How To Slash National Healthcare Costs By 90% Through Education, Nutrition, And A Ban On Junk Food Marketing
Want a real solution to skyrocketing healthcare costs? Forget about all the “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 healthcare costs are so high in the first place. In this article, we’ll look at how to fundamentally cut healthcare costs by 90 percent 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 people in our country who are responsible for health don’t understand the fundamentals of nutrition. I think that the fact that med schools don’t teach nutrition is one of the strongest statements yet about the sad state of conventional medicine. Our healthcare professionals need to be taught nutrition fundamentals.
Hippocrates himself said, “Let thy food be thy medicine.” The history of medicine is steeped in the use of plants for health and healing. The very word pharmaceutical means “medicine from plants.” However, conventional medicine today has not only ignored plants and nutrition, it has actively sought to discredit it. In my mind, this is one reason why physicians have little or no credibility 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 are often little more than glorified drug dealers. 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 healthcare 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 workplaces, when those vending machines offer junk foods that contain ingredients known to promote disease.
We can also tax foods by levying a 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 food would make them less affordable to most citizens and might cause some people to choose alternative sources of food, including healthy snack foods. In other words, if we made unhealthy snack foods the same price as healthy snack foods by taxing junk food, people would have a more balanced choice of what they want to eat.
Another proposal is to require warning labels on foods, similar to the warning labels posted on cigarette packaging. If you buy a pack of cigarettes in the United States, the label warns you that the product causes cancer and other chronic diseases. The same sort of warning labels should be required on foods, soft drinks, and other products that contain ingredients known to promote disease. This will make the average consumer aware of the correlation between these foods and their long-term health effects.
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 is 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 its influence. This won’t be an easy task.
Another excellent strategy for slashing national healthcare 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 prevented 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 1994’s DSHEA Act (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act), which 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, based on available clinical evidence. It shouldn’t be illegal to speak the truth about the relationship between nutrition and chronic disease.
We should also 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 concerns 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 attacked the company, effectively putting 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 backs and 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, and 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 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 them.
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, everyone in the country continues to look at cow’s milk as good nutrition. In fact, in children, it promotes chronic sinus problems, stagnation, constipation, hardening of the arteries, and 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. 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, serve the same junk foods. There are actually hospitals with McDonald’s restaurants inside the building!
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 these products? Clearly somebody lost their minds when they allowed these junk food chains to enter our public schools and hospitals. These restaurants should be immediately outlawed and yanked out of 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 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.
