What the Health

TOP SECRET

If you’ve seen the documentary What the Health (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?!), then you know that personal health is just the first layer of a very complex issue. When you start to peel those layers away, you discover that there is an intricate political, financial, and corporate apparatus in place to keep the American public from seeing the connections between the industrial food, medical, and pharmaceutical systems, and the illnesses that we suffer from.

So here’s what I want you to do. Visit www.whatthehealthfilm.com to peel those layers away. And if you have seen What the Health, you still need to visit—there’s way more here than we could fit into the film. There are some things you just need to know.

SECRET I

A Post-Antibiotic Era

We are barreling toward a post-antibiotic era, which means an end to modern medicine as we know it. Common infections will no longer respond to medical treatment, and strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill. Our last resort drugs are failing us right now. The reason? Eighty percent of antibiotics used in this country are fed to livestock. The animals we eat are pumped full of drugs, from birth until slaughter, in order to survive the horrific conditions on factory farms. These drugs, along with tumors, cancers, abscesses, and antibiotic resistance, make it past the USDA slaughterhouse inspectors to our dinner plates.

SECRET II

A Civil Rights Issue

Journey with us to poor communities of color where pigs outnumber people and manure cannons from factory farms blast a feces-urine slurry that rains down on homes. Come into the inner city where the vestiges of slavery—slaves were given the plantation trash to eat—are still on the menu, and then into the wider society where our addiction to killer foods is enhanced by laboratories until our brains moan, “More, more, more,” as dietary fat stimulates floods of dopamine through our neural circuitry. The addict craves the addictive substance, loses self-control over the addictive substance, and continues to use the addictive substance in spite of severe consequences. Hello, my name is America, and I am an addict.

SECRET III

Hens in the Fox Den

Government agencies like the USDA, tasked with the explicit mission of protecting our health, are running massive advertising campaigns—Pork: The Other White Meat; Got Milk?—to peddle the most damaging food substances to American citizens. A subterranean river of money, in the millions and billions, flows between the animal agriculture industry and our government. Our illnesses and addiction to what makes us ill generates revenue for corporations, and reliable funding for our government officials, who put laws into place to protect industry interests. The American public has been turned into a moneymaking commodity, just as surely as the animals in factory farms.

SECRET IV

Pharm to Table to Pharm

There’s a joke: during a clinical drug trial, there are two possible disasters. The first is if you kill people. The second is if you cure them. Ba-dum-bump. The “best” drugs, from Big Pharma’s perspective, are those that people must take for a lifetime. And as pharmaceutical executives have testified before Congress, the greater the desperation, the higher the price of the drug. Yet more than 90 percent of drugs only work in 30 to 50 percent of people. This creates a bit of a PR problem for the industry. They solve this by pouring far more money into marketing than research—sometimes over twice as much—and enlisting teams of scientists and doctors to generate “scientific studies” that “prove” how effective—and “safe”—their drugs are.