific risks (gluten, fluoride, mercury-laden dental amalgam, white sugar, artificial sweeteners, transfats, liquid vegetable oils, vaccinations, mammograms, statins and chemical food additives) mentioned are fairly well covered by Natural News, Dr Mercola and similar natural health sites.

Others are less well known. For example, I was totally unaware of the link between high soy diets (especially for infants on soy formula) and hypothyroidism and type I diabetes.*

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*The soy common in Asian diets has been heavily fermented, in some cases 5-7 years, to make it more digestible.

How Big Pharma Controls Health Care

Big Pharma: How the World’s Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness

By Jacky Law

Constable and Robinson Ltd (2006)

Book Review

In the ten years since British journalist Jacky Law published Big Pharma, the only good news is growing public awareness of the drug industry’s negative effect on human health. There’s no question the wealth and power of the pharmaceutical industry has vastly increased with the enactment of Obamacare in 2010. The latter grants major federal subsidies to both the insurance and drug industry.

Law carefully unpacks the fundamentals that position Big Pharma’s profits at the very top of Fortune 500 companies. In 2001, for example, they were number one, earning profits equal to 16-18% of sales. The banking industry was a distance second at 13.5%. While other Fortune 500 companies averaged 3.3%.

She attributes these obscene profits mainly to inflated prices Big Pharma charges Americans (as much as 5-10 times as much as in other countries), their deliberate efforts to bury and/or spin negative research, their bribing of doctors (with gifts, free lunch, training junkets and consultant fees) and medical journals (with glossy high priced ads), the refusal of the FDA to regulate pharmaceuticals (see FDA Now Completely Sold Out to Big Pharma) and direct to consumer ads aimed at convincing healthy people they need medical attention.

She devotes a whole chapter to “disease mongering,” Big Pharma’s deliberate creation of fictitious illnesses such as menopause, serotonin deficiency, post luteal dysphoric disorder and female sexual desire disorder. This is a topic I blog about frequently. See The Multibillion Dollar Depression Industry, Drug Companies: Killing Kids for Profit, Wyeth and the Multimillion Dollar Menopause Industry and Menopause Made in the USA

She also details studies dating back to 1982 revealing that low fat diets don’t decrease cardiovascular disease, as well as studies from 1992 revealing that cholesterol lowering drugs (statins) don’t reduce mortality. Thanks to the deliberate harassment and demonization of the researchers responsible for these studies, this information has only come into public view in the last two years. See Why the Low Fat Diet Makes You Fat (and Gives You Heart Disease, Cancer and Tooth Decay

Law is also highly critical of the role the pharmaceutical industry has played in minimizing the importance of poor nutrition and exposure to toxic chemicals in causing illness. She finds it extremely ironic (and immoral) that the federal government is clamping down on health supplements instead of environmental toxins.