Sludge Watch ==> Five Pillars of Food Safety - Taking Back the Planet and Our Health

[Maureen Reilly]

http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/node/1546

Taking Back the Planet and Our Health
By Helke Ferrie
Vitality Magazine, November 2007


“…Some of us were miraculously presented
Each with a goose that laid a golden egg.
Myself, I killed the cackling thing and ate it.
Alas, many and many of the other recipients
Died of gold-dust poisoning.”
Muriel Spark


Almost everything that is known to nourish life or heal disease has become 
yet
another golden-egg-laying goose. The gold dust from their eggs is a poison 
more
addictive and more fatal than crack cocaine or booze and is responsible not 
only for
Global Warming, but especially for the cancer and chronic disease industry.


To teach us about these connections and show us how to take back the planet 
and
our health, this year’s Whole Life Expo brings us two of the most exciting 
and creative
people working in food politics and cancer therapy: Health Canada’s Dr. Shiv 
Chopra,
who first saved the Canadian food supply and then Europe’s from that potent 
carcinogen,
bovine growth hormone, and Charlotte Gerson who is well-known to Toronto 
audiences
for her superb information on truly effective non-toxic cancer therapy; she 
has also
published a fabulous new book.

Dr. Chopra will present his Five Pillars of Food Safety,
a project to ban throughout the world synthetic hormones, antibiotics, and 
slaughterhouse
waste in food producing animals, and all genetically engineered seeds and 
pesticides in
agriculture. He has already presented this to various countries and is now 
taking it across
Canada. Both Chopra and Gerson are supported, by international scientific 
research and
their life-time experience, in their assertion that these contaminants are 
the wholly
avoidable causes of cancer, most chronic diseases, birth and 
brain-developmental defects,
antibiotic resistance, the so-called hospital bugs, and prion-mediated Mad 
Cow Disease.


What Dr. Chopra and his fellow scientists, especially in the European Union,
want to achieve politically is to detoxify the world and truly nourish 
humanity – the same
prescription which has made the Gerson therapy so extraordinarily successful 
for cancer
patients. Charlotte Gerson will talk about her new book (see review p. ?) 
and the ways in
which this therapy is continuing to adapt to counter the increasing toxicity 
of our
environment. Health is dependent upon “eating only foods from which nothing 
has been
removed, to which nothing has been added, and which would go bad if you 
didn’t eat it
immediately”, as Charlotte Gerson puts it. Dr. Chopra would add that those 
subtractions
of nutrients and additions of drugs, pesticides, and foreign genes are 
indeed the sources of
the diseases the Gerson therapy treats successfully.


CAUSES OF GLOBAL WARMING AND CANCER CONVERGE


The life work of these two people has proven that the causes and the cure of 
all
chronic disease, as well as their prevention, are solely a function of how 
we treat Nature
around us and in our bodies. Consider the 2007 Worldwatch Institute report: 
the raising,
maintaining, transporting, processing, and marketing of the livestock that 
produced the
276 million tons of meat consumed in 2006 are responsible for more global 
greenhouse
gas emissions than cars and airplanes combined; also, almost all the annual 
global grain
production is used for animal feed and uses up the largest portion of water 
and land. This
economy “like a cancer, is consuming the very systems that we need to 
survive,”
observes Erik Assadourian, the report’s director.


In fact, “cancer” is now no longer a metaphor. Because meat and milk 
products
come contaminated with cancer-causing antibiotics, hormones, and pesticide 
residues,
this disease-promoting diet also turns us into exploitable resources for a 
medical industry
whose gold dust is mostly fool’s gold - those drugs, namely, which do not 
cure but
“make the sick get sicker, quicker” (Dr. Sherry Rogers’ famous phrase) and 
go on to
cause additional environmental contamination in the world’s rivers and 
groundwater,
once they leave human and animal bodies after having done their damage in 
them.
Indeed, the cancer industry has in the past 50 years grown as fast as the 
weapons
industry, and the makers of war promise peace through poisons and radiation, 
as does the
cancer industry – and we have more and more cancer and less and less peace.

This determined corporate effort for control of humanity’s dependence on its
products, sacrificing quality to quantity, is especially pernicious in the 
food industry, the
primary cause of chronic diseases which markets nutrient-depleted and 
additivepoisoned
foods and spoils the soil and the water we all depend on. And all this 
primarily
for the benefit of five companies (Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Monsanto, Dow, 
DuPont).
They control 80% of the world’s seeds, agrochemicals and agro-drugs whose 
patents they
hold. Since many bacteria, entire plants, some animals, and even huge 
portions of the
human genome have become patented over the past 20 years, we have reached 
the absurd
stage where it is theoretically a violation of patent law to have babies. 
Our genome is, in
fact, no longer Nature’s gift, but private property the use of which could 
requires a
license (NewsTarget.com, October 5).


