Surprise Surprise…Big Pharma Paying Doctors Expenses

September 12th, 2011

Natural News

By: S. D. Wells

Pharmaceutical firms in the United States are shelling out massive funds for doctors travel and entertainment expenses in hopes of boosting sales of new drugs. More than 160,000 doctors have received related payments in 2011 already.

The big push includes free samples, hospital detailing, journal ads, gifting, and the sponsoring of continuing medical education, but patients fear this all leads to doctors prescribing popular, money making drugs instead of following standard of care practices .

Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca top the list of companies also spending far more on “marketing” than on research, with a total estimated $57,000 billion in overall marketing expenditures in just one year in the United States.

Pharmaceutical giants are claiming they are just trying to be open about how they conduct business, but the statements come at a time of intense scrutiny, and after several prosecutions regarding unlawful marketing practices.

In fact, some of these databases were actually set up as part of settlements of federal criminal investigations into the illegal marketing of drugs to doctors. Many companies have not released any data whatsoever, but Lilly and Pfizer combine to have paid out over 90 million dollars.

United States government agencies are preparing guidelines that will make such information mandatory by 2013. Currently there are over 80,000 pharmaceutical sales reps in the U.S. pursuing about 800,000 pharmaceutical prescribers, so it can be extremely difficult to track the money for one doctor from several sources, or to identify the largest recipients, like an entire hospital, without laborious work by a whole team of computer experts.

By 2013, new federal healthcare laws are expected to make it easier for the public to track a doctor’s payments from multiple companies; however, there may be controversial business opportunities available in the setting up and running of these supposedly transparent websites, such as PharmaShine, which was founded auspiciously by a former attorney for Merck.

Critics are complaining about the extreme conflicts of interest that arise from all the gift giving and promotional items, saying doctor’s can negatively influence the cost of medicine by recommending or prescribing brand name drugs over cheaper generics. In many instances, the reward is substantial for doctors to do exactly that. Over 380 doctors have earned more than $100,000 from drug companies in just the past two years.

But there is also a flip side to these perks. One doctor said he had to follow a slide show presentation word for word in order to receive funding for a speaking engagement promoting certain pharmaceuticals, or there would be changes made to his contract.

On top of all the other problems inherent in proper ethics and disclosure, many prominent doctors at academic medical centers have failed to disclose millions of dollars in drug company payments, and Federal prosecutors say some payments are really kickbacks for illegal or excessive prescribing. Are doctors now moonlighting as drug salesmen in order to keep the perks flowing?

Click here for the full report from Natural News

It’s Easier To Get Prescription Drugs Than You Think!

August 22nd, 2011

Daily Finance

By: Melly Alazraki

Does the market have you thinking about getting a little pharmacological help to ease your jitters and lift your mood? Getting a prescription for Prozac is easier than you think. In fact, you can skip the appointment with a psychiatrist altogether.

A study released last week in Health Affairs journal found a growing trend of doctors who aren’t psychiatrists offering antidepressants to patients. The meds often get prescribed without any psychiatric diagnosis, simply to boost someone’s mood, relieve mild anxiety, or improve sleep. Worse yet, there’s no evidence these drugs actually help such patients.

All these questionable prescriptions helped make this class of drugs one of the most commonly prescribed in the U.S. In 2010, according to IMS Health data, antidepressants spending grew to $11.6 billion. The class was the second most prescribed after cholesterol regulators and heart meds, with nearly 254 million prescriptions.

It’s No Secret Who’s Really Smiling

The growth in antidepressant use brings a smile to at least one group of people: Big Pharma.

While Eli Lilly’s (LLY) Prozac has long lost its patent protection, U.S. Cymbalta sales for 2010 grew 9% to $2.8 billion, topping the $758 million mark in the most recent second quarter. Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (BMY) Abilify U.S. sales grew by 5% in the recent quarter, to 517 million. AstraZeneca’s (AZN) second-quarter U.S. sales of Seroquel XR grew 14% to $205 million. (Both Seroquel XR and Abilify are atypical antipsychotics approved by the FDA as adjunct treatments for depression that doesn’t respond to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor like Prozac or Zoloft alone.)

The study made no mention of any illegal marketing practices by pharmaceuticals that may have contributed to this trend, although such allegations regarding off-label marketing are certainly not foreign to AstraZeneca or Eli Lilly, among many others.

