If nutrition is so good at preventing and even reversing chronic disease, why isn't it taught by the practitioners of conventional medicine? Why isn't your doctor giving you the fundamentals of nutrition? Why don't you see television ads promoting nutrition?
The reason is quite simple. There's no profit in it. Let's face it, conventional medicine is a commercial entity. Pharmaceutical companies are in business to make money. They want to maximize their profits. Their mission statement should read "Our goal is to maximize profits, no matter what it takes, as long as we can get away with it."
By their behavior, you can see that pharmaceutical companies are far more interested in generating profits than actually improving human health on a global scale.
Drug companies are in business to make money, not make people healthy
You see this in many ways including the price gouging of American consumers, attempts to block the importation of prescription drugs from Canada, the refusal of companies to fund AIDS drugs initiatives in Africa, and so on. You especially see it in the suppression of prevention by conventional medicine at the FDA. There is actually an effort underway to minimize any discussion of disease prevention and instead focus on disease symptom treatments -- especially those involving pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures.
There is really no money in disease prevention. Or put another way, if you find a way to be extremely healthy, it doesn't create profits for anybody except you. In fact, if you used to be diseased, and you changed your lifestyle and started consuming outstanding foods giving you optimum nutrition, the pharmaceutical industry is now losing a customer. You have just cost conventional medicine a paying customer. And given the sky-high cost of most prescription drugs these days, they might have been counting on you to generate a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars in revenues over the next few years. But now, by taking control of your own health and using disease prevention coupled with nutritional fundamentals, you are a healthy human being who has eliminated a measurable profit from the pharmaceutical companies.
So it's not hard to understand why the pharmaceutical companies are not interested in promoting nutrition. And since most of conventional medicine today is really just an extension of "Big Pharma," the whole system has little or no interest in teaching prevention. Hospitals don't earn money when you're healthy either. Surgeons certainly don't benefit when you take care of your own cardiovascular health and no longer need heart bypass surgery. In one case after another, when you take control of your health and practice outstanding nutrition, you are actually taking money away from a for-profit industry.
Healing foods cannot be patented and, therefore, cannot be exploited for profit
Another important point to note here is that food cannot be patented by the pharmaceutical companies. You can't take a tomato and patent that tomato, then restrict it from the population and make sure it can only be prescribed through pharmacies. Of course, certain hybrid tomatoes can be patented, but those are more along the lines of scientific experiments than ordinary, everyday garden tomatoes that I'm talking about here. The point is that these healing foods -- like broccoli, garlic and onions -- can't be patented. So the pharmaceutical companies cannot own the intellectual property that's at stake here. As a result, they can't make money by selling these foods and promoting their disease prevention abilities.
We have a medical system that suppresses information about the correlation between foods and disease prevention. The system is designed to make sure that the only information you, as a consumer, receive is information about synthetic pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures or other things that generate profits. And foods don't generate profits. At least, not on the scale that would be expected by pharmaceutical companies.
Another reason you don't hear much discussion on the correlation between nutrition and chronic disease in the popular press these days, or among practitioners of conventional medicine, is because most of the revenues generated from conventional medicine actually come from the treatment of the symptoms caused by nutritional imbalances and deficiencies. In other words, the big money makers for conventional medicine are diseases that are in fact caused by nutritional deficiencies and nutritional imbalances in the first place. If poor nutrition wasn't so widespread, the lucrative disease treatment industry would collapse due to lack of customers.
This article is an excerpt from the book, The 7 Laws of Nutrition by Mike Adams.
About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate and award-winning journalist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.TV, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He also launched an online retailer of environmentally-friendly products (BetterLifeGoods.com) and uses a portion of its profits to help fund non-profit endeavors. He's also a successful software entrepreneur, having founded a well known email marketing software company whose technology currently powers the NaturalNews email newsletters. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and enjoys outdoor activities, nature photography, Pilates and martial arts training. He's also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don't Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds. Known as the 'Health Ranger,' Adams' personal health statistics and mission statements are located at www.HealthRanger.org
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Sunday, December 05, 2004
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