When Nature is forced to produce merely quantity, it withdraws life-supports 
to
become aggressively disease-promoting. Eggs from that brutally unnatural egg 
industry,
when compared to free-range birds, have about half the Vitamin E, less than 
one fourth
the Beta carotene, one tenth the Omega-3 content, and a whopping double the 
cholesterol.
Furthermore, the relentless quest for profits and market control in 
agriculture has reduced
the cancer-protective trace minerals by 76% in fruits and vegetables since 
1940, when the
use of synthetic pesticides began (Soil Association report 2001). As 
Charlotte Gerson’s
new book explains, this recent mineral loss further accelerated the 
degradation of food
plants (and the incidence of cancer), a process that began 150 years ago 
with artificial
fertilizers. Plants require at least 50 essential nutrients to be healthy 
themselves and to
pass on their health-promoting properties in food. However, artificial 
fertilizers provide
them only with nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus; so we slowly starve on 
starved
plants. And no - this quantity-focused food production does not feed the 
world more
efficiently, as the sentimental corporate propaganda repeats ad nauseam; in 
fact, as food
researcher Ivette Perfecto’s team recently showed in the Journal of 
Renewable
Agriculture and Food Systems, organic farming can yield up to three times as 
much food
as pesticide-dependent patented crops.


Eventually, this disregard for Nature and the determination to breed nothing 
but
golden-egg-laying geese has the potential to bankrupt nations and also 
silently promote

our extinction, which is Nature’s way of becoming insolvent. Gerson reports 
on a longterm
Harvard study, involving 18,555 young women, which showed that for every 2%
increase in calories derived from transfats (foods convenient to corporate 
interests and
totally the wrong fuel for Nature’s productions) the risk of infertility 
increased by 73%.


DR. CHOPRA’S PLAN AND GERSON’S VALIDATION


His fight for food safety as a Health Canada drug regulator spans almost 
four
decades. In his forthcoming book, Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health 
Canada
Whistleblower, he describes his determined efforts to stop carcinogens from 
entering the
food chain and running continuously afoul of the government-supported 
corporate
agenda. Some key dates are significant here:
! On January 6, 1996 Canada’s federal Minister of Health passed an Order
in Council (that is: in secret, to avoid parliamentary debate) which
transferred the power of drug safety and efficacy to the companies
producing them and in essence removed independent regulatory oversight.
! Health Canada scientists fought against this sell-out to the food 
producing
corporations, and Dr. Chopra went public on June 11, 1998, telling
Canadians on CBC’s Canada AM that now the food supply in Canada was
no longer safe.

! The federal government placed a gag order on Dr. Chopra which he
defied, and the government took its own health scientists to court - and
lost spectacularly on September 5, 2000: the court ruled that Health
Canada’s civil servants and scientists are responsible to the Canadian
people, and politicians cannot shut them up when it suits them and their
corporate friends.

! Our government’s support of the corporate drive to make food and drugs
into golden-egg laying geese continued unabated: in 2003 Health Canada
presented a report entitled “Plans and Priorities” which outlined the
proposed changes to the Foods and Drugs Act. According to this report
this Act had “too narrow a focus on safety…” and proposed that what was
needed was to “unleash business energies” and “reduce the regulatory
burden on industry and business”. The foundation of the Act, known as
the government’s “duty to care” for the safety of the public, gave way to
the corporate notion of “risk management”. These two notions are
incompatible, as risk management allows for dead bodies and adverse
events as being simply part of doing business and does not obey the
“precautionary principle”.


! When Health Canada scientists kicked up even more fuss, then Prime
Minister Paul Martin fired their “ring-leader”, Dr. Chopra, in July 2004.
That was a happy mistake. Dr. Chopra, a self-motivated loose canon whose 
lifelong
spiritual mentor has been Mahatma Gandhi, fully knowledgeable about 
government
sleaze, incorruptible (“There just isn’t enough money in the Bank of Canada 
to bribe me
with.”), and dedicated to science-based public health, is beginning to prove 
dangerous to
business-as-usual. The decade-long battle Dr. Chopra fought against 
carcinogenic bovine
growth hormone eventually became an issue in the European Union whose 
scientists



agreed with Dr. Chopra and his colleagues and advised against its use. 
Denmark went
further and actually proved that removing such hormones, all antibiotics, 
and not using
slaughterhouse waste as food for herbivore food-producing animals did not 
result in
lower food production. That resulted in the EU banning all of these poisons 
which we
continue to use in North America. Dr. Chopra observes, “Here it is science 
versus
management. Our governments do not listen to their scientists.”


