Why Are Smart People So Ignorant When it Comes to Health

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Here is a nice (but long) three-part article on why most people (including the smart ones) are ignorant on health and related big issues of our modern society (such as economics, the environment, politics).

He explains a. how people become an expert in one area but don't know the basics of others b. how the government and the big corporates enforce nutritional ignorance on the massesc. why schools don't encourage creativity and don't teach critical thinking skills but encourage only blind productivity

d. why we are genetically programmed to follow the herd and not think individually but do " group think " and goes on to connecting these to unrealized potential of human consciousness.He writes: " With

greater consciousness comes deeper independent thought, and with

independent thought comes the natural tendency to recognize and value

knowledge while casting away falsehoods. This is the true pathway to

wisdom, and this is the corridor through which the human race must now

pass if it wishes to coexist with Mother Nature as a viable form of

life on our planet. "

A very good article though long. Please take the time to read and it may strike a chord somewhere!-----------------------------http://www.naturalnews.com/026843_health_food_nutrition.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/026851_nutrition_health_cancer.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/026859_health_vaccines_food.htmlA heart disease patient of lateHad an IQ of 168.His brain was immense

But it lacked common senseAnd it never engaged when he ate.- by the Health RangerAs

an observer of human behavior, one of the most fascinating things I've

ever witnessed is really smart people dying of diseases that are easily

preventable through basic nutrition (vitamin D, plant juices, targeted

supplements, superfoods, etc.). I know doctors dying of cancer who take

chemotherapy over vitamin D supplements. I know members of MENSA who

are killing themselves with junk foods

and diabetes. I know extremely intelligent attorneys and physicists who

are among the smartest people in their respective fields; but when it

comes to basic health, they're completely ignorant.In

fact, if you look around at all the " smart " people you know, you're

likely to find the vast majority of them are incredibly ignorant when

it comes to their own health. They know nothing about basic nutrition,

the benefits of superfoods or the dangers of pharmaceuticals. They eat processed junk foods, dairy products and food products contaminated with pesticides and toxic chemicals.

They may be the smartest people in the world in their labs or offices,

but when it comes to their own bodies, they are among the most ignorant

people on the planet.How can this be?How can such high-IQ people remain so utterly ignorant when it comes to their own health?There are two reasons, it turns out. And one of them will blow your mind...

How to become an expert in one area while abandoning the basicsTo

be an expert in astrophysics, you have to spend many years studying

astrophysics. To get really good at law, you have to study law. If you

want to get good at anything, you have to focus on it, learn about it,

and invest some time learning how it works.That's what I've done with the subject of health and nutrition (and you too, probably). And yet I'm not an expert in astrophysics, nor law, nor brain surgery. Importantly, I don't have to be an expert in those areas because I don't practice in those areas.

And

yet -- here's the important part -- all those physicists, attorneys and

surgeons do have a physical body they need to take care of. They all

need to become proficient in basic human health, regardless of whatever

other specialties they might pursue.In other words, everyone with a body needs to learn the basics of taking care of that body.

And yet most of the smartest people in the world today have spent

essentially zero time learning about human health. So even with their

high IQs, they make childish, ignorant decisions when it comes to their

own health. They may be doctorate-level academic thinkers in their own

fields, but when it comes to protecting health and preventing disease, these people haven't even graduated from kindergarten yet.You

see this quite frequently in the geek community, by the way. Junk food,

pharmaceuticals and caffeinated soda drinks seem to go hand-in-hand

with the wired, pale and frenzied computer brainiacs who are, after

all, smarter than everybody else. They can write DRM decryption code

with one hand while they eat MSG-laden fried snack chips with the

other. Like everybody else, they are high-IQ, highly-specialized

experts in their fields who remain woefully uneducated when it comes to

their own health.

But how can so many smart people be so utterly unaware of the basics of nutrition? That vitamin D prevents cancer and influenza? That aspartame kills your brain cells? That processed meat (beef jerky, bacon, sausage, pepperoni) contains cancer-causing coloring chemicals designed to make the meat look rosy fresh?