However, the study said that direct-to-consumer advertising could be causing patients to request the drugs. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that allow advertising for prescription medications.

Do We Have a Drug Problem?

The researchers are concerned that this growing trend of non-psychiatrists prescribing antidepressants could mean that the drugs get prescribed inappropriately. They worry that patients who haven’t been properly diagnosed are not receiving the best care they need. The study suggests starting by educating physicians on mental disorders, the drugs, and their appropriate use.

The researchers also encourage patients to ask questions — lots of them, including questions about the diagnoses, the side effects, possible alternative treatments, and whether antidepressants are the right treatment for their problems in the first place.

Click here for the full report from Daily Finance

New Diabetes Drug Linked to Infections and Cancer

July 6th, 2011

Natural News

By: Jonathan Benson

Tests on a new diabetes drug being developed by drug giants Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have revealed that the new class of drug may be linked to causing urinary tract and genital infections, and several forms of cancer. Add to that dapagliflozin’s many other known side effects, and the experimental drug fares even worse than metformin, the more-common drug for treating type 2 diabetes.

The two-year study found that out of 5,478 patients treated with dapagliflozin, nine of them developed bladder cancer. Only one patient in the control group of 3,156, on the other hand, developed bladder cancer. Based on these results, a person taking dapagliflozin appears five times more likely to develop bladder cancer than a person not taking the drug.

The results were similar for cases of breast cancer. Nine out of 2,223 women taking dapagliflozin developed breast cancer, while only one of 1,053 in the control group developed breast cancer. These figures point to women taking dapagliflozin being more than four times more likely than women not taking the drug to develop breast cancer.

The way dapagliflozin works is that it blocks glucose from being absorbed into the bloodstream through the kidneys, and instead dispels it directly through the urine. By artificially flooding the urinary tract with excess sugars in this way, the urinary tract and genitals become far more prone to bacterial infections than if the sugar was processed in the normal way, and the negative effects of this were observed in the trials as well.

According to data presented at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), other serious side effects associated with taking dapagliflozin include back pain, influenza, diarrhea, headache, nasopharyngitis, upper respiratory tract infection, renal impairment or failure, and hypoglycemia.

Ultimately, there is no need for diabetics to take dangerous drugs like dapagliflozin and risk complicating their condition with new ones. Reversing and curing diabetes is fully possible, and it can be done safely and naturally without the use of drugs.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Studies Show Adverse Side Effects in Schizophrenia Drugs

December 28th, 2010

Natural News

By: Amy Chaves

The November 2010 issue of Nature reported that several large pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, have chosen to pull out of the psychiatric pharmacology in the treatment of schizophrenia. The reason is obvious, according to Nature author, Abbott: The first generation of schizophrenia drugs (manufactured in the 1950s) and the second generation (manufactured in the 1990s) have not addressed the adverse side effects of antipsychotic drugs on patients.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes schizophrenia as a mental disorder that interferes with a person’s ability to identify what is real. A person affected with this disorder is not able to manage emotions, cognition, as well as communication. Symptoms could appear in early adolescence as “early flickers of paranoia, hypersensitivity, and hallucination” (Dobbs, 2010). According to WHO, schizophrenia is usually characterized by disruptions in the most fundamental human attributes such as perception, language, thought, emotion, and sense of self. In 2001, WHO estimated that schizophrenia affects 7 per thousand of the adult population (the equivalent of 24 million worldwide), mostly between 15 to 35 years old.

The same November 2010 issue of Nature discussed about a US clinical trial involving nearly 1,500 patients in 57 clinical sites, and at a cost of US$43 million. This trial examined an array of second generation antipsychotic drugs to determine if they were better than the first generation antipsychotic drugs. The clinical trial spanned from 2001-2005. When the results of the unblinded trial were released in 2005, the psychiatric community and pharmacological companies were astounded: the findings suggest that the new drugs were barely different from the old ones.

Although both generations of anti-psychotic drugs were reported to control hallucinations and delusions, patients taking the second generation drugs remained confused, withdrawn, and devoid of drive, the same side effects observed in the first generation drugs. The result of this clinical trial, according to psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, is frustrating and humbling for the research community and it had a chilling effect on the pharmaceutical industry (Abbott, 2010).