The result is a crisis in food quality as well as in health-care. Dr. Mark 
A. Hyman,
the editor of the journal Alternative Therapies (July 2007) observed: “The 
government
subsidizes farmers to grow corn and soy crops with $ 30 billion a year, 
which fuels the
fast and junk food industries with high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fatty 
acids, which
are used to produce energy-dense, poor quality, disease-creating foods such 
as soda and
French fries… the food industry increases demand by marketing these products 
with $ 30
billion a year… a tax-deductible expense to corporations, which are in 
effect further
subsidies from our governments. Children then become obese and diabetic in 
their 20s
and require care for heart disease and amputations before they are 30, for 
which the
government must also pay.” California and Quebec have taken note and banned 
junk
foods in schools, and it may turn out that Quebec will lead the way in 
stopping all the
other garbage too, just as they did when they outlawed cosmetic pesticide 
use. The
Quebec farmers’ union fully supports Dr. Chopra’s plan.


The consensus among food scientists is that the hormones and antibiotics 
used in
food-producing animals are complete carcinogens (i.e. they cause and promote 
cancer)
because they do not degrade when the animal is killed nor do they degrade in 
our
digestive tract, and they pass into the water and soil to be recycled as 
potent poisons.
“The rivers of Saskatchewan have dangerously high levels of tetracycline,” 
says Dr.
Chopra. Furthermore, because such drugs upset the balance of the animal’s 
gut flora, we
get the curse of so-called “hospital bugs” against which no drugs exist. 
Today, antibiotic
resistance has become such a problem, that the most liver-toxic drugs, such 
as Cipro, and
drugs-of-last-resort, like Vancomycin, have become standard treatment. Also 
Guillaine
Barre Syndrome and the ever-increasing antibiotic resistance in harmful 
bacteria are
known to be caused by the unnecessary prophylactic use of antibiotics in 
food animals.
Specifically, Campylobacter is a bacteria of the E.coli family which causes
diarrhea, vomiting, and even death in young animals and children. In small 
numbers it is
part of a healthy gut flora, but constant exposure to antibiotics has 
allowed it to
proliferate because it rapidly evolved protective mechanisms against these 
drugs and
some species even thrive on antibiotics as food. Charlotte Gerson explains 
in her new
book how it has become necessary to stop the use of calf livers (for their 
cancer-fighting
and immune-boosting enzymes) in the Gerson therapy, because even organically 
raised
calves have abnormally high counts of this harmful bacterium which they seem 
to get as
embryos through the contaminated water supply. The Gerson protocol has 
successfully
substituted other nutrients.

Mad Cow Disease is caused by the prions that increase in number when
slaughterhouse waste is fed to herbivores whose immune systems are 
simultaneously
depleted by pesticides, thereby increasing the chances for this disease to 
appear. Finally,
the immune-disrupting and cancer-promoting properties of GMOs are by now 
well
researched and documented, and the use of pesticides is condemned by the 
medical
profession throughout the world.

5
As for cancer, Dr. Chopra informs us that a woman’s exposure to standard
agricultural pesticides during the first 6 days (!) of pregnancy is the most 
critical time
because then the zygote, on its way to becoming a fetus, is “programmed” to 
be
vulnerable to cancer when becoming a fully formed human.'


Dr. Chopra’s plan is to ban all these practices and substances and assert 
“our Godgiven
right to eat food as Nature makes it.” In fact, he wants to Canadian people 
to sue
the Canadian government under the Charter – a legally sound plan. He will 
discuss the
details of how to return to truly safe and nutritious food at the EXPO and 
you will learn
how you can participate in this project.

What Dr. Chopra and his fellow scientists in Canada and the EU want to stop 
in
the production of food, is exactly what the Gerson protocol removes from the 
patients
they treat, teaching them how to avoid these poisons for the rest of their 
lives. The food
the Gerson protocol advises patients to eat is the food Dr. Chopra and his 
colleagues want
us all to eat. Come and hear them tell us about how we can make this 
possible. Author
Arundhati Roy puts it best: “Another world is not only possible, she is on 
her way. On a
quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”


Sources

L. Armstrong, G. Dauncey & A. Wordsworth, Cancer: 101 Solutions to a 
Preventable
Epidemic, New Society, 2007
H. Ferrie, Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health, Kos, 2004
C. Gerson & B. Bishop, Healing the Gerson Way, Totality, 2007
M. Shapiro, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at 
Stake for
American Power, Chelsea Green, 2007