The real reason is more insidious than you may have imagined. If you want to learn it, read on...Good health is bad for businessHere's the real reason why so many smart people remain so uninformed when it comes to their own health:

The institutions of power in our modern world go out of their way to keep people nutritionally ignorant.By " institutions of power, " I mean our governments, our private industries (health care and others) and the corporations that pull all the strings behind the curtains.

What

are the most powerful corporations in our world? Aside from the

military bombs-and-bullets companies (who have their own scams

running), the most powerful corporations are drug companies, media companies, agriculture companies and food & beverage companies.

Now

think about this clearly for a minute: What do all these companies have

in common? How do all these companies keep their economic machines

running?The answer is: Nutritional ignorance of the masses.You

see, the agriculture companies depend on nutritional ignorance in order

to keep selling their processed ingredients to food companies which

then turn around and sell those nutritionally-depleted products to

consumers. Media companies depend on the advertising revenues from the

promotion of junk foods and junk beverages, and drug companies depend

on the revenues from all the diseases caused by the widespread

consumption of all those products.These four industries -- Big

Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media and Big Food -- have a dark, incestuous

relationship that generates huge profits... but only as long as the

masses remain nutritionally ignorant.If people became proficient in nutrition, superfoods, vitamin D and natural foods, all four of these industries would suffer huge financial losses. Their sales and profits would plummet in a world where nutrition is common knowledge. Their continued financial success requires nutritional ignorance among the masses.

(This article continues tomorrow in part two, here on NaturalNews.com) This is the second part of a three-part article series. To read part one (recommended), visit: http://www.naturalnews.com/026843_h...

Enforcing nutritional ignorancePowerful

corporations, of course, require the services of oppressive government

to enforce nutritional ignorance across the population. In the USA, the

Food and Drug Administration is the primary enforcer of nutritional

ignorance.The FDA, as most NaturalNews readers well know, makes one of its primary missions the destruction of knowledge about nutrition and natural remedies. This is accomplished by outlawing any honest speech about nutrition from supplement companies, even going as far as threatening them with arrest and criminal prosecution if they dare link to scientific studies about nutrition (http://www.naturalnews.com/019366.html).

Meanwhile, the FDA openly approves health claims on processed food products sold by powerful corporations. This is designed to convince consumers that junk foods are healthful foods, even while healthful foods can make no claims whatsoever about their health benefits.

The

FTC also gets in the game with its own brand of censorship, arresting

and imprisoning owners of companies that offer natural cancer treatments based on good science. That's why no real cancer cures

are offered in the U.S. anymore -- all the scientists who know the

subject have either been imprisoned or run out of the country.Medical

journals also play a part in the ongoing nutritional ignorance of the

masses by promoting intellectually dishonest information about the

supposed benefits of pharmaceuticals while attacking natural remedies

and ignoring nutritional cures.The disease

non-profit groups also play a big part in the nutritional ignorance

scam. Note, carefully, how the cancer non-profits dare not teach people

to take vitamin D supplements? If they did, cancer would cease to be

such a big problem and those non-profits would lose membership (and

power). So they continue the grand charade of ignoring known cancer

cures while claiming they're still " searching for a cure. " I've

even seen lots of smart people jogging along in those " race for the

cure " events -- which are of course just a fundraising fraud. When I've

asked these people where the money goes that they're donating, they

just shrug their shoulders and say, " I dunno. I guess it goes to find a

cure! " These are very smart people, mind you, who have been

sucked into this sucker's fundraising trap. They have no clue where the

money is going (hint: almost all of it goes to cancer " recruiting " and

screening efforts to scare more women into chemotherapy) and yet they

jog along with all the other sheeple, somehow believing they are doing

good in the world.In all, these institutions and power centers accomplish something quite remarkable: The complete nutritional ignorance of virtually the entire population.And with that, they shore up their own profit centers by keeping the American people ignorant and nutritionally illiterate.

