Nutricide and Pharmacide

As I look at the increasingly bizarre world around us, I think two new words seem appropriate: nutricide, the killing of people by serving them junk foods; and pharmacide, the killing of people by over-prescribing pharmaceutical drugs.

Read the labels of almost every supermarket food sold in a box, can, jar, bottle, or bag, and you’ll find that they contain far too many ingredients that serve large-scale processing but are slowly lethal to con-sumers ingesting them. I’m referring to various sugars, trans fats, interesterified fats, excess salt, and soybean oil as the top offenders. The fast-food companies are no better, serving up their breaded, deep-fried, hydrogenated goodies.

The folks at McDonald’s, KFC, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Campbell, and so many other makers of processed food are killing people by way of overweight, dia-betes, and heart disease. They’re guilty of nutricide.

Unfortunately, some so-called health food and natural food products aren’t much better. I recently attended the Natural Foods Expo show in Anaheim, California, where more than 3,000 companies showed their products to over 50,000 visitors. Many of the products were great – meats from organically raised animals, organically grown produce, and even relatively healthy snack foods.

But there were also too many attempts at feel-good knockoffs of conventional junk foods: “health food” soft drinks with as much sugar as a Pepsi, energy bars with as much sugar as a Snickers, chocolate soy milk with more sugar and calories than regular chocolate milk, ad nauseam (a term that seems particularly appropriate). And people wonder why two-thirds of Americans are overweight.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry has cooked up their own solution to the ills caused by all these unhealthy foods: heavily advertised drug panaceas that, in most cases, have side effects worse than the disease itself. Each year, more than 700,000 people get hospitalized because of adverse reactions to drugs, and more than 100,000 people in hospitals die from their medications, all of which are approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. They’re all guilty of pharmacide.

Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, a pioneer in nutritional medicine, recently pointed to the debate about whether anti-depressant drugs were really better than placebos. “This is a phony debate, almost like trying to figure out how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin,” he told me. “Even if the drugs are 10 percent better, they are so much more toxic than any placebo that a placebo should be preferred.”