How to slash national health care costs by 90% through education, nutrition, and

[Guest guest]

It is very simple, your government, the health (disease care) care

industry, the major corporations, etc. do not want nor plan for you to

be " healthy " .

 

 

http://www.insurancefactor.org/002706.html

 

How to slash national health care costs by 90% through education,

nutrition, and a ban on junk food marketing

 

Want a real solution to skyrocketing health care costs? Forget about

all the so-called " cost saving " schemes dreamed up by politicians,

drug companies and HMOs. All they do is create new levels of

bureaucracy that don't address the real problems of why health care

costs are so high in the first place. In this article, we'll look at

how to fundamentally cut health care costs by 90% nationwide -- while

simultaneously enhancing the quality of life for all Americans --

through a program of education and disease prevention that starts with

changing the way doctors are educated.

 

I find it absolutely appalling if not downright ridiculous that the

people in our country who are responsible for health don't understand

the fundamentals of nutrition (see related ebook on nutrition). That

med schools don't teach nutrition is I think one of the strongest

statements yet about the sad state of conventional medicine. These

people need to be taught nutrition.

 

It was Hippocrates himself who said, " Let thy food be thy medicine. "

And in fact, the history of medicine is steeped in the use of plants

for health and healing. The very word pharmaceutical means " medicine

from plants. " And yet today, conventional medicine has not only

ignored plants and nutrition, it has actively sought to discredit it.

This is one reason why, in my mind, physicians have little or no

credibility whatsoever when talking about health and disease

prevention. They are, technically, ignorant. Dr. Andrew Weil, author

of Spontaneous Healing and many other books on health and healing,

even calls conventional doctors, " nutritionally illiterate. "

 

Medical schools have no credibility either, because they are basically

conduits for teaching the use of drugs, pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy,

and surgical procedures to an army of doctors who, in practice, are

often little more than glorified drug dealers. So if we are going to

adopt nutritional strategies and actually prevent disease in the

United States, we're going to have to start teaching our doctors about

foods. This crucial knowledge has been ignored thanks to the dominance

of this highly corrupt industry we now call " conventional medicine. "

 

The next step in slashing the skyrocketing costs of health care is to

outlaw foods and food ingredients that promote disease. It makes no

sense that food companies should be able to sell products that

directly promote obesity and chronic disease. One of the first things

we can do in this area is ban the advertising of such foods. There

shouldn't be soft drink ads on television or in magazines. It should

be illegal. We should also ban vending machines, especially from

public schools and work places when those vending machines offer junk

foods that contain ingredients known to promote disease.

 

We can also tax foods by levying things such as the junk food tax.

Although I'm not a big fan of increasing taxes or using taxes for

social reform, it is true that taxing junk foods would make them less

affordable to most citizens and might cause some people to choose

alternative sources of food such as healthy snack foods. In other

words, if we made unhealthy snack foods the same price as healthy

snack foods by taxing the junk foods, people would have a more

balanced choice of what they want to eat.

 

Another proposal that I especially like is requiring warning labels on

foods similar to the warning labels now posted on cigarette packaging.

If you buy a pack of cigarettes in the United States, the label warns

you that this product causes cancer or other chronic diseases. The

same sort of warning labels should be required on foods and soft

drinks and other products that contain ingredients known to promote

disease. This is the only way the average consumer will be made aware

of the correlation between these foods and their long-term health impacts.

 

If someone picks up a six-pack of soft drinks, they should notice a

warning label that says, " Warning: This product promotes obesity and

diabetes. " That's the plain truth about soft drinks. No scientist or

doctor in his right mind would argue against such a statement. Of

course, the soft drink industry would and so would practically

everyone under the influence of the soft drink industry, which

includes the USDA and many legislators and regulators in the federal

government. So this won't be an easy task.

 

Yet another excellent strategy for slashing national health care costs

is to allow nutritional supplement manufacturers to tell the truth

about what their supplements do for your health. This is something the

FDA has disallowed for decades. They have never allowed manufacturers

of nutritional supplements to make true statements about what those

supplements can do for your health. In fact, the FDA battled

vigorously against the DSHEA Act in 1994 that finally allowed

nutritional supplement manufacturers to make qualified statements on

their products, as long as such statements were followed with the

quote, " This statement has not been endorsed by the FDA. "

 

We should allow supplement manufacturers to tell the truth about what

their products do when it is based on available clinical evidence. It

shouldn't be illegal to speak the truth about the relationship between

nutrition and chronic disease.

 

Another thing we should do is halt the persecution of nutritional

supplement companies by conventional medicine and the FDA. The FDA

continues to attack and even persecute companies that manufacture and

promote nutritional supplements.

 

There are countless examples of this, but one of the most recent is a

company called Lane Labs that was selling a product called MGN-3 which

contained medicinal mushrooms well known to boost immune system

function and treat cancer in humans. The FDA didn't like this company

selling a product that actually worked, so they attacked the company

and effectively put it out of business through lawsuits. This is, of

course, part of the FDA's strategy for protecting the profits of the

pharmaceutical industry to which the Fraud and Drug Administration

answers.

 

This sort of activity by the FDA should be halted and investigated by

the FBI so that nutritional supplement manufacturers can operate in a

free environment, without having to watch their back to wonder if the

next federally approved " inquisition " is on its way.