A systematic review in 2003 by Bagnall, et al., examined the effectiveness, safety, and cost-effectiveness of atypical antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia. The review consisted of 171 randomized, controlled trials, of which 28 were from drug manufacturers. Although the review showed that atypical drugs (i.e., risperidone, amisulpride, olanzipine, and clozapine) were seen to be more effective in relieving symptoms of schizophrenia than typical ones, it nonetheless found the following common side-effects: agitation, movement disorders, impotence, dry mouth, nausea and vomiting, dizziness, and weight gain.

The same systematic review examined the safety of these drugs and some of the following adverse reactions were found: death, malignant syndrome, seizures, hepatic dysfunction, and cardiac problems.

A systematic review, involving the application of scientific strategies to limit bias, is a synthesis of relevant studies that address specific clinical questions. Reviews of this kind are considered as the best evidence for making clinical decisions.

The findings of the 2001-2005 US clinical trial and the systematic review of Bagnall, et al. point to the ineffectiveness of anti-psychotic drugs in dealing with schizophrenia. Considering that up to 1% of the world’s population is estimated to be affected by this disorder, schizophrenia represents a huge market for any pharmaceutical. However, as research have shown, the pharmaceutical industries have done little in 50 years to address the adverse side-effects that patients have experienced from antipsychotic drugs .

Click here for the full report from Natural News

U.S. War Veterans Being Killed With High-Dose Psychiatric Drugs

December 7th, 2010

Natural News

By: David Gutierrez

Questions are being raised over whether a widely prescribed anti-psychotic drug may be contributing to the deaths of traumatized U.S. war veterans.

Among those who recently died while taking AstraZeneca’s blockbuster drug Seroquel are Marine corporals Andrew White and Chad Oligschlaeger. Both were being given multiple drugs, including Seroquel, for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Both died in their sleep.

Before his death, White was being given more than double the maximum recommended Seroquel dose for patients suffering from schizophrenia.

“He was told if he had trouble sleeping he could take another pill,” said his father, Stan White.

Seroquel is the United States’ fifth-best-selling drug, and one of the top prescribed drugs by the Veteran Affairs Department. Since the start of the Afghanistan war, government spending on the drug has increased more than 770 percent to $8.6 million per year. Yet in the same time period, the number of patients being treated by the department increased by only 34 percent.

The drug is approved only for the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, yet it is commonly given to vets for insomnia and other PTSD symptoms. According to The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, other side effects “may include dry mouth, blurred vision, and tardive dyskinesia, typified by involuntary movements of the lips, mouth, and tongue.” Other proven side effects include weight gain and diabetes, while new research suggests that the drug may also cause sudden heart failure.

Medical examiners concluded that both White and Oligschlaeger died of “multiple drug toxicity” caused by a deadly interaction between the different drugs they were taking; such deaths are not recorded as caused by any single drug. Yet family and advocates of vets are becoming increasingly concerned that Seroquel may bear a large part of the blame for such deaths, and are calling for a reevaluation of prescribing practices for the drug.

“Right now, I’m so angry, and I believe someone needs to be held accountable,” said Oligschlaeger’s mother, Julie Oligschlaeger. “The protocol absolutely has to change.”

Click here for the full report from Natural News

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 11-10-10

Today, Kevin delves deep into the illegal immigrant controversy and gives you the health advice that could save your life! Plus, author and former meteorologist, Brian Sussman, stops by to blow the whistle on one of the biggest frauds of our era; global warming. Click here to find out how the government is misleading you.

Self Help:
Turn Back Time
Inspiration From Teddy Roosevelt
Beef Up Your Diet
Treating Crohn’s Disease
Add Even More Nutrition To Your Salad
Kill Viruses For Good!
Join Today!

Health:
Big Pharma Attempts To Jump On The Fish Oil Bandwagon
AstraZeneca Only Facing Fine For Illegal Marketing
Chicken Feces Found in Commercial Beef
Children’s Tylenol, Motrin, Benadryl, Zyrtec Recalled
Vitamin D Cuts Cancer Risk
Teen Girls Get Bribed To Get Gardasil Vaccine
Drugging of Infants & Toddlers in the US

Government:
Just One State
Putting Security Back Into Social Security
WHO Issues Warning About Big Pharma Corruption

Everything Kevin:
Become An Insider!
Kevin is on YouTube!
Sign Up For Kevin’s FREE Podcast
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Become Kevin’s Friend on Facebook
Kevin’s Film Club
Kevin’s Book Club

Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!