What does it feel like to be a slave?I can't help but

bring up a touchy chapter of American history -- made even more touchy

by the recent racial profiling debate regarding the police arrest of

Prof. Henry Gates. It is an historical fact that slave plantations in America

forbade their slaves to learn how to read or write. Literacy, you see,

empowers people, and when slaves are empowered, they're harder to

control.Keeping the slaves illiterate made them easier to

dominate. If you can't read road signs, it's harder to escape. If you

can't write, it's difficult to secretly communicate with others (you

can't even write a note!). Illiteracy, it turns out, is a highly

effective strategy for keeping people enslaved.Americans today are kept nutritionally illiterate

for precisely the same reasons: To make them easier to control. To

enslave them -- economically, medically and even chemically. Banning

knowledge about natural remedies (the FDA) while promoting false

science as truth (the medical journals) accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of enslaving an entire nation (including nearly all of the " smart " people).

As a result, we are slaves to that system of enforced nutritional ignorance.It

is a system that grows our (genetically modified) crops. That processes

grains into depleted foods. That feeds us through vending machines and

fast food restaurants. That sells us medicine when we become

predictably sick. It is a system that turns free-thinking, intelligent

people into blabbering, diseased victims who are so deeply entrained in

the philosophy of enforced ignorance that they will actually defend it.Ignorance is power.Power over the people. Power to dominate minds. Power to make money off the suffering of others.

What the cruel, white plantation owners did to their black slaves in the 1800's, Big Government is doing to all of us today.By

the way, if the phrase " Ignorance is Power " seems familiar, that's

because it's a paraphrase of one of the lines in George Orwell's novel 1984, which states:War is PeaceFreedom is SlaveryIgnorance is PowerThis

philosophy, it turns out, is embodied by our government today. " War is

Peace " refers to the idea that the only way to achieve peace is to wage

war. (This is precisely the foreign policy of the U.S. today.) " Freedom

is Slavery " means that in order to achieve freedom,

we must give up our rights and become slaves. (Also a key principle of

the crooks running Washington today.) " Ignorance is Power " is as I've

described here: The more the population can be kept ignorant and

illiterate, the more easily they can be controlled by advertisers,

government regulators and so-called " authority figures " like conventional medical doctors.

 

No coincidenceThus,

it is no coincidence that the U.S. population is kept nutritionally

ignorant. The knowledge destruction campaigns of the FDA, combined with

the health disinformation

efforts of the medical establishment, have managed to keep even really

smart people completely in the dark on nutrition fundamentals. People

don't even know the truth about vitamin D! (http://www.naturalnews.com/025495_c...) and (http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html)

And

that, my friends, is how even really smart people can seem so

incredibly unintelligent when it comes to nutrition. It is not mere

coincidence; it is a devious, intentional plot to keep the population

docile and ignorant. And you can really see the effectiveness of this

scheme when it comes to things like vaccines.

Thanks to widespread ignorance of vitamin D, people foolishly believe

their only protection against influenza is a vaccine injection (even

smart people!).That so many people willingly line up to be

injected with an untested, unproven and utterly ineffective vaccine

cocktail is proof of how easy it is to control a population as long as

the people are kept illiterate. People who lack good information have

no way to ask questions. So they go along with whatever disinformation

the " authorities " are pushing at the time, even if it's complete

nonsense.Even smart people, I've learned, have very poor discernment skills when it comes to questioning authority.Why the schools are dumbed downNow that you know all this, you instantly know why the public schools continue to be dumbed down: Keeping the population illiterate is easier if you start early!

For

the most part, public education today is really just a shadow of a real

education. Some students graduate from high schools with virtually no

ability to read or write -- much like the slaves in America's

plantation days. As illiterates, they are ripe for exploitation by

powerful corporations and governments. They have no real ability to

question what they're being told, or to stand up for their own rights.

