Doctors Smoke Camels And You're Not Fat And Sick From Factory Food
Industrial food practices have made people fat, sick and nearly dead - what can you do?
I’ve spent over a year writing about wellness, health and weight loss. My husband and I are healthy and of normal weight — now.
We weren’t that way four years ago.
Students used to be completely astonished when I’d show them old commercials for cigarettes. Not just the “Doctors Smoke Camels” ones, but also the Flintstones. That’s right: a children’s cartoon advertising healthful, fun tobacco use.
What does this have to do with today’s obesity and chronic disease epidemic?
“They” are still telling you that highly-processed foods sold in our stores and served in most restaurants are healthy and good for you. They also say that factory-produced beef, pork, and chicken are healthy and safe.
It’s all as true as when the doctors told all of us to smoke Camels: for our health.
Maybe there was a Devil’s Bargain made back in the 70s and 80s. The tobacco giants may have agreed to take a hit in their bottom line while the Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Pharma giants replaced nicotine with other addictive substances like sugar, salt, and fat. At this time, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris bought into big food companies, especially sweetened beverages and sodas.
The U.S. rise in obesity began during the 1980s.
In the 1980s, I had a rampaging eating disorder. I would often not eat for up to four days at a time. I now know that I probably permanently damaged my metabolism through those practices.
When I think about how twisted and perverse the industrialized food system is, I am overwhelmed with grief and dismay.
To this day, this minute, many millions of people still believe that the reason they grow fatter and sicker each day they grow older is that they “lack willpower” and “just aren’t counting calories well enough or exercising hard enough.”
It’s The Protein
I grew up in an orange grove. Then I moved to a rural area where everyone had a small vegetable plot, horses or maybe a single cow, and chickens.
I remember feeding and caring for my grandfather’s banty hens. They laid eggs — I was so young I didn’t realize there were store-bought eggs too. There were few packages of cut-up chicken in the store.
Most of all, I remember the size and shape of chicken drumsticks, breasts, and wings. A drumstick was the perfect size for a child’s serving.
Bruce bought some chicken breasts on sale last week and I made them into green chicken enchiladas.
One of the breasts was the size and weight of not two, but three breasts from “back in the day.” This package of two breasts weighed 1.7 pounds. When I opened the package, the breasts were strangely formed. The meat was spongy. When I started making the green chile chicken, the meat exuded at least a cup of liquid. It didn’t look good and it didn’t taste that great either.
“Let’s not buy any more of that cheap chicken,” I said. We’ve agreed on this before and usually try to buy organic free range whole chickens because they are of normal size and weight and the meat has a normal texture and doesn’t exude lots of liquid when cooked.
I could show you what the chickens look like when they are raised by chicken farmers that are essentially sharecroppers for Perdue. OK, I’ll find a picture that’s not too bad, but which will illustrate how the large packages of gigantic pieces of chicken that you see in the store start out.
The chickens are lying down in their own feces in the chicken house because they have grown so rapidly that they cannot walk.
Look at the feet of the chicken in the foreground. They are severely deformed. This is so common that this picture is in an encyclopedia, studied by school children who may have never seen what a normal, healthy chicken looks like.
There are many worse things in the chicken houses. The genetic modifications, antibiotics, hormones, and other chemicals pumped into the chickens as soon as they hatch from their eggs have created some animals that look like things out of an extreme horror movie.
Today’s factory-raised broiler chickens grow from chick to market weight in 48 days — six weeks.
Organic chickens grow to market size in 8 to 10 weeks. They weigh two to 8.5 pounds on average. Conventionally-raised chickens weigh between four pounds (broilers) and ten pounds.
The massive breasts that I cooked last week were probably “plumped” with water. This practice increases the weight of chicken and producers have many excuses for it. “Plumping” amounts to adulterating food that was not of good quality to start with. The motive is increased profit.
There’s nothing new here.
