Don't Eat the Meat: Response to On-line article

http://hubpages.com/hub/Processed-Meats-Declared-Too-Dangerous-for-Human-Consumption

That's right people, processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption! As if I needed more justification for my predominately whole food diet. Never really been much of an eater of red meat and thank goodness for that!

The United States is a curious beast to me. A strong and smart nation that seems hell bent on self-annihilation. They feed their people some of the worst "food" imaginable and then wonders why its citizens health continues to worsen. A situation where there are multiple social mechanisms to ensure that poor people remain poor and then the poor people who can only afford cheap, processed foods are shamed because they become obese and then have health issues that they can't afford to treat. It's almost criminal. And this all seems to be in the name of profit in the free market. People don't have to eat such concoctions but they do because they're available, convenient and plentiful.

It reminds me of a product Stephen Colbert brought to my attention: a chocolate chip pancake covered sausage on a stick! How this is considered food is beyond me. Just because it's edible does not make it food! Or at least that's what I wish was the case. Over the past few decades, north Americans have become rather lax in what is considered food.

For instance, the Cheezie, a product almost entirely composed of oil. At a party this weekend one of my friends enlightened as to the pure evil that is this product. We lit a whole bowl of them on fire! Cheezies are flammable like you wouldn't believe! The result was a pile of burnt out ashes and a strange liquid by-product that I was really unsure of. This is what we put in our bodies people! Makes me ill inside thinking of how this food stuff is broken down in the body. It's a marvel really.

Then what I find further interesting is the various comments to the online article: they ranged from outraged to totally skeptical. One poster, referring to themselves as "Republican" called it hippie propaganda and a few questioned where this information was coming from even though it clearly states in the first sentence that the findings come from the World Cancer Research Fund review of 7000 clinical trials looking at the link between diet and cancer.

Why is it that people protect the status quo with such fervor? If people were to stop eating processed foods, whole corporations would go out of business, jobs would be lost and it would hurt the economy. How short-sighted! It is similar to the arguments against action on climate change. If businesses are forced to comply with caps on emissions it will hurt those businesses, assumingly beyond what they can manage financially. But here's the thing, if we do nothing there's a strong possibility that we will be unable to inhabit this planet, maybe not in our lifetime, but probably soon. The same as with food. Once you find out that there's convincing evidence that something is bad for you, that regular consumption of one thing or another will increase the development of cancer cells in your body, the individual should of course stop eating that one thing. One would hope though that the governing bodies on such issues should have a moral responsibility to remove dangerous products from store shelves. Apparently they feel no such responsibility. Its so clear that what is valued above the health of the populous is protecting vested interests.

I sympathize with the Cheezie lovers of the world, and those that can’t live without bacon. I do. We have come to expect that these “things” will be part of our food intake. They’re bad for us, but we don’t care. Same with smoking, so completely harmful, yet smoking is still pretty much state sponsored and accepted as stupid but ok.

We live to kill ourselves.