In the last 3 articles I reviewed how much of our current disease and dysfunction can be attributed to key popular health myths, which certain groups in our society won’t let fade from view.

Our current culture is conditioned to make all its’ major decisions based on monetary considerations. It’s this flawed and outdated paradigm that stands as the sole motivating factor not to remove many dangerous health myths from our societal fabric. An old capitalistic saying is, “create a problem, create a business”and there’s nothing more profitable for certain industries than the perpetuation of key health myths and the sickness those myths cause.

See, if health was our culture’s top priority we would have eliminated cigarettes and toxic food would be illegal but as we can all see, our society turns a blind eye to things that hurt us when they produce profit and honored growth numbers. We’re conditioned to believe that numbers should impress us and be the only measurements of how our society is functioning. We’re told that if the numbers go up, we should be smiling and celebrating. We’re conditioned that small percentage growth of our investments, the TSX, the DOW, the NASDAQ or our GDP is our true salvation yet as these numbers have grown, our health has plummeted on all accounts.

Our obsession with economic numbers is why these health myths still circulate today, as sick people create more economic growth than even the most well conceived business plan. There’s no profit in healthy people and there’s no profit in dead people. The pot of gold lies in the in-between, people who aren’t healthy but aren’t yet dead. Until we decide that our health is worth more to us than economic numbers, these myths will not go away because the motivation to keep people sick won’t go away.

We need to invent a system where the motivation is to keep people healthy. How about a medical system where all the salaries stay the same yet the only time health workers have to come to work is if people are sick? If this were the case, the budget to run the medical system would stay the exact same yet the flow of truthful health information would be automatic, as  the motivation would be to stop disease and not to create it. Giving the patients side effect laden medications and destructive surgeries would obviously be counter productive in such a system. Also inside this new system, the perpetuation of health myths would also cease as the profit would be in health and not in sickness.

In the last articles I reviewed the myths found inside the Canadian Food Guide and touched on the myth of genetic based disease. The genetic disease theory is quite easy to show as myth. We all know that our genes are set from the day we’re conceived yet we’re told our genes cause many of our diseases and that genes don’t change. Common logic understands that if we have the same genes from the day we’re born that we should have the same genetic diseases from the day we’re born, if our genes are supposed to never change and those flawed genes are supposed to cause our disease.

We also know that an eye cell and an ovary cell have the exact same genes. This is true. If we’re taught that one set of genes equals one determined result (a certain disease) then how does one cell become an eye cell and another cell become an ovary cell, when they have the exact same genetic code? Well, the answer is that genes don’t really control us like we’re taught in school and in the media. The genetic determination of disease is a great myth and this is one of those myths that makes certain people lots of money.

When an entire population gives up trying to make healthy changes in their life because they’re conditioned to believe that what they eat and how they live will do nothing for their disease state, the profit piles up for key players within the medical system. In the next article I will continue on with this topic. You can view all the past articles at www.jchristoff.com.