It sounds obvious, but if nature doesn't make it, we shouldn't eat it. Eating processed food that doesn't exist in nature is unhealthy. We have been programmed to accept fake food for so long that we sometimes forget that even FDA-approved foods are not necessarily safe.
Take Sucralose, for example. It is now known to damage DNA. Yes, that is not a typo.
Sucralose is 600 times sweeter than sugar and itself contains no calories. Although it has been marketed as a healthy product that can help fend off obesity and diabetes, sucralose consumption has been linked to leukemia, weight gain, obesity, diabetes, liver inflammation, metabolic dysfunction and other illnesses.
Scientists are as fallible as nature is complex
When the FDA approves food and drugs for human consumption, they base their decisions on clinical trials that usually take a few years. But we now know that Sucralose is capable of severe long-term damage that we did not understand when the artificial sweetener was created.
The problem is that we have become disconnected from nature. We think smart guys in white coats know everything. They don't. There is no way for a human to understand the full and complex intricacies of the human body. It's the ego of the intellectual mind that makes people think otherwise.
Science is wonderful, but it is based on theories of nature — it is not nature. Often our theories prove correct, but they are a small fragment of reality. We can't assume what we can prove is all there is.
What's more, when you combine overblown egos with greed, you create the perfect storm: government support for corporate endeavors that have the potential to create great harm but are promoted as healthy and safe because the people who will profit from them are unwilling or unable to see the bigger picture.
Highly paid experts may lie to you
The FDA is filled with humans who are susceptible to human foibles. One such person was Curtis Wright, a former director at the FDA. The infamous Sackler family coached Wright to approve their pain killer, Oxycontin, based on the claim that the drug was "non-addictive."
When the approval process was investigated years later, Wright was no longer employed at the FDA. He wasn't fired — he left the FDA and went to work for the Sacklers at Perdue Pharma — making an annual salary of $400k, significantly more than he made working for the government.
Imagine if Wright had refused to promote the lie that Oxy was "non-addictive" and had either refused to approve it or, at a minimum, cautioned physicians to prescribe it with great care. That's what should have happened — we know that because we have since learned that Oxy, an opioid, changes the brain's structure.
There is no way to know how many lives might have been saved if the Sacklers had not used their wealth and power to buy the approval of the FDA.
Auto-immune diseases may be caused by fake food
Scientists are also now looking into the possibility that auto-immune diseases are caused by leaky gut syndrome. That's where the stomach lining gets compromised, and stuff that shouldn't be in our bodies ends up in our stomachs and blood.
While almost no one is willing to say FDA-approved fake food is the culprit, it makes sense. What would cause our stomach lining to deteriorate if we only ate real food? And what would be in our guts that is so bad for our blood that it activates our immune systems? Common sense tells me it's fake food. I don't need a man in a lab coat to prove it to me.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of money in fake food, so don't expect the FDA or your doctor to tell you the food industry is poisoning you. There is a lot of money in medicine, too, so doctors are more than happy to treat patients with ongoing illnesses — it's guaranteed income.
Why do we listen to advertising but not to our bodies?
I'm old enough to remember when doctors said smoking was healthy. Alcohol was also considered a safe and acceptable way to relax. But I defy anybody to find someone whose first puff of smoke was pleasurable. We learned to tolerate it — even though our bodies told us that it was not good for us the first time we tried to smoke.
We bought the hype presented to us by the tobacco industry, and we trained ourselves to tolerate the smoke. As for alcohol, it kills brain cells. Yet every ad for a canned cocktail or wine cooler tells us it's the key to enjoying life.
Why do we believe what we see on TV instead of listening to our bodies?
We are doing the same thing with food. We allow corporate advertising to determine our eating habits and health. We have convinced ourselves that what's on our shelves must be safe because the FDA allows it.
We know better. We should act like we know better.
At some point, we must demand that Congress stop the FDA from allowing commercial food producers to profit from making stuff we shouldn't be eating. And while we're at it, we must take healthcare out of the for-profit realm. We should start working toward those goals now.
Activism is the answer
We know so much now that we never knew before. But if we want that knowledge to be useful, we must demand that the Biden administration and Congress act with our best interests at heart.
Please consider reaching out to the Biden administration (the FDA is part of the Executive branch) and your representatives in Congress (Congress is responsible for FDA oversight) and remind them that they work for us, not the corporate food industry.
The FDA must be held accountable for their choices — they are supposed to protect us, not commercial food producers and Big Pharma.