Health news roundup: Kraft shrinks, drugs in the drinking water, and obese chickens (satire)

Tuesday, January 31, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Kraft Foods, obesity, health news

Give yourself a round of applause. We're winning the war against junk food manufacturers! Kraft Foods, a company that I would categorize as the largest junk food / processed food manufacturer in the world (also owned by a tobacco company, by the way) has just announced it's slashing jobs and closing manufacturing plants. A whopping 8,000 jobs, to be exact.

That's good news for the health of Americans, because it means fewer factories are churning out disease-promoting junk foods. Overeducated, misguided economists would argue with that, screaming about the loss of jobs. But what good is a job if the resulting product worsens the quality of life of consumers? We could boost the national economy, I suppose, by hiring people to throw dirt in the air, but it doesn't make anyone richer or more abundant. It's not the jobs that matter, but what the jobs are producing. And Kraft Foods, apparently, missed the boat on rolling out healthy foods. Trans fat free Oreo cookies don't count.

I have a recovery plan for Kraft that doesn't even require a million dollar fee to fast-talking business consultants: try making foods that don't shorten the lifespan of your customers and you might discover a more reliable revenue stream.

Water with a twist of Prozac

As reported in the LA Times, Los Angeles County has suddenly discovered what I've been warning about for years: their drinking water is contaminated with prescription drugs. Gee, didn't anybody think about where all these synthetic chemicals end up after they leave the bodies of patients?

Apparently they end up right back in the water supply. They also end up in the streams (where fish born with two sets of reproductive organs are now enjoying the happy benefits of Prozac), rivers (where nothing is left alive anyway, thanks to industrial pollution) and oceans (the last great pollution frontier for mankind).

As it turns out, these pharmaceuticals also end up in the biosolids (a nice way to say "human feces") that gets repurposed as "organic" fertilizer on our nation's crops. Now, I'm not sure that corn actually needs Viagra to grow, but it's sure getting a dose. You see, thanks to Big Pharma's sinister success in convincing 50% of Americans that they are chemically deficient (a crazy notion that no sane American would have believed a generation ago), we now have half the nation gobbling overpriced, over-hyped and over-prescribed medications, then flushing them down the toilet. Flushing to where? Most Americans don't seem to have a clue about the answer.

The result is pharmaceutical pollution on a global scale. And as long as Big Pharma keeps pumping out these dangerous chemicals, they're going to end up in the global ecosystem where the cumulative effect of thousands of drugs is entirely unknown. As scientists have admitted, nobody really knows what happens when biological organisms are exposed to micro doses of a thousand different drugs. But whatever happens, I'm sure it's not so horrifying that the FDA wouldn't approve it.

In fact, if this trend continues, you may not need to visit the pharmacy at all: Just drink the water! You'll get a dose of antidepressants, antibiotics and arthritis drugs with every smooth sip! And if that thought makes you shudder, don't sweat it, there are also anti-convulsants in the water. Perhaps this is what allows Los Angeles residents to handle the traffic there.

I just wonder, with all the drugs in the water, will you soon need a prescription to drink it? Will drug companies charge royalties for drinking the water? Will Bush take credit for it and explain this was his plan all along to provide "free drugs" to voters?

It's endlessly amusing to me to watch the western world stumble like a drunken sailor into these eye-opening realizations that should have been obvious from the beginning: "You mean synthetic chemicals are dangerous to the environment?" Of course not. And we should all eat pancakes scraped off teflon pans with metal spatulas. And don't forget to drink your fluoride, too, while you're at it.

Viruses linked to obesity?

Americans may have found yet another way to blame something else for their own poor decisions: Research published in the American Journal of Physiology explains that scientist with way too much time on their hands (who probably applied for this funding as a college prank) injected chickens with adenoviruses to see what might happen.

Unfortunately, the chickens didn't explode, so the Dept. of Homeland Security cut off all funding. (What good are chickens if they can't be used to bomb foreign nations in the name of national defense?) However, the scientists did discover that the chickens stored more body fat than usual.

From that experiment, the ever-bewildered U.S. media declared that viruses are to blame for obesity in humans! What a relief! It no longer has anything to do with the fact that TV-hypnotized Americans don't exercise, or that they gobble up sugars, soft drinks and fried foods at a pace that would make a pack of famished chickens blush (right through the feathers, no less).

Listen up, Americans: Obesity is no longer your fault! Researchers said so. And there are a couple of plump chickens staggering around a Virginia laboratory to prove it. Oh yeah, and some national newspapers reported it, so it must be true.

You gotta love this country. I'm not certain the journalists who leap to these conclusions are any smarter than the chickens, but I'm willing to bet most of them are fatter. Were they also injected with adenoviruses? Do they think the obesity epidemic in this country is the fault of a couple of needle-toting lab researchers who have been sleuthing across the country, jabbing skinny people in their sleep and transforming them into overnight diabetics?

For those of you paying attention to the way the world really works, you've probably already figured out the scam behind this virus explanation for obesity. It goes like this: If obesity is caused by a virus, then drug companies can invent a vaccine for obesity!

Ah, you knew that one was coming, didn't ya? There's a vaccine for everything, apparently, but there is no cure for just plain stupidity. There is, however, plenty of entertainment to go 'round. The drug companies, the researchers, the journalists and the chickens are all racing each other to the world record for low IQ scores. And the chickens are losing that race.