Click Below to watch the Kevin Trudeau Show LIVE!

Drug Companies Hire Troubled Doctors As Experts

October 19th, 2010

NPR

Drug companies say they hire the most-respected doctors in their fields for the critical task of teaching about the benefits and risks of the companies’ drugs.

But an investigation by ProPublica has uncovered hundreds of doctors receiving company payments who had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists.

To vet the industry’s handpicked speakers, ProPublica created a comprehensive database that represents the most accessible accounting yet of payments to doctors. Compiled from disclosures by seven companies, the database covers $257.8 million in payouts since 2009 for speaking, consulting and other duties. The companies include Lilly, Cephalon, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer.

Although these companies have posted payments on their websites — some as a result of legal settlements — they make it difficult to spot trends or even learn who has earned the most. ProPublica combined the data and identified the highest-paid doctors, then checked their credentials and disciplinary records.

That is something not all companies do.

“Without question, the public should care,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine who has written about the industry’s influence on physicians. “You would never want your kid learning from a bad teacher. Why would you want your doctor learning from a bad doctor, someone who hasn’t displayed good judgment in the past?”

ProPublica senior reporter Charles Ornstein detailed the findings with Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne.

NPR: Tell us a little about the database. What have you found, and who’s on it?

Charles Ornstein, ProPublica: For many years, the pharmaceutical industry has been paying doctors to speak and consult on their behalf, but the names of those doctors have largely been a secret. So, for the first time we’re seeing from the companies who they’re paying for. Now we have a chance to take a look at their backgrounds and what they’re doing for the money.

What are these 17,000 doctors listed in the database doing for the seven drug companies that have released information?

The drug companies rely on doctors to speak locally and travel around the country to educate other doctors about the risks and benefits of the drugs. And they can get paid a lot of money. In our database we found that there were 384 doctors who, over the course of just the past 18 months, have received at least $100,000 from the drug companies that have reported so far.

What kind of money are we talking about, and what is that buying the drug companies in the way of sales?

We’re talking about big money. Just from these seven companies, they’ve paid out more than $257 million in the past 18 months, and remember not all of these companies have even disclosed their payments for that whole period of time, so it’s likely going to be substantially more, just for these seven companies.

What do they get for it? They wouldn’t be spending this kind of money if they weren’t getting returns from the perspective of increasing their brand in the market, letting doctors know about it, encouraging them to prescribe it. They say that doctors’ success at increasing prescriptions is not a means in which they’re measured, but some of the lawsuits against the industry have said that prescriptions and return on investment absolutely play a role.

And you have found among those doctors a few who have backgrounds that are a bit shocking, especially considering they’re representing these drug companies and, in a sense, representing themselves as experts.

If you take a look at the pharmaceutical company websites, you see that they take great pride in that they’ve recruited the top names in the field, the leading experts and academicians to speak on behalf of their products and consult with them, and when you start looking at the backgrounds, you find some, indeed, are the top names in their fields. But some you can’t find any information about.

We found several dozen of the top speakers did not have board certifications — which means they were not certified in their medical specialties — and then we found more than 250 doctors who had some type of sanction taken against them by a state medical board. And we just looked at a sampling of states.

Some of the discipline was really quite serious. The Ohio Medical Board, for example, voted a couple of years back to revoke the license of William David Leak, whom they accused of performing unnecessary nerve tests on 20 patients and subjecting some to an excessive number of invasive procedures. Dr. Leak is appealing the penalty, and his license is still active, but since 2009 he has received $85,000 from Eli Lilly and Co.

Another one is a hospital disciplinary case out of Georgia — the state appeals court in Georgia in 2004 upheld a hospital’s decision to kick Dr. Donald Ray Taylor off its staff. He’s an anesthesiologist, and he admitted to giving young female patients rectal and vaginal exams without documenting why. He had also been accused of exposing women’s breasts during medical procedures, and when he was confronted by a hospital official, he said, “Maybe I am a pervert; I honestly don’t know.”

