|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
by author Dr. Johann Georg Schnitzer
Supplying hundreds of millions of people with daily food and drink is big business. Each company competes to entice you to choose its products. You’re assaulted with television advertising, newspaper, magazine, radio and billboards–until you succumb. Doctors and scientists are hired to research and document the positive effects of products. Negative, independent information rarely hits the media. It’s called “marketing.” It’s really “lying by omission.” There is a strange paradox in the food industry. The lower the health value of packaged foodstuff, the higher its price! I’ll give you an example. Compare a bag of freshly harvested carrots with a can of carrots that has gone through a processing factory. The highest nutritional value is obviously in the fresh carrots, yet the canned carrots will cost you much more, ounce for ounce. Because you don’t only pay for the carrots. You pay for the tin, the machines needed for processing, the process itself, the bank credit and interest rates for the machines and the cost of the factory building. You also absorb the salaries of the workers and provide profit for the factory owners. It’s called “enrichment” or “improvement” processing. But the only “enrichment” is in the wallets of the factory owners through the insidious process of refining, extracting, dehydrating, sterilizing–even radiating–what was once nourishing food. You may be sure the farmer does not get rich! Grainy Goodness One of the most lucrative lies in food processing is when manufacturers sell you “enriched” and/or “improved” cereal grain. All components of the grain are separated and sold individually. Producers of “concentrated feed” for animals buy the cereal fibber, or bran. It’s also sold to pharmaceutical companies who extract the vitamins and sell them to you as “food supplements.” The life, or the germ, of the grain is removed and sold as a nutritious food “additive” to sprinkle on your cereal. The starch component becomes “refined fine flour.” That’s what you use for baking, thinking you’re getting the best! You’re not. You’re getting a product with all the food “value” removed and you’re charged a high price for it! And because of the nutritional deficiency in this “refined” product, your health suffers. Another lucrative “enrichment process” is to feed the grain, usually wheat, barley and oats, to animals and then sell you the meat. If you compare the price of one pound of wheat, for instance, and one pound of beef you’ll get the profit picture. Do you see the trick? I call it this Profit Centre No. 1. Medical/Pharmaceutical Politics Profit Centre No. 2 deals with the ailments of civilization as a result of malnutrition. This profitable modern medical industry thrives as a result of the processed food industry. A lifetime of eating food that has been extracted, refined and denatured until it is actually unfit for human consumption has caused the present epidemic of chronic diseases and degeneration of health. As inevitable side-effects of Profit Centre No. 1, each generation is less fit that the one before, resulting in both physical and mental degeneration, allergies and disease. Diseases require medical treatment, don’t they? They need drugs, surgery, machine technology for tests, hospitals and hospitalization, doctors and nurses–it goes on and on. The chronic ailments of civilization have become the multibillion-dollar business that keeps sufferers “on the hook” with prescription drugs–all of which have side-effects–so that these people never really get well. Curing them would be an economic disaster for modern medicine! Medication to suppress the ailments of our chronically ill civilization is also the basis of the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. Chronically ill people need permanent medication, which creates permanent demand and adds up to sales, income, earnings and high profits. Check the high prices of both over-the-counter and prescription drugs! Manufacturing medicine that would “cure” chronic diseases would be an economic disaster for the drug industry. You don’t see breweries producing beer that would satisfy thirst for a lifetime, do you?
Dr. Johann Georg Schnitzer is author and editor of “Dr. Schnitzer’s Health Secrets Service” at doc-schnitzer.com. He has written more than 20 books with some hundreds of thousands of published copies, and numerous studies, essays and articles. His most important goal: a synthesis of civilization and health, to allow humankind a healthy and happy life in an ecological balance with a rich, healthy, respected and well-kept nature. Source: alive #246, April 2003 |
||||||||||