Are you pandering to the whim of soulless corporations who want your money and don’t care about your health? No? Well, let me put it another way. Do you enjoy putting on weight and watching your health get worse every year, while the companies who sold you the adulterated food that is doing this to you, laugh all the way to the bank?

Because that is what is happening. Most of us are aware that our food is being interfered with. We may believe that this is being done for our convenience, but, in reality, the majority of processing is done for a profit motive. The upshot is that we are forced to pay for our food three times, once at the checkout, the second time when we eat it, and once again when we have to pay for treatment for illnesses caused by compromised food.

There have been many stories in the press about low fat, so-called healthy eating options being worse for our health than the original products. These stories are all very well as far as they go. The problem is that while they are informing us, they are often misleading us as to much darker improprieties being perpetrated by food companies.

Media In Cahoots?
In Britain, a national newspaper reveals minor mischief on the part of a crisp (potato chip) manufacturer whose product “boasts of being less than 100 calories and ‘free from hydrogenated fats’. But the crisps contain 22g of fat per 100g – which actually makes them ‘high in fat’ according to the Government’s regulations”

But the article then goes on to say:

“‘Free from hydrogenated fats’ is a red herring: No reputable manufacturer still uses these dangerous fats.”

This is totally untrue. The reality is that, in many western countries, manufacturers are legally allowed to state that a product is free of trans fats (hydrogenated fats) if they contain less than a certain amount, usually around 5%. There is no level of these fats that it is deemed safe for human consumption.

Such newspaper stories are symptomatic of an alarming degree of press collusion with the food companies. They suggest, for example, that margarines no longer contain trans fats, and are healthier than butter; that saturated fat is inherently bad for our health – it is, in fact, essential to health; that we should eat lots of omega-3 oils – we only need  small amount, too much is toxic.

Meanwhile, however, food companies are dumping omega-3 oils into everything they can think of – olive oil (omega-3 oils should never be heated), yoghurt, so-called heart-healthy margarine (not heart-healthy at all!), and even milk – simply in order to make their products more attractive to the consumer than products to which omega-3 oils have not been artificially added. This is a problem because these oils are extremely potent, and excessive amounts can cause arterial damage and contribute to atherosclerosis.

But it would not be possible to spread the message about the apparent deficiency of omega-3 oils, or galvanize the masses with inaccurate information on a range of health issues, without the participation of a willing press. The expression “high in polyunsaturates” has become almost ubiquitous in supermakets, even though sufficient quantities of these fats are present in any diet that contains enough fresh vegetables. The dangers of too much polyunsaturates are exactly the same as the danger associated with an excess of omega-3 oils.

Dodgy Diets
And once food company tampering has made us fat and sick, diet gurus step in to sell us diet snacks and shakes with many of the same dangerous ingredients as other processed foods. Often, the same food manufacturers produce products for the hugely lucrative diet industry that produced the foods that made us fat in the first place. They get you coming and going.

And at the other end of the spectrum, the medical fraternity are not helping. Being in servitude to the drug companies, doctors are unlikely to suggest a dietary solution where a pharmacological one exists. Obesity is a huge market and the drug companies want a piece of it. They don’t have to care whether those solutions are sustainable long term, as long as they appear to have an immediate impact on the problem.

To an extent, we, the public, are complicit in this attitude, we want to see quick results, achieved with the minimum effort. We have been conditioned to expect the world to work this way. But this approach to things has a price. The drugs that are supposed to be curing our ills are actually keeping us sick.

The only way to correct this situation is to demand change – from the top down. Because governments are happy to keep taking the huge tax revenues generated from the colossal profits of the food and diet industries. In the meantime, we should be voting with our wallets to send these cynical food companies a message they will understand. These corporations know exactly what they are doing to us, and the more we keep quiet about it, the better they like it.

These companies are experts at manipulating science and the media to say exactly what they want them to say. They present a friendly, benign face to the world, but we’re onto them. In the battle for our health, our adversary has become increasingly sophisticated. It’s high time for us to start playing catch-up.