In the 1800s, Stephen Douglas called Abraham Lincoln a “hatchet-faced nutmeg seller.” When I first heard that, I was like, “What?” Here’s what Douglas meant: charlatans used to sell pieces of carved wood as “nutmeg.” They got away with it because many buyers had never tasted or seen the real thing.
It’s the Food Itself, Making You Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
Way back in 2006 I was on a panel about genetic engineering at a World Science Fiction Convention and an audience member asked about our food system and if it was possible that hormones in our chicken, beef, and pork could be causing people to grow faster and bigger (and fatter).
Another person on the panel, a man with a science degree who presented himself as an expert, yet who also did not know the difference between a gene and a chromosome —
Yelled, “No! The hormones don’t affect humans, only the animals.”
I said, “I doubt it.”
My daughter had begun to mature too fast. I took her to the pediatrician, who told me that he had patients as young as 6 and 7 years old who were developing breasts and getting their periods.
“It’s the milk,” he said. He thought it was hormones in milk.
I switched my daughter to all organic products and she stopped her early development and eventually developed at a normal age — or what used to be one, anyway. The problem the doctor described, in no way unique to my daughter and me, has only sped up. Internationally, the onset of puberty has sped up by an average of 3 months per decade since the 1970s.
“No one knows why,” writes the New York Times. Now you know why I read this publication to see the propaganda these gigantic corporations want to push on us to further their aims for ever-increasing profits for their primary shareholders.
Everyone should “know why” people are “growing.”
It’s the same reason that has turbocharged the growth rates of chicken, poultry, and beef over the past five decades. According to the University of Minnesota Extension, as soon as beef cattle raised for factory systems are born, they are implanted with a series of hormones in their ear. The hormones include estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, and additional synthetic androgens and estrogens. The Extension wants everyone to know that the amounts of hormones are “minimal” that enter the animal’s flesh and that the ear is “discarded” when the animal is “harvested.”
Even one day faster to market equals hundreds of millions and even billions of profits to the shareholders of these massive multinational corporations.
And compounded over daily consumption for decades, all of the additives, hormones, antibiotics, and other adulterants in our food add up to the way people are these days: fat (75% of adults are obese or overweight), sick (almost 50% of the adult population has hypertension, 28% diabetic or pre-diabetic), and nearly dead (life expectancy declined to 76.1 years, lowest since 1996).
The average U.S. life expectancy is lower than any other nation our country typically considers itself “better” than. The “Greatest Country On Earth” has managed to create a lifestyle where —
I go out with my friends and not only am I generally the thinnest and fittest, nearly every friend I have (aside from my fellow wellness enthusiasts) is diabetic, or is a cancer survivor or currently fighting cancer. Or, they have high blood pressure, heart disease, and mobility issues. These are not 80-year olds, these are people in their 50s and 60s who are living reduced lives because —
They lack willpower and don’t exercise enough? Count those calories! There’s an entire Reddit group with hundreds of thousands of members following the “CICO” diet. That means “Calories In-Calories Out.”
None of those people know that by law, calorie counts on packages can vary by 20% — nor do they know that these calories that are marked are based on a 19th century system, come from a printed book (that’s now a computer program) and — man, it’s worthless. It’s all made to confuse you and flat-out shame, humiliate, and demoralize customers into thinking they cannot change their diets or improve their health. All they can do is keep buying and consuming the same junk that has destroyed their lives and health.
Doctors Smoke Camels: they are good for you!
No, Doc, Camels aren’t good for you. And neither is any of the crap purveyed by the most evil people on the planet. They are the animal, people, and planet killers.
If you saw what these farms have become, what they do — how these pieces of meat end up in the store and in your mouth, how these poor quality foods are ground into slurries and dumped into packages like dried dog food —
You’d think about becoming vegan just like I am.
Some great info here, some of it I knew, some I didn't. It's horrifying what we are feeding ourselves and our children - without consent in the last 40 years we have been opted in to several social experiments on a grand scale, and we are living with so many consequences now.
Amazing article, Amy. It's Gera. I won't write more until I see if this goes through.