In the first 4 articles I reviewed the health myths found inside the Canadian Food Guide and also the health myths found within the genetic causation of disease. I reviewed the financial incentives that keep these myths in play, even though these myths cause negative health consequences if you personally apply them into your life. Lets look at it this way.

If you were an engineering student and used the wrong formulas to built a sky scarper, it would collapse not far into construction. The formulas you used would be called untruths, incorrect, failures or just basically lies because of the negative engineering outcomes they provided. You would not be permitted to use those incorrect formulas again and it would be declared by society in general that anyone building a skyscraper in the future could only use the building formulas that are proven to be safe, correct and truthful. If you continued to use the incorrect building formulas and continued to cause negative results you could be charged criminally, jailed or baned from building anything else in the future. This all makes sense of course so why does our medical system run in the exact opposite way where negative results are not only defended but advertised as breakthroughs? Have we lost our minds?

Unfortunately, in a way we have lost our minds. We’ve lost control of how our minds really work and how they respond to advertising, education and direction from authority. Inch by inch we’ve been moved in a direction where people generally believe that getting sick is now normal and that drugging or cutting ourselves into an early grave is the best we can do in the faulty bodies we were unfortunately handed at birth.

Nothing is further from the truth. The health myths I talk of are so a part of our everyday culture that asking someone to describe them is like asking a fish to describe water. The water is everywhere and it’s all the fish knows. For that reason the fish won’t even understand the question. Today not only have people been conditioned that sickness is normal (that’s a health myth in itself) but so many people are employed to care for the sick that a good portion of our society doesn’t even want to ponder the issue. As Upton Sinclair once said, “It’s hard for a person to understand something when their pay cheque is dependent on them not understanding it.” Basically health lies are great for the economy and the truth isn’t. Great system we’ve developed isn’t it?

These health myths have become such pillars of our culture that most people now believe that good health is the equivalent of chasing a magical unicorn. People hear about healthy people and know that health exists out there somewhere but they’ve never experienced health personally so they’re conditioned to believe that being healthy is nearly impossible. Yes, it can seem hard or impossible but then again that’s exactly what happens when 3 generations of any culture are fibbed to regarding what it takes to be healthy. Oddly enough it takes little effort to be healthy and plenty of effort to stay sick because health is the natural state of the body. In order for the body to break down and acquire disease you really need to abuse it for decades on end.

In Dr. Mark Hyman’s book “Ultra Metabolism” he reviews the genetic myth of disease citing a study where unhealthy foods were given to a group of people. The people’s genes were assessed and all the disease genes were set to the “on” position. Good food was given to the same people and remarkably all the disease genes were now set to the “off” position. Genes are like light switches. Disease genes can be “on” in the body but they can be turned “off” via healthy habits. Very different from the myth of genetic disease causation our medical system force feeds to us so we get scared and believe that drugs and surgeries are our only options.

I will continue this subject in the next article.