In A Post-Industrial World
Presented without sources – you can look each of these things up online yourself and there are quite literally tens of thousands of articles, news items, or papers – if you can be arsed to wade through a few thousand words apiece of densely-packed terminology. Or you can take my word and spot-check points. I recommend the latter.
So what am I rabbiting on about?
What Are “Modern” Diseases?
If you have a social media account and read the timelines you can spot trends. Back in last century when ICQ was the most-used messenger program, for example, it became really obvious to a few of us that the climate was warming up. As Twitter became the messaging software of choice, those of us that kept in contact were noting weather oddities and it started becoming obvious that it wasn’t a glitch, right around the time that the words “global warming” started to uptick.
Since then it’s also become obvious that many diseases we experience are a result of modern living.
Mental Function
As a f’ristance, Thomas Midgely Jr made the tetraethyl lead additive that was marketed as “ethyl” (carefully avoiding the “lead” part of the formula in the name) and has spread lead contamination to every portion of the globe. It also resulted in a noticeable decrease in the level of the average IQ of every country that used ehtylated fuel, which at one time was pretty much everywhere. It also caused a spike in antisocial behaviours in the generations exposed to it during childhood.
But now we also have long COVID, and in fact some studies are suggesting that if you knew the IQ of a person prior to the pandemic you could tell that they’ve had COVID by the measurable drop in IQ. So there’s that. And also I bet before very long some studies will also link it to asocial behaviours such as flaunting masking and distancing, thus making it our very own actual ‘zombie’ virus.
Also the trauma of the last few years has left millions with mental and emotional trauma and caused never before seen pressure on mental health services. There have been at least a dozen viruses that have affected people in small almost imperceptible ways including mental health, and multiple additives in our food are proven to cause learning and behavioural difficulties in children before they were (usually) banned.
Diabetes
Among those is diabetes (and metabolic sysndrome) caused by a variety of ingredients and additives and food production processes over the decades. Even the use of glyphosates (used as a herbicide in farming, including use just a few days before harvesting to ensure the maximum drying of crop and thus highest crop yields) has been linked to higher incidences of metabolic disease and diabetes.
Pain / Fibromyalgia
Over the last few decades I’ve also been keeping track of chronic pain sufferers and this too is on the increase. No-one’s quite sure of why this is happening but I’m confident one or other of our chemical additives and pollutants will be found to have become the OG cause of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and a raft of similar afflictions.
Thyroid
Thyroid dysfunction has increased sharply since (I THINK – not 100% where I came across this will have to research when I can) refined white sugar and flour and salt and use of high fructose corn syrup sweetener.
Fertility, Reproductive
Thanks to PFAS and a variety of additives and other environmental chemicals, male fertility has plummeted, to the point where we face a population crisis. It started mainly in First World people due to our much earlier exposure to these environmental chemicals but thanks to aggressively marketing all our “convenience” miracle foods and products, it’s now becoming a worldwide phenomenon.
And thanks to aerial dispersal it’s now been found that PFAS is in ALL rainwater in far higher than safe concentrations, and of course rainwater becomes our groundwater and groundwater becomes our drinking water.
Thomas Midgeley’s famous ETHYLlead treated fuels spread the lead contamination globally also, so we have all the key factors in place for a massive population collapse around the planet.
All In All
Things look a bit grim for us all. . .
But There’s A Horizon
… to all this. Drinking water from most people’s taps will be GRAS (generally recognised as safe) but that’s a widely varying standard, ranging from Flint, Michigan’s toxic water to finest crystal spring water bubbling forth from underground sources that were laid in a thousand years ago before we f&&ked it up.
Most local civic water supplies will be free of major debris and toxins. Except the things they don’t yet know are in it, like maybe ummm – PFAS? . . I’m saying that civic authorities can only act on known toxins and only test the water for those they are reasonably certain are in the environment. And while PFAS may now be on their radar, many will still be tooling up to test for it.
Because most civic water supplies are derived from groundwater and groundwater derives from rainfall or snow melts, and both of those have now been shown to contain unsafe levels of PFAS, and will pick up lead from the environment because it’s been spread there in fine particulate form for the last 100 years (yes it’s almost 100 years since we started adding lead to the petrol) so these are things that need to be accounted for.
More important is to keep an ear to the ground about other things we’ve spread around and are only now beginning to find are toxic and hazardous. For the moment at my place we filter water using charcoal filters already because we know the water comes from a large dam and it has enough in it by way of dead animals and the runoff from nearby farms, and maybe you should consider that too.
