The Synthetics Belief System

The synthetics revolution is a by-product of activities within three sectors of the U.S. economy; the processed foods industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the chemical industry. These economic interests influence our diet and health from the womb to the grave. The control we give them over our lives springs directly from our acceptance of this belief system's primary conceit — that their lab-created synthetics are as benign and more effective than naturally occurring foods and medicines.

Our indoctrination into the synthetics mythology has deep roots in an awestruck fealty to science and technology, whose powers have simultaneously blessed us and blinded us. We live in a prosperous system where the economic principles of supply and demand, competitive markets, and profit motives, relentlessly drive the industrialization of our food and medicine and health care. This system has created cheaper and more plentiful food and produced a host of medical technologies (if we can afford them) that may save lives and extend lives in almost miraculous ways. But what have we overlooked, what have we sacrificed, in return?

At least 70 percent of the processed foods in your local grocery store contain at least one genetically engineered ingredient that has never been tested for its potential harm. More than 3,000 synthetic chemicals are regularly added to U.S. food products and hardly any have been tested for their synergistic (interactive) toxin producing effects in the human body.

Most vitamins and supplements sold in the U.S. that are advertised as natural are actually synthetic chemical concoctions that contain coal tars, preservatives, artificial colorings and a vast range of other potentially harmful additives. More than 25,000 chemicals are in the cosmetics sold in the U.S., yet less than 4 percent of these ingredients have ever been tested for toxicity and safety. Within the nine or so vaccines given your children before entering school are additives and preservatives that can include mercury, aluminum, MSG, formaldehyde and others linked to disorders ranging from brain and nerve damage to autism and attention deficit disorder.

Over the past one hundred years our species has been engaged in a vast and complicated chemistry experiment. Each and every one of us, along with our children, our parents and our grandparents, have been a guinea pig in this experiment that uses our bodies, our health, our wealth and our good will to test the proposition that modern science can improve upon the foods and medicines of Nature.

Despite our culture's remarkable sophistication in medical technology that keeps the seriously ill alive and extends lifespans, our overall health condition has degenerated alarmingly and rapidly. Over the past 100 years our cancer mortality has gone from 3 percent of all deaths to 20 percent of all deaths. Our incidence of diabetes went from one-tenth of one percent of the population to almost 20 percent. Heart disease went from being almost non-existent to killing more than 700,000 people a year. At the same time, health care costs have risen until the U.S. now spends twice as much on medicine and care per person per year than any other industrialized nation in the world.

It's no coincidence that simultaneous with this health decline the perils we face from our food, our medicine and our health choices have become a drumbeat of alarming news reports. Here are a few representative examples. A study from the science journal, Public Health, described in 2004 how the incidence of death from brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and motor neuron disorders, was found to have tripled in nine Western countries, including the U.S., during the period 1974 to 1997. The most likely causes researchers identified were exposure to pesticides sprayed on crops, synthetic chemicals from the processed foods that we consume, and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of our modern lives.

Food seemed to be a major culprit for this toxicity because Japan, alone among the ten countries studied, experienced no increase in brain disease mortality, apparently a result of the Japanese diet being healthier than Western diets. Only when Japanese citizens relocate to Western countries and consume those processed foods do their disease rates exceed that of Japan as a whole.In California, state environmental officials discovered that 60 percent of the rivers and streams contained high levels of prozac, ritalin, and antibiotics.

How could such contamination possibly have happened? Because people had dumped their excess prescription drugs into those bodies of water, or had flushed them directly, or through bodily waste, into sewer and septic systems where the chemicals then leached into ground water.

Blood testing of thousands of Americans has widened the scope of concern. Medical researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other synthetic chemicals in the blood and urine of nine volunteers who had no occupational or geographical connection to these chemicals or where they are manufactured. More than half of these chemicals are known to be responsible for birth defects, or cancer, or brain and nervous system disorders in humans.An even more extensive round of testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, involving 2,400 adults and children, documented more than 200 synthetic chemical toxins in their bodies, with hundreds more chemicals suspected to be present. How did we become so toxic? What thrust us as a culture and as individuals onto this slippery slope? How can we navigate our way back to a healthier and less toxic future?

These are some of the questions raised and answered in The Hundred Year Lie.
Above is from The Hundred Year Lie website. Grab the book..it's a fascinating read!