Home
Newsletter
Events
Blogs
Reports
Graphics
RSS
About Us
Support
Write for Us
Media Info
Advertising Info
Nutritional illiteracy

To save America's health, we must end nutritional illiteracy among doctors, patients

Sunday, June 27, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: nutritional illiteracy, healing foods, health news


Most Viewed Articles
https://www.naturalnews.com/029089_nutritional_illiteracy_healing_foods.html
Delicious
diaspora
Print
Email
Share

(NaturalNews) An obese doctor comes home to his wife at dinner time carrying yet another bag full of drive-through junk food from a local restaurant.

Worried about his health, his wife asks, "Don't you realize all that junk food you keep eating is destroying your entire body?"

"That's not my concern," the doctor replies. "I'm only an ear, nose and throat specialist."

This joke illustrates an important point: That even the most brilliant scientists, doctors and researchers can seem downright clueless when it comes to their own health. And this joke isn't really a joke at all: It's a sad but true commentary about the blind spots in the knowledge of those who are among society's most intelligent thinkers.

I've known many brilliant people. Even a few geniuses. But rarely do I meet anyone whose knowledge of food and nutrition rises very far above outright ignorance. Perhaps one in a hundred people in the western world today have taken it upon themselves to actually learn about foods and health -- the rest simply wing it, going along with the mainstream. (And the mainstream is diseased...)

Brilliance in one field doesn't always translate into nutrition

But here's the really interesting part: The more intelligent a person is in their own field of specialty, the more informed they think they are about foods and nutrition (even if they aren't). A typical rocket scientist, for example, is so used to being right that when it comes to his dietary decisions and food shopping habits, he thinks he is right by the mere fact that he is the one making his food consumption decisions. Because he's always right, then whatever decision he makes -- whether it deals with food, finances or relationships -- must also be the right decision.

Making matters even worse, really smart people are especially susceptible to strategies of non-conscious persuasion -- such as those used by food advertisers. Food companies don't appeal to logic and reason when advertising their junk foods because there really isn't much logic or reason behind consuming their products at all. Instead, they use emotional anchoring to unconsciously attach feelings to brands. That way, when you're in the store shopping, you unconsciously experience a preference for a particular product or brand without knowing why.

This gets the smart people every time, it seems. They may have superior logic and intellect compared to the rest of the world, but when you examine their grocery store receipts, they're buying all the same junk as the guy with an IQ of 70 who lives next door.

Having brains, it seems, doesn't necessarily translate into making good decisions about food and health. And yet these people should know better.

Food and consequences

Most scientists, doctors and high-IQ people believe in The Law of Cause and Effect. Every action (a cause) results in some reaction (an effect). Every input has an output.

Most people acknowledge this universal truth, and yet when it comes to foods and health, there's a bizarre disconnect about this. People have been trained by the big food companies -- and even government regulators to a large extent -- that what they choose to eat has almost no bearing on their health outcomes. The establishment would rather have you believe that your genes control your health while glossing over the far more important point that it is your diet that controls the expression of your genes.

They would rather ignore the truthful fact that vitamin D prevents infectious disease 500% better than a vaccine because this allows them to promote vaccines rather than teach nutritional responsibility. Even mainstream dieticians from the American Dietetic Association are taught that there is no difference between dead foods and living foods. A calorie is a calorie, they're taught, no matter where it comes from or whether it's in a plant from Mother Nature or a sugar factory made by Man.

The nutritional ignorance in our culture is astounding, and as long as such ignorance remains so widespread, we will never achieve a health care system that's both effective and affordable. As long as our doctors remain nutritionally illiterate, we will never have a health care system that values educating patients about what they put in their mouths.

Ignorance is the enemy of lasting health, and sadly our own government institutions such as the FDA maintain policies of enforced ignorance that outlaw companies selling natural products from linking to scientific studies that discuss the health benefits of their products. Everything from cherries, green tea and walnuts have been under relentless attacks by the FDA, which threatens company founders with arrest and prosecution unless they remove their website links that point to scientific studies published in peer-reviewed science journals. (https://www.naturalnews.com/019366.html)

One important victory over FDA censorship has just been achieved in the courts (https://www.naturalnews.com/028929_FDA_health...), but the FDA's campaign of enforced ignorance continues.

Even our public schools reinforce nutritional illiteracy among our children. While nearly everyone agrees it's important to teach our children how to read, write and understand math and science, there is no real effort to teach children how to feed themselves in a healthy manner. Health class is a nutritional joke, and school lunch programs actually teach students precisely the wrong message by serving up dead, processed "institutional" foods that promote diabetes, cancer, heart disease and behavioral disorders. (You can also find McDonald's restaurants in many U.S. hospitals, by the way, but that's another story...)

Nutritional ignorance may be fantastic for generating obscene profits for the drug companies, but it's a terrible policy for public health. Americans will only achieve true lasting health when they are granted open access to truthful information about the healing capabilities of natural foods, superfoods, nutritonal supplements and herbal remedies.

Until that day comes, we will remain a nation locked in a cycle of ignorance and disease that will ultimately bankrupt us at every level. Nutrition can help us break that cycle, but only if we can get past the ignorance and unleash a new era of nutritional literacy for our people.

Read my related report, "Nutrition Can Save America!" for more details on how this might work: https://www.naturalnews.com/report_Nutrition_...

And keep reading NaturalNews.com to stay informed. We'll keep bringing you more news about natural remedies, nutritional cures, and the dangers of synthetic chemicals.

If you'd like these stories brought to your attention via email, just subscribe to our free daily email newsletter using the subscription form below. It's free and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Receive Our Free Email Newsletter

Get independent news alerts on natural cures, food lab tests, cannabis medicine, science, robotics, drones, privacy and more.




About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

comments powered by Disqus



Natural News Wire (Sponsored Content)

Science.News
Science News & Studies
Medicine.News
Medicine News and Information
Food.News
Food News & Studies
Health.News
Health News & Studies
Herbs.News
Herbs News & Information
Pollution.News
Pollution News & Studies
Cancer.News
Cancer News & Studies
Climate.News
Climate News & Studies
Survival.News
Survival News & Information
Gear.News
Gear News & Information
Glitch.News
News covering technology, stocks, hackers, and more