Our water goes through regular “stink cycles” that tie in with seasons and rains so we began filtering our drinking and cooking water ten years ago. Now though there are some things that get past the filters so when that happens we buy water from the store (and filter that before using it because it’s generally just tap water – but tap water from a different place so probably not stinky like ours) and use that for drinking water.
Food, too
Also one can be more watchful about food. When people were all enthusiastic about HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) I looked into how it’s made and why it’s used – cheaply, and because it’s cheaper than other sugars, in case you hadn’t already guessed – and decided that a sugar made for feeding livestock probably wouldn’t be much good for humans, and avoided it wherever I could.
When I read about how white flour becomes white flour and white sugar becomes white sugar (CLUE: bleach makes things white. Clue: Bleach is toxic unless you’re a certain idiot #45) I stopped using them wherever possible.
Reading about how farmers routinely treated wheat with the herbicide glyphosate to be sure ALL the wheat stalks had dried nice and crispy and could all be harvested without moisture condensation, made me avoid a lot of flour manufacturers and to this day we have a few sources of certified organic flour that we use in preference to mass produced store flours.
Same goes for cooking oils and fats – some are just the last ditch efforts of a producer to stay competitive on price, some are outright fraud, any that are, are also toxic. The original canola oil was made as turkey feed but was too carcinogenic so the plants had to be bred and bred until they produced a fat that wasn’t as toxic any more.
Corn oil is another fat I will never trust because it doesn’t need to be there – we have animal fats, we have certain seed fats that have always been easy enough that our forebears could make by hand at home, and so why are we now processing oils at insanely high temperatures and pressures? Because it’s cheaper is why. And just like ethyl lead made fuel cheaper and let us run our cars better but turned out that this “cheap” alternative has had a really lethal consequence, we find that most processes we industrialise end up creating chemicals rather than foodstuffs.
These things aren’t just my brainfarts, either. Go look some of these things up. Here, I’ll give you another: peanut allergies. Whole races have lived with peanuts forming a significant part of their diets, and the incidence of peanut allergies was always near zero. Why?
Cynics can say (and have) that people with peanut allergies in a place where that’s a large part of the diet, starve to death or die in childhood. But it’s not really a thing, is it? We have children who get along just fine for a decade and then suddenly, while eating maybe their 20th kilo of peanuts, get allergic reactions. Adults in some countries get along fine eating their local peanuts and then one day get hold of a packet of First World peanuts and die in agony.
The clue’s in the processing: When less developed peoples process their peanuts, they may just sun dry them. Or boil them. Or throw a few alongside the fire to roast. And those peanuts are not going to affect 98% of the population at all. But it was decided early last century that low temperature roasting was uneconomical (!!! There goes that money motive again!) and while high temperature roasting did affect the product to some degree, that was the only way it was going to be done. And generations since then are suffering. Because The Economy that’s why.
Part of the desensitising process for peanut allergy sufferers is to be exposed to small quantities of the allergen. But they don’t generally use HT roasted nuts for that, but LT roasted or even boiled. Because we can all tolerate those quite well…
Reasons
I could go on about this stuff. (And I do, on various of my other blogs more devoted to general food fraud and crime like The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, go take a look there.) And people who look at all of those posts just mutter about “tinfoil hatter” and go away because they can’t bring themselves to believe the sheer number of things that other people do in pursuit of financial gain.
The people who snicker at these kinds of posts are the kind that firmly believe that a mythical “they” are out there and that they wouldn’t allow such things to happen. And certainly not that they would be so incompetent as to let so many crimes slip past them. Their trust is misplaced.
Because the person that decides that they can allow food grown in human sewage to be sold isn’t one of “our” them – it’s some export controller in another country where the food’s destined to go to other people, people who don’t matter a toss to them. People like us. And our they can’t be bothered to check that other them because our they have their hands full managing our producers and manufacturers.
There isn’t any one single world body that checks on all our thems to ensure that they’re ALL doing their jobs properly. And if there was such a body, almost none of them that controls stuff anywhere in the world would actually pass. There are too many political financial economic and personal pressures on them, for them to behave ethically in all cases. And there are literally millions of “thems” out there so it’s no surprise that almost all our systems are broken and toxic and injurious.
The only piece of advice I can issue to anyone out there determined to not get too much PFAS on their Weetbix is to not believe anything is actually safe until you’ve done research on that product on sites that aren’t owned by, related to, subsidised by, or paid by the manufacturer of that product. That’s not ‘woke,’ that’s just taking responsibility for your own health and safety rather than trusting that some shadowy “they” will always have your back.
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