They have no ability to defend themselves against the campaigns of disinformation promoted by those in power.America's

schools do a very poor job of teaching critical thinking skills, but

they do a fantastic job of churning out the next generation of

illiterate wage slaves. And this, of course, is entirely the point.

That's why you can't even call public schools a " failure " -- because

they are actually quite good at what they're designed to do: Train

people to be mind slaves who get along in society without asking too

many questions.Getting back to the question at the top of this article, the truth is that even really smart people are mind slaves, too,

because you don't get through the world of academia by asking lots of

questions. You survive academia by conforming. You get through medical

school by swallowing whatever you're told and shutting down that part

of your brain that used to ask skeptical questions. People who ask too

many questions get flunked out. Thus, all the people who

become the top doctors, academics and leaders in our nation are, by

definition, conformists. That's how they are so easily fooled by the

disinformation campaigns waged by Big Pharma, the FDA and the medical

journals. And that's how they end up with a double-doctorate degree in

physics while chowing down a greasy, genetically-modified cheeseburger

in the other.This article continues in part three, to be published here on NaturalNews tomorrow.This is the third and final part of a three-part article series. Part one is available at http://www.naturalnews.com/026843_h... and you can read part two here: http://www.naturalnews.com/026851_n...

SolutionsUltimately, what's more important than teaching people nutritional knowledge is teaching people the skills of thinking for themselves.

A population of independent thinkers would naturally embrace knowledge

of nutritional remedies and natural cures. They would naturally resist

the FDA's pro-drug propaganda, and they would be able to more readily recognize the value of safe, effective and low-cost natural medicine.

The reason why this isn't happening right now in modern society is obvious when you realize that people are not trained to THINK, they are trained to follow orders.

This is especially true with doctors,

where the art and craft of medicine has been stolen away from

well-meaning physicians by state and federal bureaucrats who wish to

centralize all the medical decision making. They want doctors to be

robotic enforcers of a centrally-planned medical agenda, not local

decision-makers operating with autonomy.In today's health

care reform debate, for example, all the big players want to dictate to

doctors how they should make their decisions -- insurance companies,

drug companies, state governments and the federal government. Nobody

wants to empower doctors with the ability to make reasonable decisions

based on human compassion and necessary medical care, because that

would cost too much (and it might not involve monopoly-priced

pharmaceuticals).But it isn't only doctors who are taught to

abandon independent thinking: It's all of us. Through our conformist,

dictatorial public education system and incessant television programming, we are all taught to cast away independent thought and conform with the masses.Why we are genetically programmed to follow the herd

This tendency, in fact, is genetically programmed behavior

among not just humans, but many other species. It's actually a shortcut

survival strategy for quick decision making. If you're standing in a

forest, for example, and a stampede of 100 people run towards you,

screaming in fear, you may not know what they are afraid of, but in the

back of your mind, your brain concludes " Well, one hundred people can't

all be wrong. I'm gonna run too! " And you turn around and run in the

same direction they are running, oblivious to any reason why.Following

the masses as a decision-making shortcut pays off much of the time, but

it misleads us when the masses have been misdirected. And the masses,

it turns out, are incredibly easy to misdirect through propaganda, advertising and deliberate disinfo campaigns.In

fact, I would say that on all the big issues of our modern society --

health, economics, the environment, politics, etc. -- the masses have

been deliberately misdirected to pursue beliefs

and actions that serve only the interests of those who covet profits

and power. Thus, using the convenient mental shortcut of following the

masses in modern society is a sure recipe for engaging in actions that

betray your own personal interests. Much of modern advertising, for

example, could be accurately described as a campaign to convince

individual consumers to make purchasing decisions that go against their

own self interest. (This is especially true in the banking and credit

card industries.)

The situation has become so strained that it could even be argued the smartest strategy is to do the OPPOSITE of what the masses are doing.

