Death By Supermarket (30 page)

I honestly don’t have a clue what Scientology is all about, but I do have to say that I agree with Tom Cruise in his stance against antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs. Why aren’t more doctors interested in the food people were gestated on, raised on, and are currently eating? Hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, sex hormone imbalances, depleted vitamin D levels, low omega-3 intake, low amino acids, sugar and stimulant addictions, hypoglycemia, food allergies, heavy metal loads, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, a sedentary lifestyle, and many other factors can make people depressed.

Of course there are new mothers who suffer from life-threatening postpartum depression, the extreme example being Andrea Yates, whose postpartum depression ambushed her into a psychosis so dark that it compelled her to drown her five children. People with deep depression and especially psychosis can be spared a comparable tragedy by being offered a temporary lifeline of antidepressants. But for the millions of others who are not likely to experience a psychotic break due to their depression, there are options to taking drugs.

Logically one would think of starting by eliminating high-fructose
corn syrup altogether from our diet. Yet, as Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes, “Imagine if Al Qaeda had resolved to attack us not with conventional chemical weapons but by slipping large amounts of high-fructose corn syrup into our food supply. That would finally rouse us to action—but in fact it’s pretty much what we’re doing to ourselves.”
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Another idea would be to use a “natural” remedy for depression. In the standard (albeit cruel) test of the efficacy of antidepressant drugs referred to as a “forced swim,” rat subjects are tested to compare how long it takes for them to stop swimming (i.e., “give up”) when given antidepressants as compared to rats that were not given antidepressants. Researchers at a Harvard-affiliated hospital found that rats respond to omega-3—as in cod liver oil—as an “antidepressant.”
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Remember back in
chapter 8
when we talked about the association between neurotransmitter imbalance and violence? A dietary experiment conducted in a maximum security institution for young offenders in Aylesbury, Britain, demonstrated that essential fatty acids can also calm violent tendencies. More than 200 inmates took part in a doubleblind, randomized, placebo-controlled study. Those given multivitamin, mineral, and fatty-acid supplements, as in cod liver oil, experienced a 25 percent drop in antisocial behavior and a 35 percent stay of violent incidents. Among the placebo group there was no change.
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And if we’re going to talk about placebos, a recent study reviewed twenty-plus years of research on antidepressants, concluding that although antidepressants can lift depression in most patients, the benefits are hardly more significant than what patients experienced when they (unknowingly) took a placebo.
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Aside from a natural food diet, there are alternatives to drugs for many conditions: acupuncture, Chinese, Ayurvedic and other types of herbs, hypnotherapy, neurofeedback therapy (a type of biofeedback that retrains brain wave patterns), neural therapy (injections of novacaine at meridian sites to correct painful syndromes), bioidentical hormone replacement, heavy metal chelation, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, nutritional supplements,
yoga, meditation, massage therapy, craniosacral therapy (a type of massage to move spinal fluids), osteopathy and chiropractic (both of which treat disorders of the musculoskeletal system), and many other modalities. But since insurance companies do not pay for noninvasive, safe, and effective healing and preventative approaches to keep people well, drugs and procedures after people get sick are the only choices available for most people.

Although some people felt that Bill Clinton deserved to be impeached from the office of the President of the United States because he lied about a dalliance in the Oval Office (and many parents were incensed that they had to explain to their children what “oral sex” meant), today there is no uproar about children learning that men who take impotence medications should seek medical attention if their erections last more than four hours.

Let’s take a closer look at this issue because it truly represents the levels that drug companies will stoop to in order to get us to buy their drugs. In the last decade pharmaceutical companies have branded the human condition. The purpose of branding is to cultivate and maintain a loyal customer base. These days, without branding, it’s virtually impossible to market a product. Branding begins with identification. The drug industry would like you to identify with disease. And so the drug industry, which is intent on convincing us that we are diseased and that the “cure” is their drugs, brands our sicknesses with acronyms. The list of conditions that have been abbreviated and woven into the daily fabric of our lives is endless. One “disease” that has become alarmingly familiar has been branded with the acronym ED, for Erectile Dysfunction.

