Originally published February 11 2009
Hey, Americans: Are You Suffering from Pervasive Peanut Butter Avoidance Disorder?
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) While American consumers are running scared over the possibility of tainted peanut butter, it's worth pointing out that the number of people sickened by salmonella (529 at last count) is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people harmed or killed by toxic chemicals that are intentionally put into the food supply.
But that hasn't stopped people from freaking out over peanut butter. They're demonstrating a kind of mania that I've dubbed, "Pervasive Peanut Butter Avoidance Disorder" (PPBAD) as a nod to the disease mongers of modern psychiatry. You can generate your own disease names, too, at: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-mongering...
But is this peanut butter fear really warranted?
How many children die of cancer each year from eating sodium nitrite in hot dogs, bacon and processed meat? Nobody has an exact number, but it's no doubt much larger than 529. Brain cancer and leukemia kill a lot of children, and much of it is caused by chemical food additives. (http://www.naturalnews.com/022288.html)
How many adults suffer neurological impairment and ultimately die from drinking artificial chemical sweeteners? How many people get heart disease and die from eating partially-hydrogenated soybean oil used in margarine, cookies and crackers? How many future adults are going to die early from all the caffeine-spiked energy drinks they're consuming right now?
And for that matter, how many U.S. adults have been killed by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals? That number is at least 100,000 per year (http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_...) and may be much higher. At 100,000 deaths per year, over 8,300 Americans are killed every month by Big Pharma's medicines.
In contrast to all that, how many people have been killed by tainted peanut butter?
Eight.
Yep: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Eight. I don't mean to minimize the value of those eight lives, but if we're talking about national public safety, we have to keep the numbers in perspective here. Eight lives versus eight thousand killed every month by pharmaceuticals.
That makes pharmaceuticals 1,000 times more fatal than poisoned peanut butter. And that doesn't even count all the suicides caused by psychiatric medications, most of which never get reported as anything other than suicides (the drugs are usually left out of the explanation of death).
Screaming about peanut butter, but silent about deadly pharmaceuticals
So where's the outcry against deadly pharmaceuticals? Sodium nitrite in processed meats? Aspartame and MSG in beverages and foods?
The silence is disturbing. People are too busy freaking out over peanut butter to get their heads on straight and focus on the real threats to the health of American consumers.
The real threats are the use of dangerous chemicals in foods, drugs and personal care products. Those chemicals are no doubt killing many hundreds of thousands of Americans each year and adding a huge burden to the medical expenditures by the federal government (and state governments, too).
My question to the remaining sane people in America is simply this: If you're worried about the salmonella in the peanut butter, why aren't you worried about the sodium nitrite in the hot dogs?
Or how about the artificial colors in the sports drinks and the hormone residues in meat and milk? What about the mercury used in dental fillings, or the synthetic fluoride chemicals dumped into the public water supply? How about the pharmaceuticals in the water supply, too?
We live in a toxic world, overflowing with cancer-causing chemicals that are routinely promoted to us as being "beneficial." Peanut butter is the least of our problems.
How to control the population: Spread irrational fear
But the public's focus on peanut butter certainly does show one thing: The complete insanity and irrationality of many consumers.
Fear mongering is highly effective at shoving the sheeple towards irrational behavior. It worked in the days following 9/11, it worked for the original bailout money fiasco (the stupid Bush bailout, not the stupid Obama bailout, which is even larger), and now it's working to get Congress to approve a new government bureaucracy: The proposed Food Safety Management Administration (FSMA), a whole new layer of bureaucratic interference with the food supply that's bound to end up doing to foods what the FDA did to nutritional supplements.
America, get your head on straight! If you're afraid of peanut butter, your priorities are completely askew. Yes, your health is being seriously threatened today, but not by peanut butter. Your chance of being killed by tainted peanut butter is even less than being struck by lightning this year.
You can send all that recalled peanut butter to my house, by the way. I'll gladly eat it. Probably 99.999% of all the peanut butter being recalled right now is completely safe. And for the other point-zero-zero-one percent, I'm quite certain that a healthy immune system and the regular use of probiotics will allow me to survive a little salmonella consumption. I've eaten far stranger stuff as a kid in the public school system anyway�
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml