Health blogger threatened with jail time for advocating Paleo diet that cured his diabetes

Thursday, April 26, 2012 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: dieticians, free speech, nutrition advice

---

(NaturalNews) Internet free speech is under assault in America, and a dangerous new trend has surfaced that threatens to throw nutritional bloggers in jail for advocating healthy diets on their blogs or websites. As you read this, a blogger who wrote about using the Paleo diet to overcome diabetes is being threatened with jail time in North Carolina, where the state Board of Dietetics / Nutrition claims his nutritional advocacy is equivalent to the crime of "practicing nutrition without a license."

His name is Steve Cooksey, and his website is http://www.diabetes-warrior.net

He's being targeted by state "dieticians" (which is another word for "nutritional moron" as you'll see below) who say that Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to "practice dietetics or nutrition." His website's advocating of the Paleo diet for individuals who have health challenges is, they claim, a violation of law.

So they've threatened him with arrest if he does not take down his website... or at the very least stop advocating the Paleo diet to readers.

Criminalizing health advice

But wait a second. People give nutritional advice on their websites all the time. Millions of websites and blogs, in fact, currently offer advice on fitness, nutrition, disease prevention, natural remedies and more. Are all those people now criminals if they live in North Carolina?

And even worse, could this censorship insanity spread to other states? Might such censorship be pursued at a federal level?

Truth is, such an effort has already taken place. I don't recall who was behind it, but nearly a decade ago, several U.S. Senators got together and tried to push a bill that would make it a federal crime to offer health advice on the internet. That effort failed, and we never heard anything more about it. But now that the U.S. government has crossed what I call the "threshold of criminality" and has devolved into a police state gang of total thugs (TSA, anyway?), it's not hard to imagine these people trying to bring back their loony ideas of criminalizing health advice on the web.

The point behind all this, of course, would be to monopolize information while silencing those who freely share the truth about natural cures, vitamin D, cancer prevention and so on. The truth about nutrition quite obviously threatens the power and profits of the pharmaceutical industry -- an industry that thrives on nutritional ignorance and highly deceptive marketing of its poisons to the uninformed masses. Merck, in fact, was just fined $321 million for criminal violations in the illegal marketing of Vioxx (https://www.naturalnews.com/035690_Merck_Viox...).

In North Carolina, monopolistic thuggery and oppression of Free Speech is making the state look pretty ugly from a liberty perspective. As reported in the Carolina Journal: (http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/di...)

"Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail. The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist."

The key here is found in the phrase, "...can't encourage others." Thus, the mere "encouraging" of someone to eat something healthy is now considered a crime in North Carolina.

Thus, the sentence, "Eat more vegetables and less meat" can suddenly land you in jail. Or posting a blog that includes, "You will be healthier if you drink fresh raw veggie juice each day" suddenly turns you into a criminal.

The purpose of licensing boards is to enforce intellectual monopolies

This all comes from the bewildering brain of one Charla Burill, the director of the North Carolina Board of Dietetics & Nutrition. Like all state licensing boards, the purpose of this board is to create a state-run monopoly over a group of professionals. And like any group, it wants to criminalize anyone it can't control. This is why state medical boards that license M.D.s are also in the business of criminalizing herbal medicine, chiropractic medicine and other forms of therapy they cannot control.

Licensing boards have a poor track record of respecting freedom. In Texas, for example, the medical board has long sought to criminalize cancer research pioneer Dr. Stanislawy Burzynski whose innovative methods have saved countless cancer patients. (https://www.naturalnews.com/032998_Burzynski_...) Other medical licensing boards around the nation routinely attack and criminalize naturopaths and Chinese Medicine practitioners.

So it's not necessarily a surprise that North Carolina's Board of Dietetics / Nutrition wants to criminalize those it cannot control through its licensing monopoly.

What other speech might soon be criminalized?

Charla Burill is a tyrant much like any other government tyrant we've seen in recent history. She wants to strip private citizens of their First Amendment rights in order to subject them to the onerous licensing requirements (and legal jurisdiction) of the board she controls. This is a blatant and outrageous violation of the fundamental right to Free Speech. And if it is allowed to stand, where else might it lead?

If a person can be criminalized for advocating a specific diet or nutritional approach on a website, then couldn't the same warped logic be used to criminalize anyone offering relationship advice? Or mental health advice? Financial advice? Political advice? Pet care advice? Advice for raising children?

