Must read: "It is insanity to have universal health care in a country that does not exercise the precautionary principal. With the runaway rates of diseases, the future burden on taxpayers will be extraordinary and cripple our economy. 41% of us are expected to get cancer in our lifetime, 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women. The Centers for Disease Control reports that it is the leading cause of death by disease in American children. 1 in 8 women are expected to get breast cancer. And only 5-10% of all of those cancers are genetic. Which means 9 out of every 10 cancers are environmentally triggered and could be prevented. Our food is now so littered with additives that it hardly resembles food anymore. In some cases, it is even regulated by the EPA as a pesticide (which is what happened to our corn when chemical companies decided to genetically engineer it with an insecticidal toxin). We are the only developed country in the world to allow an artificial growth hormone into our dairy supply, a growth hormone so controversial overseas because of its links to elevated hormones levels associated with breast, prostate and colon cancers that every other developed country around the world opted out. Oncologists have written in the New England Journal of Medicine that the cost of cancer care alone is enough to bankrupt our economy. Layer on top of that the cost of treating Alzheimers, allergies, autism, ADHD, asthma….are there other “As” we have not yet named? CNN and Time recently reported that the additional cost of care for a child with food allergies runs at about $4,200 a year. Those costs not only include special dietary needs but also the cost of medicine. The Center for Disease Control reported a 265% increase in the rates of hospitalizations related to food allergic reactions over a ten year period. What about prevention do we not understand? Our economy is sick because we are. Our health care system has turned into one that is about disease management. We are crippling our economy with a health care system that no longer works. We are sickening our population with a food supply hopped up on artificial and synthetic ingredients, ingredients for which there are no long term human safety studies, much less synergistic toxicity studies which might tell us what these chemicals and ingredients are doing to us in combination. We talk about obesity and “let’s move” as if somehow 30 minutes of exercise will be able to purge the pesticides, artificial growth hormones and genetically engineered ingredients now regulated as pesticides from our cells. We are fooling ourselves. Prevention begins with purging these ingredients from our food supply, the way countries around the world have already done. The artificial growth hormone, rbGH, found in our dairy, is not used by any other developed country around the world. Sixty-four countries labeled genetically engineered ingredients in foods so that consumers could make an informed choice when it comes to protecting their health and opt out if they want to. Artificial dyes derived from petroleum have been removed from children’s foods int the United Kingdom by our very own American corporations (Kraft, Wal Mart, Coca Cola, Nestle) because of their link to hyperactivity. Yet we continue to pump these ingredients into our food supply, driving shareholder returns. But at what price? The externalized costs of these companies have become the revenue opportunities of the pharmaceutical companies. And while shareholders capture the returns, the ones that continue to be out of pocket are American consumers. The United States now spends more on health care and disease management than any other country on the planet. Eighteen cents of every dollar spent in our economy is spent managing diseases and on health care costs. It is affecting all of us – it doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you are on. Disease doesn’t know party lines. Cancer doesn’t care if we are a Republican or a Democrat. So while we debate universal health care, perhaps it’s time that we have a conversation worth talking about and that is how we get a handle on the runaway rates of diseases in this country, so that we don’t cripple our economy and the health of our children who will inherit it."
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 05:20:46 +0000
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