We aggregate so you’ll cogitate!
by MICHAEL BRAUNSTEIN
Online 2015.02.24
Recent news items to keep the brain cells percolating.
The Good
Eggs aren’t bad anymore. Eggs never were bad in my estimation. Decades ago when the common wisdom was that butter was bad and margarine was good, I didn’t buy that either. Even as a grade school kid, eating something that science had concocted instead of a natural food didn’t make sense to me.
Eggs have been freed from the aspersions that science cast upon them as far back as the 1950s. It’s good news that people unaccustomed to thinking for themselves can now take the word of the same “experts” who told them eggs were bad, now telling them that eggs are okay. Well, at least the panel is informing the public correctly now. So, good for you folks, you can eat eggs again.
No measles deaths. In fact, no encephalitis reports either. So, as the media sweat dries off our flatscreens and we realize how much was hype, self-aggrandizement by the Centers for Disease Control and job justification by health officials on every level of government, we can see that a disease often contracted in childhood and conferring permanent immunity was about as much a threat as eating eggs. Now, that’s not to diminish how important it is to maintain a strong immune system or how sick a person can get with any disease but a knee-jerk panic mode isn’t sensible. Hopefully people will keep things in perspective with the next media-created crisis.
That perspective includes noting zero deaths from measles for the period 2004-2015 (CDC records) but 108 deaths from measles vaccine combination reported to the United States’ Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (vaers.hhs.gov) over the same period. Zero deaths from measles, 108 deaths from measles vaccine. So, though we’re reporting this under the “good news” heading, temper it with that second fact.
The Bad
People are sheeple. The news about eggs above decries this bad news item: People still rely on institutions and government panels to tell 'em what’s good for them. With the recent news that the USDA’s Nutrition Panel has published its latest Dietary Guidelines, we find the panel backtracking on a number of previous pronouncements, including the egg issue. That set of guidelines also reneges the previous condemnation of cholesterol and saturated fat in general. These are foods that Heartland Healing has been illuminating for years. There are reasons nature included cholesterol in our bodies and our food. Same with saturated fats. Same with sugars — the naturally occurring type. The Panel also finds its way to condemn refined sugar, finally.
But more importantly, why do we need a panel to tell us what observation and nature should teach us? And a panel that is obviously wrong more often than not and touts the false position for decades, at that? To paraphrase the old saw about enabling, “Think for a man and you shape his world for a day (and possibly incorrectly) but teach a man to think for himself and you’ve helped him reason for a lifetime.”
Just look at the makeup of the panel. (health.gov/dietaryguidelines/committee/) Members are from institutions that act like they know everything. They were joined together under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture to tell us what we should or shouldn’t eat; all of them from universities that we all know get major funding from Monsanto, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Beef and the rest of corporate America.
The fact that we have so many “panels” thinking for us should be the big, bad news of the day.
The Ugly
Superbugs If a person wants to stay healthy, he should stay out of two places when at all possible: the supermarket and the hospital. Both can be extremely hazardous to your health.
The standard supermarket sells mostly stuff that will poison a human and drain nutrients from the body. If you stay in the produce section, you can almost get by as long as you shop sensibly and organically when needed. Straying into the areas bounded by the Five Rivers of Hades, one finds only processed ingredients posing as food-like substances, laced with chemicals and devoid of nutrition. Damnation awaits.
Things could get even more dangerous when you visit a hospital where a super-deadly race of bacteria lurks, a race humans created. Now, don’t avoid a hospital when absolutely necessary but really consider the consequences.
In humanity’s ongoing and poorly conceived battle against Nature, we have managed to take a good thing (antibiotics) and overuse them to the point of permanent harm. Nature always wins. Bacteria have adapted and mutated to overcome our haughty attempts to control evolution and strains such as the dreaded CRE are now in the news. Having emerged resistant to carbapenem, the nuclear solution of antibiotics, CRE is raging in America’s hospitals. This particular strain is transmitted by hard-to-sterilize medical scopes used in common medical procedures. Doctors just love to poke around inside the body and when we do invasive stuff like that when it’s unwarranted, CRE finds a new home and infects patients. The stuff is impossible to kill using drugs. When it gets into the blood, mortality is worse than Ebola. About 65 hospital patients have died since 2013. Anyone mulling an elective procedure would do well to think twice. This stuff makes other infections look like a case of… well, the measles.
Be well.
