The Hundred-Year Lie

The Synthetics Belief System:
This lie really began in earnest in 1906, the year the U.S. Congress enacted the Pure Foods and Drugs Act, the first law of its kind that gave the public a false sense of security about the real safety of its foods and medicines.

It is worth putting this synthetics belief system it spawned into some historical perspective.

This synthetics revolution is by-product of activities within three sectors of the United States of America economy :-
1. the processed foods industry,
2.the pharmaceutical industry, and
3. the chemical industry.

These economic interests influence our public diet and citizen health from our mothers' womb to our own grave. The control we give them, government of the day, over our lives springs directly from our acceptance of this belief system's primary conceit " their lab-created synthetics are as benign as - and more effective than - naturally occurring foods and medicines. That claim is what we describe as the Hundred-Year Lie. 1906 up to 2009 is more than a hundred years, in fact, and this synthetics belief (a lie in reality) system still growing in our midst.

Our indoctrination into the synthetics mythology has its deeper roots in an awestruck fealty to science and technology, whose powers have simultaneously blessed us and blinded us. We live in a prosperous system where the economic principles of supply and demand, competitive markets, and profit motives relentlessly drive the industrialization of our food, medicine, and health care.

This system has created cheaper and more plentiful fake food and produced a host of medical technologies that may save lives and extend lives in almost miraculous ways (if we can afford them). But what have we overlooked, what have we sacrificed, in return?

In our food choices, today, we seem to have traded the safety or our long-term, longevity, health for lower prices and convenience, though even the cost incentive may actually be an illusion, given the medical bills a diet of processed foods may eventually generate. Even the insurance companies are considering policies to provide coverage for toxicity in food with a high premium, if you can prove the case, of course. Until then, it is business as usual for all parties.

The sheer proliferation of processed food/drink products (more than 300,000 available, figure was in year 2006), and nonprescription drugs (at least 200,000 brands, in 2006) constitutes an inherent toxic synergy. We have introduced thousands of chemicals/synthetics into our human diet.

How will they each affect us?
And how will they react with one another inside our human bodies?
The study of synergy - the ways in which chemicals/synthetics may react in unexpected ways - is a new field in which researchers are now making alarming discoveries. lace our food and medicine with the toxic brew of synthetic chemicals that now percolate through every aspect of our natural environment and we have a recipe, poisonous recipe at that, for massive immune system breakdown and health-care system disaster.

Randall Fitzgerald