"Take a pill" was a great line by one of my favorite characters on a show, oh, maybe 20 years ago, called "Fridays". It ran in competition to "Saturday Night Live." Didn't make it though. SNL is still with us. Fridays isn't.
In any case the character was a pharmacist with long, wild, stand up hair. He would quite often pop up from behind the counter. And his advice to anyone with any problem was to "take a pill." That's what the mega-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry tells us every day, several times a day. Take a pill. We have a pill for everything. You know, the old Dow Chemical slogan: Better living through chemistry. Well that's all a lie.
Yes, sometimes in some instances modern chemical medicine is the right application of treatment. But do we all need so many medications in our lives? What did our grandparents, or better yet, our great-grandparents do without all the pills? Actually, they did a whole lot better than we are doing.
It is not common knowledge, but our great-grandparents had much lower rates of cancer and heart attacks than we do today. There wasn't all that much ADA or autism, among other more modern ailments either. What it comes down to is two basic areas of our modern life: food and chemicals.
First chemicals. We are surrounded by all sorts of chemicals today: household chemicals, agricultural chemicals, industrial chemicals; the residues from supposedly non-reactive plastics in which we get and store our food, food additives and preservatives, and the pills that so many of us are taking every day.
Then there is the food difference between us and our ancestors. They ate more butter, cheese, meat, high saturated fats than we do today by far. They also suffered fewer heart attacks and cancer. The main death-causing problems in the bad old days were threefold: 1) unsanitary conditions, 2) insufficient food (among the poor), and 3) death from childhood diseases. If a person, then, got sufficient food and didn't die from any major disease or accident, then they could live a long and healthy life, well into their 80's or 90's.
Today, due to eating a diet low in saturated fat, high in sugar, and high in overly processed food (mainly white flour), and high in processed vegetable oils, we have an epidemic of cancer and heart attacks, among other health problems.
Statins, a popular drug prescribed to lower cholesterol, has been indicated in higher rates of cancer and Parkinson's disease . . . people having "extra-low cholesterol levels." (Journal of the American College of Cardiology, July 31, 2007; 50: 409-418.) Statin drugs may also be related to liver and muscle damage. Today, cholesterol is considered to be the devil itself, but if that is true, why weren't our great-grandparents dying from heart attacks at higher rates than we do today? (For more on the benefits of cholesterol--yes, that's right, the benefits--go to
http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/skinny.html#chol.
Think about all the drugs that are hyped to us on TV . . . and all the really negative possible side effects. No thank you. I will eat in a traditionally healthy way, one that my ancestors have eaten for thousands of years: butter, cheese, whole milk, red meat and whole grains. You can take a pill . . . if you want.
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