I supposed in the mind of people like Charla Burill, the state should be in charge of licensing and controlling every single expression of speech on the internet. If you talk about pet care, you're supposed to apply for (and pay for) a "pet dietician" license. If you talk about relationships, you need a "counseling license." If you advocate self pleasure on the 'web, you might even need a "masturbation license," which I'm sure North Carolina's pot-bellied government goons are experts at granting.

Under North Carolina's interpretation of its (false) authority, virtually the entire NaturalNews website is "criminal." Yep, when we say you should drink some green tea for its antioxidants, well that's a crime, you see? When we say "get more vitamin D" to help prevent cancer, that's a violation of North Carolina's dietician rules!

Dieticians - the lowest sub-class of nutritional grunts

Dieticians, for the record, are the sub-class of processed food grunts who regurgitate government-approved nutritional DIS-information and design school lunch programs, prison food programs and hospital food programs. These are, for the record, the three worst places to get food, as nearly all the food served in these locations will leave you even more diseased than ever.

"Dieticians" are widely discredited in the world of real nutrition, and the dietician community has yet to even acknowledge any qualitative difference between DEAD foods and LIVING foods. Dieticians are all about counting calories, and they couldn't care less where they come from. These are the morons who actually tell cancer patients to drink Ensure! (Yeah, seriously...)

I'm not sure why anyone would even want to be labeled a "dietician." It's sort of like being called a "retard" in grade school. Because, of course, the nutritional knowledge of dieticians is rather retarded, as in "lacking in development." It's basically stuck in the dietary "science" of the 1950's, when scientists thought there were only 4 vitamins.

But instead of upping their knowledge and entering the 21st century of nutritional wisdom, these state-monopolized dietician groups want to force everybody to stay stuck in the 1950's while harassing everyone who dares to offer modern scientific nutritional knowledge on issues like raw foods, phytonutrients, anti-cancer medicinal herbs and other similar topics.

In fact, I would submit that the "North Carolina Board of Dietetics / Nutrition" is misnamed! They're so far behind on modern nutrition that the name itself is misleading. To be accurate, the board would have to be renamed the "North Carolina Board of Malnutrition." Because that's what the board teaches and enforces with its monopolistic (false) authority.

Action item: Tell the North Carolina Board of Dietetics / Nutrition to leave bloggers alone

It's time to tell this group of malnourished morons to keep their mitts off bloggers who are practicing Free Speech. In fact, I would say that the blogger who overcame diabetes using the Paleo diet probably knows MORE about nutritional principles than the dieticians who run the NC board!

If anything, the NC board should be studying this guy's blog and learning something useful. After all, type-2 diabetes can be cured with nutrition, but the dieticians groups never teach this simple truth. In their minds, food can never treat disease. And that's a truly idiotic limitation under which they operate.

Join me in CALLING the North Carolina Board of Dietetics / Nutrition and demanding they stop harassing health bloggers:

http://www.ncbdn.org/contact_ncbdn/
North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition
1000 Centre Green Way
Suite 200
Cary, NC 27513

Phone: (919) 228-6391
Toll Free: (800) 849-2936
Fax: (919) 882-1776

Email: [email protected]

This article is MY Free Speech

By the way, this article is an expression of my Free Speech. Will this NC dietician group also threaten me with being thrown in jail for expressing these views about how idiotic and misdirected they are?

Better yet, why don't they post a big article on their website that attempts to explain why their outdated, minimized "dead" dietician approach is better than the modern, cutting edge nutritional information we teach here at NaturalNews? I'd love to take part in that debate, in fact.

But as you'll see, tyrants don't want to debate the facts. They just want to CONTROL everybody and silence any discussion. They are all about asserting force and power rather than allowing the best intellectual ideas to rise to the top. By silencing discussion, terrorizing nutritional advocates and threatening bloggers, they can maintain their own informational monopolies while eliminating competing ideas.

That's not science, my friends. That's just brute force thuggery. That's the North Carolina Board of Dietetics / Nutrition.

Hear the interview with this Paleo diet blogger on the Robert Scott Bell Show

Robert Scott Bell recently interviewed Paleo blogger Steve Cooksey. Find the April 25, 2012 show at:
http://naturalnewsradio.com/Archive-RobertSc...

Here's the interview on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R653E4OXJzc

Sources include:
http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/di...