In the stock market, this earns great dividends for many " counter

investors " whose profits are extracted from the predictable investment

decisions of the easily-swayed masses.In terms of health care, when the masses are lining up for swine flu vaccines, the informed critical thinkers are skipping those lines and heading for the health food stores to stock up on anti-viral herbs and immune-boosting superfoods.

In

the grocery stores, while the impressionable masses are committing a

slow processed-food suicide by purchasing toxic processed foods,

the critical thinkers are heading straight to the fresh produce section

and loading up on unpopular, health-enhancing natural foods.In this way, doing what's intelligent is very often unpopular.

Going with the (ignorant) flow of the masses, however, is easy. It

takes no courage, nor thought, nor intelligence to simply do what

everybody else is already doing. What really requires some gumption is

the pursuit of precisely those well-informed actions that are unpopular

with the masses -- or even derided by them. " What do you mean you're

not going to get a vaccine shot? Everybody's getting a vaccine shot! " False rationalityMany

doctors, scientists and medical researchers like to imagine they are

the sole protectors of truly rational thought. And yet, upon closer

inspection, it turns they merely follow the same " group think " process

while hiding behind a scientific-sounding linguistic jargon used as

cover. Underneath the mumbo-jumbo, they are the same as the rest of the

masses: They go along with what the (scientific) group thinks for no

other reason than the group thinks it.This is the reason why mercury

fillings have persisted for so long in modern dentistry, by the way.

There's no sense to putting toxic heavy metals in the mouth of a child,

but it's just been done that way for so long that few dentists bother

to question it. Same story with chemotherapy: It makes no sense to

poison a patient and harm their vital organs as a " healing therapy, "

but it's been done for so long that it's simply accepted as medical

fact.The layers of this false rationality go far deeper than you might suspect:• At one level, some individuals may believe that a false fact is real (such as mercury fillings be safe).• At another level, there exists the meta-belief that the person's beliefs are based in fact rather than fiction.

•

At a deeper level still, there exists the meta-meta-belief that the

person expressing the belief is an individual who exists separate from

the other people or elements in the universe. (The myth of the id.)•

At a deeper esoteric level, there rests another persistent that the

universe in which all this takes place is " real " and not merely

illusion. (The " persistent reality " myth.)And yet, the person

subscribing to the false beliefs about mercury fillings is, in reality,

invoking a cascade of falsehoods about what they believe, how they

believe it, who is the container of that belief and the very nature of

reality itself.As such myths are arranged in layers, dispelling them is often best accomplished through a layers approach as well:•

First, it may be useful to show them evidence that convincingly

disproves their top-level incorrect belief. (At this point, most people

will simply reject the contradictory evidence, but some will have their

curiosity raised enough to consider more questions...)• Second,

by showing the mistake of their first belief, you can invite them to

question the accuracy of their entire belief system. This is

essentially inviting them to ask " Wow, how could I have ever believed

that before? There must be something wrong with the process I

previously used to conclude that was true... " • If you wish to take it further you can even invite the person to begin to question who the vessel

is that held those false beliefs, and you can begin to peel away the

false layers of the id and its obsession with separateness and ego.For

those who make it that far, they can then gain a perspective from which

belief systems in the material world can be reconstructed or rearranged

from the core.This is all pretty advanced stuff, admittedly. We

can't reasonably expect the masses to transform themselves into

self-reflective enlightened beings as a strategy for health care

reform. Those who understand these concepts, however, can at the very

least strive for a persistent and gradual uplifting of the consciousness of the human race as a worthy pursuit.Because,

let's face it: At its core, nutritionally illiteracy is not merely

about a lack of facts. It's actually a symptom of the unrealized potential of human consciousness.With

greater consciousness comes deeper independent thought, and with

independent thought comes the natural tendency to recognize and value

knowledge while casting away falsehoods. This is the true pathway to

wisdom, and this is the corridor through which the human race must now

pass if it wishes to coexist with Mother Nature as a viable form of

life on our planet.