Click here for the full report from NPR

Pfizer Ends Trial After Widespread Overdosing of Children With Psych Drug

October 18th, 2010

Natural News

By: David Gutierrez

Drug giant Pfizer has canceled a scheduled clinical trial of its antipsychotic drug Geodon after the FDA accused it of subjecting child participants in a prior study to “widespread overdosing.”

“After careful consideration, the company decided not to proceed with the study,” Pfizer spokesperson Gwendolyn Fisher said.

Fisher said that although the company had taken “preparatory steps” toward the trial, it had decided to abandon the study in order “to meet regulatory timelines.” No patients were enrolled.

Pfizer is seeking FDA approval to market Geodon for the treatment of bipolar disorder in children between the ages of 10 and 17. An FDA panel already rejected this use once in 2009 by a vote of 10-7, expressing concern that large numbers of participants had failed to complete clinical trials of the drug. The FDA asked Pfizer for further information on the drug’s safety in children, and the company responded by launching pediatric trials of the drug.

In April, the FDA warned the company that researchers in charge of the trials were engaging in “significant violations,” including “widespread overdosing” caused by inadequate company oversight.

Five months earlier, Pfizer had agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle a collection of federal and state criminal and civil charges that it had improperly marketed Geodon and three other drugs.

Geodon, which made Pfizer $1 billion in 2009, is already approved for the treatment of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in adults. Its competitors AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly have already secured FDA approval to use their respective antipsychotics Seroquel and Zyprexa to treat bipolar disorder in children.

Treatment of children with antipsychotics remains a controversial practice amid growing concern over major side effects such as severe metabolic changes and weight gain.

Although Geodon’s most recent safety trial has been canceled, the company made it clear that it still plans to secure FDA approval for pediatric use of the drug.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Breast Cancer Awareness Campaigns Cause More Harm Than Good

October 15th, 2010

Natural News

By: Ethan A. Huff

For over 25 years, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) organization has been conducting campaigns to “promote breast cancer awareness, share information on the disease, and provide greater access to screening services.” But since such campaigns began, breast cancer mortality rates have remained virtually the same, while more women than ever needlessly undergo dangerous treatments for a disease they do not even have.

Groups like the American Cancer Society (ACS), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation all support breast cancer awareness initiatives, which include urging women to get annual mammograms and to undergo conventional treatments like surgery, radiation and chemotherapy at the first signs of a tumor. But many professors, scientists and health professionals now say that such programs and recommendations have not only failed to achieve positive results, but have actually put more women in harm’s way.

“I don’t think people understand the lack of progress (achieved by breast cancer awareness programs),” Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, is quoted as saying in a recent Los Angeles Times article. Visco referenced statistics showing that deaths from breast cancer have dropped maybe two percent since they started in 1990, which is likely a statistically insignificant figure.

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice explained that breast cancer awareness campaigns have failed to keep up with developments in breast cancer research, including new research showing that most of the cancers identified with mammography are not even malignant. And as a result of continued screening, millions of women end up being treated with expensive, potentially life-threatening treatments for cancers that will never harm them.

A recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that for every one woman helped by a mammogram, up to 15 others are misdiagnosed and mistreated. But because of breast cancer awareness campaigns that continue to scare women and push them towards outmoded, unscientific methods of approaching the disease, many women are willing to participate in conventional screening and treatment programs anyway, even if such programs ultimately cause them needless harm and possible death.

A drug company founded National Breast Cancer Awareness Month
A quick look into the history of NBCAM reveals that its founding sponsor is AstraZeneca, a multi-national drug company that manufactures breast cancer drugs like Arimidex, Tamoxifen, Faslodex and Zoladex. And what was the original stated goal of NBCAM? To promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the fight against breast cancer.

Most NaturalNews readers already know that mammography is largely ineffective and dangerous to health. Mammograms do not differentiate between harmless and malignant tumors, and they pump a regular dose of radiation into women’s breasts that can eventually cause tumors to form. But the one thing mammograms are good at is racking up lots of breast cancer diagnoses.

Before the days of mammography, breast lumps were not the major scare they are today. But today, otherwise healthy women are habitually screened and told that detected tumor need immediate intervention, even though the vast majority of them are harmless. Sometimes women actually develop harmful tumors from the mammograms themselves, resulting in the same interventions. Either way, at the end of the day, drug companies like AstraZeneca reap large profits from the mammogram system.

