(NaturalNews) Developed to treat anxiety-related disorders and phobias, systematic desensitization (SD) is based on the principles of classical conditioning and the premise that what has been learned (conditioned) can be unlearned. This "conditioning;" however, has been systematically unlearned by a focused effort driven by Big Pharma to desensitize people to their deleterious effects.
How Big Pharma uses systematic desensitization
Initially designed for therapists, SD has been widely used by various organizations and political agendas to brainwash and reshape the voting public. Big Pharma, for instance is using SD to gain significant strides in 2012 to convince the world that GMO's and pesticides are healthy and organic foods are superfluous.
Recently, we have seen this with what seemed like a no-brainer proposal in California to label GMO foods being unbelievably turned down by the popular vote. Companies like Monsanto and The Hershey Co. contributed to what was eventually a $44 million windfall for "No on Prop 37" while proponents were only able to raise $7.3 million. Like most Big Pharma victories, this devastating loss to health crusaders can be attributed to SD as this $44 million was used to convince the voting public that people do not need to know what is in their food.
Many steps have led to this decision, but few seem as significant as the plethora of "scientific" studies that have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals only to be exploited by the media to the general public. For example, the
Annals of Internal Medicine recently published a systematic review of the literature from 1996-2010 in which 17 studies in humans and 223 studies of nutrient and contaminant levels in foods were evaluated to review evidence comparing the health effects of
organic and conventional foods. Although the study claims that "the risk for contamination with detectable pesticide residues was lower among organic than conventional produce," the main conclusion was that "the published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."
To systematically legitimize the false conclusion from this article,
Harvard Medical chimed in to show their support to the reading public who all but deifies
Harvard University as omniscient. According to the
Harvard Health Blog, even though "the
Annals study won't lay the 'organic is better' argument to rest... it should at least relieve some of the
guilt many of us feel whenever we steer our shopping cart around the organic produce case." The SD is clear in this instance as people are encouraged, in an attempt to defy the so-called insidious "guilt" tactics of the organic movement, to ignore their common sense and human instinct that pesticides are harmful.
In what seems like an attempt to seal-the-deal, national
health spokesperson Dr. Oz, in a
TIME Magazine editorial piece, declares organic foods to be "elitist" and appropriate only for "the 1%." This successful SD propaganda aligned conventional foods with the "99%" by making them sound more populist. This is obviously an attempt to convince the masses that the
food of "common folk" is pesticide ridden GMO crops, and that they are healthy for them.
SD is clearly the technique of choice as the fact that pesticides are extremely detrimental to our health is completely glossed over by the claim that organic foods are not "significantly more" nutritious than conventional foods. The reality is that pesticides are "anti-nutrients" and actually cause disease processes. We must remember: Fish did not discover water. In fact, because they are completely immersed in it, they live unaware of its existence. Similarly, when a conduct is normalized by a dominant cultural environment it becomes invisible.
Sources for this article include•
http://www.health.harvard.edu•
http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685•
http://www.naturalnews.com/038157_dr_oz_organic_food_sellout.html•
http://ballotpedia.org• McLeod, S. A. (2008). Systematic Desensitization. Retrieved from
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Systematic-Desensitisation.htmlAbout the author:Eric is a peer-reviewed, published researcher. His work on heart disease and autism has been accepted internationally at various scientific conferences through organizations like the American Public Health Association and Australian-based Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute.
Visit his blog. Track his work on facebook. Read Eric's other naturalnews.com articles.
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