 

We should also overhaul our school lunch programs. Currently, school

lunches offer terrible nutrition to students. We feed our students

refined white flour, added sugars, dead foods, processed foods,

hydrogenated oils, and then we send them back to class and wonder why

they can't learn or pay attention. Instead of giving them good

nutrition, we as a nation just dose them up with Ritalin, a powerful

narcotic that masks the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity

Disorder. What we need to do is feed our children foods and

nutritional supplements that support stable blood sugar, optimum brain

function and a positive learning environment. These foods are readily

available and our school lunch programs should be serving those foods.

 

We should also remove cow's milk from school lunch programs. Cow's

milk is a terrible source of nutrition for anyone who isn't a cow.

While it is outstanding nutrition for baby cows, it is nutritionally

freakish when it comes to human nutrition. For some reason, everybody

in the country continues to look at cow's milk as good nutrition. But

in fact, in children it promotes chronic sinus problems, stagnation,

constipation, hardening of the arteries and even heart disease. It

even contributes to infant deaths. This is something that we should

stop serving our children as quickly as possible. (The dairy industry

would disagree, of course...)

 

We should also ban junk foods and fast foods at schools and hospitals.

I think it's crazy that some schools have fast food chains right in

the cafeteria where children can buy disease-promoting foods for

lunch. It is just as crazy that our hospitals, which are supposed to

be institutions of health and healing, also serve the same junk foods.

There are actually hospitals with McDonald's restaurants inside the

hospital!

 

Were people out of their minds when they allowed these restaurant

chains into our schools and hospitals? Were they willing to give up

any sense of ethics in exchange for royalties on the sales of such

products? Clearly somebody lost their minds when they allowed these

junk food chains to enter our public schools and hospitals. They

should be immediately outlawed and yanked out of these institutions of

learning and health.

 

Another thing we should do as a nation is fund public education

advertising campaigns that teach parents and the public about good

nutrition. We need to have television ads, radio ads, and magazine ads

that counter the billions of dollars in advertising promoting soft

drinks, snack foods, fast foods, and other junk foods that cause

obesity and chronic disease.

 

One way to battle that is to run public service announcements that

counter the hype with the truth about health and nutrition. Of course,

doing so will cost taxpayer dollars, but it will also serve as an

investment and ultimately will save billions of dollars in long-term

healthcare costs. Remember, investing in prevention is a good

investment. It's money well spent at both the personal level and

national level.

 

Moving on down the line here, another fantastic idea for improving the

nutrition and health of our nation is to end the subsidies on corn and

sugar. There's no sane reason why corn and sugar need to be subsidized

in this country. By subsidizing them, we are only making these food

ingredients cheaper. And since ingredients derived from these products

(such as high-fructose corn syrup) are precisely those ingredients

that promote obesity and chronic disease, we are actually making the

consumption of foods that promote disease more affordable to the

average citizen.

 

This is economic insanity. If anything, we should be making unhealthy

foods more expensive to create a disincentive to their purchase. We

should immediately end the subsidies (corporate welfare) to Big Sugar.

We should stop subsidizing the growing of corn. By doing so, we will

make healthy foods more attractive to consumers while reducing the

consumption of foods made from corn syrup and added sugars.

 

Another idea for enhancing the nutrition of the nation is to create

incentives that reward good nutritional strategies among the public.

One idea would be to have insurance rebates for people who attain and

maintain certain health milestones. If a person can get under 15% body

fat, for example, or get their cholesterol below 130, or maintain a

healthy body weight, they should have rebates on their insurance

compared to people who choose not to follow healthy lifestyles. This

would create a financial incentive for people to pursue healthful

dietary and exercise strategies.

 

And the long-term result is that everyone's insurance rates would go

down, because healthy people cost a lot less in terms of medical

expenses. They don't need as much surgery, they don't need medical

care, and they don't need vast quantities of expensive prescription

drugs that are largely responsible for driving up health insurance

costs today.

 

There are many other fantastic ideas circulating out there. What I've

presented here are just a few of the really good ideas that, if

implemented, could save us billions of dollars as a nation. We would

have far greater productivity. We would all live longer. We would have

a higher quality of life. We would have lower rates of crime due to

better balance of mental function -- especially among young males who

are highly susceptible to behavioral disorders associated with the

consumption of refined carbohydrates.

 

As a nation, we could invest a few pennies in prevention and save

hundreds of dollars in medical costs. We could significantly cut the

cost of treating our nation's health disorders. We could slash the

number of people who are diagnosed with chronic disease. We could end

our dependence on pharmaceuticals and end the drug racket now being

hyped by the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA. All that is required

is to have the courage to do what is right. And that is to outlaw the

sale and marketing of foods that promote disease, to invest in

teaching the public the fundamentals of nutrition, to overhaul our

medical schools so that doctors are taught the basics of nutrition,

and to reform the nutritional strategies pursued by public schools and

hospitals.

 

If we are going to be a healthy, vibrant nation, this is what we're

going to have to do. Should we follow the current path being pursued

-- the path of chronic disease, obesity, and skyrocketing medical

costs associated with the treatment of disease symptoms -- we will end

up diseased and bankrupt. We will be a nation of poverty and disease

rather than the nation of health and wealth we could create if we had

the courage to make the right decisions today.

 

This article is an excerpt from the book, The 7 Laws of Nutrition by

Mike Adams.