“It’s a common problem with disease awareness campaigns and patient advocacy groups,” said Welch. “If you look into their funding sources, you’ll often find a pharmaceutical company or device maker who stands to benefit from an expansion in the number of people with the condition.”

Laurie Casaday, spokeswoman for NBCAM and senior manager of corporate affairs in oncology for AstraZeneca, denies such claims, however. She insists that the program is “not about selling a breast cancer drug”, but is instead about “making sure women are educated about their breast health.”

If the organization was really concerned about educating women about their breast health, though, it would acknowledge the mounting scientific evidence that denies the viability of mammography and conventional cancer treatments, and would subsequently stop using fear-mongering campaigns to persuade women to take that route. But this scenario will likely never happen because, in doing so, AstraZeneca and other drug companies would experience a tremendous drop in revenue due to significantly less false diagnoses.

Prevent breast cancer naturally
Real breast cancer awareness involves taking active steps to improve your health naturally, both nutritionally and environmentally. These include maintaining optimal vitamin D levels in your blood, avoiding exposure to toxins that cause cancer and eating plenty of cruciferous vegetables rich in anti-cancer nutrients.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

75% of Americans Obese or Overweight by 2020

October 10th, 2010

Natural News

By: Mike Adams

America is already on the verge of drowning in sick-care bankruptcy, but the situation is about to get even worse. According to a new study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, three-fourths of Americans will be obese or overweight by 2020. That puts America in first place for the world competition to see which nation can create the most obese population.

We’re number one!

Seriously, according to the research, America is No. 1 on the world obesity rankings, meaning a higher percentage of the U.S. population is obese (or overweight) than in any other country in the world.

Not surprisingly, why this is happening brings up all sorts of different explanations ranging from entirely valid to completely bizarre. But the simple truth of the situation is that Americans are fat because of these three simple reasons:

Reason #1) We don’t get much exercise.
Reason #2) We eat too much food.
Reason #3) The food we eat is mostly processed dead food of marginal nutritional value.

These three reasons largely explain why America has become the fattest nation in the world.

Why do we eat so much junk food?
Knowing this, the next question seems obvious: WHY do we eat so much junk food? The answer may seem complex, but it really isn’t. Americans eat junk food because that’s what’s available and that’s what they’re told to eat by their television sets.

You can buy junk foods at any convenience store, gas station or vending machine in America. But getting something that’s actually healthy for you is far more challenging. Most people opt for the quick, easy and cheap solution: Drive-through burgers or genetically modified tacos! Why bother with real food when factory-made imitation food is so much cheaper (and more convenient)?

Why don’t we get much exercise?
The sad, simple answer is that most Americans are just flat-out sedentary. A recent study revealed that an astonishing 95% of Americans never do anything strenuous — ever! The people you see in the gyms or jogging in public are the 5% who actually engage in some form of exercise.

The other 95% of Americans just do don’t much in terms of physical activity, yet at the same time Americans tend to eat huge meal portions that would be considered obscene in many other countries. When I lived in South America, for example, I quickly learned that South American meal portions are about one-fourth the size of a typical North American meal portion (in terms of what restaurants serve you, anyway). A typical one-person meal at a family Mexican restaurant in the United States, in other words, would feed a family of four in Ecuador.

This combination of eating larger meals while avoiding most exercise is the “perfect storm” for exploding obesity. It is accelerated even more by the lack of nutritional density in the food people do choose to eat.

The nutritional depleted foods we eat
Most foods consumed by Americans are heavily processed, factory-made foods. Just check out the grocery carts of the average American shopper — they’re loaded up with the most heavily processed, chemically adulterated imitation food products you can possibly imagine. And there’s a not-so-surprising correlation between the health of the person shopping and the quality of the foods in their cart. Healthy people shop primarily for fresh produce and food staples like legumes and beans.

The least healthy people are the ones purchasing canned soups, dinner “helper” products, macaroni and cheese, sweet pastries, cow’s milk, processed meats and cheeses. Not surprisingly, these are the same people who end up in the drive-thru pharmacies, buying their latest round of diabetes drugs. They’re also the same ones driving up your health care costs by destroying their own health and racking up billions of dollars in disease maintenance costs.

