It is baffling that the American public has been so effectively stampeded into near-total dependence on a shoddy, crude, and ineffective system of health care, paying an extremely high price for drug and surgical interventions that seldom actually cure our chronic degenerative diseases.
Our Health Care System Is the Third Leading Cause of Death
Did you know that our health care system is the third leading cause of death in the United States? In a year 2000 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Barbara Starfield, M.D., wrote that physician error, medication error, and adverse events from drugs or surgery cause 225,400 deaths per year, making this the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. Why would anyone let themselves be put at the mercy of a hospital, when most chronic illnesses are preventable? (Answer: Because they don't know any better.)
We have been sold a high-cost, high tech system for relieving the symptoms caused by a very low tech problem: our diet. We pay for health care, if we can even afford it, and then we continue to eat the foods that are proven to make us sick. Most of us don't know any better, because astounding discoveries in the area of human nutrition and its connection to disease have been suppressed and dismissed as "controversial".
We accept that "everyone gets sick"-a heart attack, cancer of some sort, stroke, diabetes, or Alzheimer's-so we pay for years into insurance so we can cover the extreme cost of the standard care we will need, but nobody ever asks WHY we get these diseases so often.
At the higher levels of medical research, there are people who know the answer to this question, but the Powers-That-Be-the hospital administrators and the many doctors who have invested many years and a lot of money into doing heart and cancer surgery and all the rest-don't want to give up their highly-paid specialties to become diet counselors.
So the truth that there is a better and less expensive way to prevent and even reverse major diseases we face may never reach the people. That truth is suppressed for the benefit of the drug makers, the hospitals, and the average doctor( who has very little training in nutrition, anyway).
Why You Haven't Heard There Is a Better, Cheaper Way To Achieve Health
The problem, in large part, is that there is a very subtle conspiracy taking place, mediated by money, to ensure that the public never clearly gets the message that it is our all-American diet of meat, milk products, and refined carbohydrates (sugar and white flour) that are the root cause of most of our chronic degenerative diseases.
You may be wondering why this should be of interest to a politically-concerned audience. It should be of interest because it is a perfect example of how our political system has come to represent the interests of wealthy sectors of the business community, to the detriment of the vast majority of the American people.
The facts of nutrition have been suppressed so that:
The Meat and Dairy industries can continue to earn high profits on subsidized agricultural commodities which are clearly implicated in extensive medical research as being responsible for obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers. (This is not including the terrible damage to the environment caused by both the waste problem due to raising meat, egg, and milk-producing animals, but also the idiocy of using imported fossil fuels to grow healthy vegetable protein which is then fed to animals to return about one-fifth as much less-healthy animal protein. And we are made to pay more for the privilege of the cachet of eating something that is less-healthy for us, but higher-profit for the food industry!)
But the Media Don't Want to Talk About This
The Major Media cooperate with this by soft-pedaling the hard evidence of this food/disease connection because they sell a lot of advertising space to the makers of the foods that are the source of our disease: fast food companies, prepared food manufacturers, frozen foods, diet foods - all of which are based on the basic formula of fatty meat, milk, cheese, and corn and wheat derivatives.
The Medical/Pharmaceutical cartel does its part by pushing pills and/or surgery to remedy every ailment that could cheaply be reversed by changing their patient's diet. This is clearly motivated by the profits obtained by selling prescription drugs and fifty or one hundred thousand dollar heart surgeries to millions of people every year. They would be out of business if patients learned the truth about what's causing our "diseases of affluence."
To say, as many in the medical field do, that patients are reluctant to change their diet drastically is just an excuse for their feeble attempts to inform patients that there are other clearly superior options. Who would risk the pain, expense, and danger of a major heart operation if they KNEW for certain that distinguished physicians such as Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn are obtaining better results for seriously ill heart patients through mere dietary changes? Only a masochist, I would venture to guess.
This conspiracy to profit from keeping the American public misinformed on the broad causes of why we have such a fantastically expensive health care system, has led us into the chute through which our government bureaucracies will gladly take charge of this great money-making system. Since when has turning anything over to the government led to greater efficiencies and less cost? They can't even run their own Veterans' Hospitals properly, so how could they claim to reorganize a huge national system of health provision?
The liberating truth is that what is needed is not more and better health care, but more and better health. This is available right now to those who choose to educate themselves on the care and feeding of their miraculous body.
I realize that many Americans won't be willing to do this, or if they try, they may be lured into some scam diet such as the one propounded by the late Dr. Atkins. That's a shame and is partially a result of our pitiful education system that hasn't taught us the basics of how to tell truth from self-serving fiction and half-truth.
I am not writing this to the average American, but to readers who are a lot more aware of the sea of misinformation and soft conspiracy that makes endless wars, industry bailouts and foreign political intrigues a means of draining the savings of the majority of this nation and funneling that wealth into the hands of the hands of major politcal contributors.
The story of how our health as individuals is being destroyed for the benefit of those same campaign contributors is every bit as big and important as the story of how America was steered into a war on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
This national conversation about how our "health care" will be provided is-as usual-missing the point. The real conversation we need to have is about how our typical American diet has produced the worst health of any of the major industrialized nations, which leaves us at the mercy of a medical/Media/Food Industry conspiracy to keep things more or less as they are: Profitable for them.
Paul H. Kemp is a lifelong entrepreneur and marketer. He has also served as an Economic Development Consultant for the U.S. Department of Commerce and local Chambers of Commerce, specializing in rural business opportunities for Oregon communities affected by changes in federal timber policies.
He currently is fascinated by the opportunity to help individuals take control over their own health in this global economic shake-up.
For more information on the revolution in health and fitness, visit http://www.HealthyPlanetDiet.com/
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