The term “erectile dysfunction” is a frightening, insulting, degrading, and humiliating condemnation for any man. And the cloying way this “disease” is presented on TV commercials would make any man feel like a mouse. It would make any man willing to do whatever it took to restore his manhood. Even if it meant taking pills that could cause blindness and erections that last over four hours.

Way back in 1954, Adelle Davis wrote in
Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit
, “Studies of men in prison camps, of the conscientious objectors in the
starvation experiments at the University of Minnesota, and of numerous clinical investigations show that libido decreases or disappears when the nutrition is inadequate.”
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And in his book
A Brief History of Everything
, philosopher Ken Wilbur writes, “It appears that testosterone basically has two, and only two, major drives: fuck it or kill it.” Now both the connection between inadequate nutrition and libido and the relationship between sex hormones and male drives take us back to Francis Pottenger’s cats that were fed nutrient-dead diets. If you recall, the females were she-devils, and the males meek and cringing. Could we find some similarities in men and women who eat nutrient-dead diets? Yet instead of focusing on providing adequate nutrition for endocrine glands to produce the sex hormones necessary for a healthy libido, men take Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra (giving new meaning to the adage “Love is blind”).

One commercial for ED tells men that high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes are conditions that could result in ED. The commercial doesn’t tell men that there are ways of dealing with high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, like not eating that KFC bowl of industrialized mashed potatoes, chemicalized sweet corn, deep-fried factory chicken, classic glurk gravy, and factory cheese. The commercial doesn’t say, “Hey, get some exercise, eat real food, stop taking so many drugs, and you’ll feel like having sex.” OK, if you are a man over fifty, you might have to take bioidentical testosterone or, if you’re a woman, testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, but that is due to a natural decline in sex hormones; it’s not because you’re “diseased.”

Gastrointestinal problems are a multibillion-dollar source of revenue for the drug industry. These problems could mostly be resolved by stopping eating all factory food and eating only real food. Comedian Bill Maher said it best in his HBO stand-up special: “Congress [passed] this giant Medicare entitlement prescription drug bill … And it’s going to cost literally trillions and trillions of dollars. And while they were debating this, nobody ever stood up and said, ‘Excuse me, but why are we so sick? Why do even older people need this amount of drugs?’ Could it be because we
eat like Caligula? You know the top five of those prescription drugs that are so popular, they’re all antacids, antibloating medicines, digestive aides, all things to put out the fire in our stomach from the poison that we call lunch. Folks, it’s the food. I know that people hate to hear that. But when you look at those ads on the evening news at night, people farting and burping and bloating, it’s all shit trying to get out of you. Take a hint … You’re not going to die from secondhand smoke, or SARS, or monkey pox. It’s the food. The call is coming from inside the house. The killer is not West Nile or avian flu or shark attacks. It’s the buffalo wings. It’s the aspartame and the NutraSweet, and the red dye number two and the high-fructose corn syrup and the MSG and the chlorine and whatever shit is in special sauce.”
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Ads on the tube for gastrointestinal medications invariably feature people eating pizza, fast-food chili, and other glop that is made up of that very same special sauce Maher referred to.

Then there are those who get the call from inside the house but suffer from chronic all-systems lockdown, which they seek to break through by consuming all sorts of truly repugnant sounding OTCs such as X-LAX, Rite-Aid Col-Rite Stool Softener, and Metamucil. Constipation is not just a little inconvenience, but a sign that something serious is taking place within your body. GI health (which I cover extensively in
Healthy, Sexy, Happy)
is imperative to life because your gut is where nutrition enters your body. The medical community, however, aided and abetted by the drug industry, doesn’t focus on gut health.

Tissue inflammation is the culprit behind the pain that causes people to seek out prescriptions for Cox-2 inhibitors. Cod liver oil contains omega-3 fatty acids, which are used to make hormones that control inflammation. In addition to taking cod liver oil, eating anti-inflammatory foods, such as cold-water fish and their oils (mackerel, salmon, sardines, and tuna), walnuts and organically fed, free-range eggs, seems like a less life-threatening approach than taking pills that have already been proven to cause damage to the heart and even death.