Think about it: When people buy and eat processed foods, they are not only destroying their own health; they’re passing along the sick-care costs to all the other people who share the cost burden of either private health insurance, Medicaid or Medicare. When a person buys a 99 cent hamburger, they may actually be generating five dollars in future health care costs to be paid by all the rest of us.

That’s one reason why obesity is bankrupting America. Many of the junk food eaters seem to think someone else is going to pay for their disease. Someone else is going to fix the broken health care system. Someone else is going to find a cure someday. So why bother changing their own dietary habits anyway?

Too many people dismiss their own role in creating the very disease and bankruptcy from which they’re suffering. This is happening at both the personal level and the national level. When America as a nation has its food supply regulated by a corrupt, criminal agency called the FDA that actively censors the truth about healing foods which prevent disease — and then the same country asks “Why are our people so diseased?” — you gotta just shake your head in disbelief.

America is obese and diseased precisely because that’s the kind of outcome you’d naturally expect when you imprison the herbalists, shut down the nutritional supplement companies and ban honest health claims about healthy food products while allowing toxic chemicals and GMOs into the food supply. The FDA sure deserves a round of applause here, eh?

And then when people actually do get sick, instead of teaching them how to be well, the government pushes an agenda of dangerous chemical medications and vaccine injections that only further compromise health (while driving up health care costs even more).

When companies can sell infant formula made with over 50% sugar and state food stamp programs actually cover such products by making them free to low-income mothers, then of course you’re going to end up raising a generation of obese diabetics!

This isn’t rocket science, folks. If you feed a whole generation of people junk foods, liquid sugars (HFCS) and heavily processed foods while promoting chemicals and pharmaceuticals as the answer to health care, you cannot possibly get any result other than widespread obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. It’s no coincidence that’s exactly what we see in America today. The answer is so simple that even a fifth grade could figure it out.

We must choose between the People or the corporations
If America really wants to get healthy, it’s not a difficult thing. Just put a dozen natural health and nutrition advocates in charge of regulating food, drugs and personal care products. We would clean house and put a whole slew of junk food companies out of business, and then we would restore health freedom to natural product companies so they could communicate the truth about how their products can help people prevent disease.

Make no mistake: The American people can never be healthy if Big Pharma and the junk food companies stay in business as they operate today. You literally have to bankrupt all the toxic product industries (or force them to shift to completely different products) in order to save America from the medical bankruptcy that now seems inevitable.

But these toxic product industries are very powerful and very influential. They fund political election campaigns and hire armies of lobbyists to get things passed like the recent health care reforms that effectively lock in a Big Pharma monopoly for decades to come. Disease pays big bucks to these powerful corporations, and they’re not about to see Americans get healthier if that would eat into their profits.

It would quite literally take some sort of temporary dictator in America to clean house and shut down all the consumer product companies that are right now causing widespread obesity and disease. Although I don’t support dictatorships, if such a dictator did exist and he really wanted to improve the health of the American people, he would have to radically reform or force the shutting down of companies like Coca-Cola, Monsanto, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Pepsico. All the top pharmaceutical companies would be next: Merck, Pfizer, GSK, Astrazeneca, etc.

If you shut down all these companies, seized their products, halted their operations and arrested and prosecuted their top executives for their various crimes against the People, then you might have a shot at improving the long-term health of the American people. Note carefully that this is almost exactly what the FTC and FDA do right now against natural product companies, so this kind of action actually takes place quite regularly (although it’s directed at the wrong companies). This isn’t “something that would never happening in America.” It’s happening right now!

It’s all just a matter of national priorities. If America’s politicians would rather protect the health of the profits of giant drug companies and food conglomerates than the health of the working people, then they should just keep doing what they’re already doing… it’s working beautifully! But if they actually want to help Americans get healthy and stay healthy — while saving literally trillions of dollars in long-term health care costs — they’ve got to be willing to put these toxic product companies out of business for good while promoting sensible nutrition and exercise programs through public education campaigns.

In other words, the United States government needs to be doing what NaturalNews.com is already doing: Educating people about nutrition, promoting personal health responsibility, teaching disease prevention and fitness.

Maybe one day they’ll figure out that the way to have a healthy nation is to start with creating healthy people.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Next Page »