Would you be surprised to learn that, despite alarming statistics,
osteoporosis is really a very rare condition? Embroidered statistics have been brought to us courtesy of drug companies who have redefined the testing of low bone mineral density. As it turns out, the measure of your bone mineral density (BMD) is only one of many factors that determine the risk of bone fragility. The reality is that everyone will naturally lose bone density as part of normal aging, and all bones, no matter how dense, will break if smacked hard enough. But the new standards in testing have made it nearly impossible for anyone over fifty to have a “normal” diagnosis.
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Thus those of a certain age are scared silly about falling down, fracturing a hip, and dying a horrible death. Or they are panicked about developing a dowager’s hump from spinal compression (vertebral fractures).

Using the new BMD statistics, commercials and print ads for FDA-approved osteoporosis drugs sell us on products that have a grab bag of side effects and contraindications—drugs like Actonel, which encourage women to “Act early with Actonel”. The ad warns, “You should not take Actonel if you are allergic to any of the ingredients, if you have problems of the esophagus which delay emptying into the stomach, if you have low blood calcium (hypocalcemia), have kidneys that work poorly, or
cannot sit or stand for thirty minutes
. [Emphasis mine.] Stop taking Actonel and tell your doctor right away if you experience difficult or painful swallowing, chest pain, or severe or continuing heartburn, as these may be signs of serious upper digestive problems … Side effects may include stomach pain, upset stomach, or back, muscle, bone or joint pain, sometimes severe.”

Fosamax is another such nasty drug that is linked to cancer of the esophagus and dramatically increases the risk of stomach ulcers when taken with the arthritis drug Naprosyn.
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(Bear in mind that many osteoporosis patients also suffer from arthritis.) Fosamax has also been linked to osteonecrosis (bone death) of the jaw.
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Bones are living tissues that are constantly breaking down and rebuilding in order to maintain structural integrity. Bones are like tubes that are made of and filled with protein and hardened by calcium. It’s the
hardening of this protein that makes bone solid. The osteoclast cells break down and eliminate old bone, and then osteoblast cells lay down new bone matrix, which is made up of collagen. Collagen, a protein, is the structure of bone. After the bone matrix is laid down, hormones direct calcium to be laid down on top of the protein. This new bone matrix is thus calcified.

When Fosamax kills osteoclast cells, bones get denser temporarily, but in time, bones weaken because the natural process of breaking down and building up has been disrupted. Think of what it would be like to allow your fingernails to grow indefinitely and what they would ultimately look like. Disrupting normal bone metabolism means less bone formation and increased bone breakdown, which ultimately results in osteopenia (less bone) and then osteoporosis (fracture).
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It’s disputed whether Fosamax has reduced hip fractures by even 1 percent. In other words, 90 women who were at risk for fracture would have to take Fosamax for three years to prevent one hip fracture among the group. The other 89 women would have taken the Fosamax in vain.
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In October 2010, the FDA announced that they would require warning labels about risks of thigh fractures associated with drugs such as Fosamax and Boniva.
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Unlike a teaching skeleton that can hang pretty much indefinitely in a classroom, a fifty-year-old woman does not have the same skeleton that she had when she was thirty. Every single cell has been broken down and replaced numerous times. And does anyone really believe that her skeleton can be replaced with enriched cereal, Tums, calcium-fortified orange juice, Fosamax, Actonel, or my all-time favorite, the once-a-month “bone builder” Boniva? It’s common sense that living tissue can only be replaced by eating the same biochemicals that make up bones.

In a perfect world, thinning of bones that results in osteoporosis (bone breakage) would be prevented by using BHRT, quitting smoking and other stimulants, and abstaining from factory food, and instead, eating real, living foods that provide adequate protein, fat, calcium, and other minerals, vitamins, and enzymes for optimal metabolic processes. Aside from eating
real food, the next best thing you can do for your bones is to stress them through weight-bearing exercise. Think of your bones exactly as you think of your muscles. They are dynamic. They bruise when you hit them, for example. They break down, like muscle, and they build back up. If you don’t stress them, just like muscles they will weaken. Exercising outside in the sun is optimal in order to obtain the vitamin D necessary to utilize calcium for bone growth.