It Must Be True - It's On TV!

I don't watch a lot of tv - most of the time, it's on just for background noise. My husband, Bobby, watches at night (mostly through his eyelids), but unless we're watching Huckabee, Glenn Beck, a UFC match (my fav), or a good movie with friends, I find it boring to just sit zoned out in front of the boob tube.   Instead, I choose the computer. There I can chat with friends, play games to keep my mind sharp (ri-i-i-i-ght), read, study, do research, etc. If I have an addiction, the computer is definitely it.

One of the reasons I don't like a lot of tv is the commercials. I call them an expensive form of brainwashing, although I think that term is misleading. It should be "braintrashing". Some are amusing and even make me laugh out loud. But most of them make me angry.

How's that, you ask? How could most commercials make me angry? The answer is easy because most commercials these days are about drugs. Since big pharma's yearly take is upwards of 800 billion dollars, they're just about the only ones who can really afford to advertise as they do. Think about it . . . how many ads do you see in a day for everything from nasal spray to cholesterol inhibitors, baldness prevention & repair to weight loss, sleep aids to male enhancement capsules. And the list goes on, ad infinitum. It seems there's a pill for everything these days. And just when I think there couldn't possibly be anything else, they make one up! "Hey Mister! Don't have the energy to walk the dog or play basketball with the kids anymore? Then you probably have Low-T!" Now, wasn't that original? The big pharma marketers know just how to get to us, don't they?

In all these tv ads, they spend half their alloted time telling you why you really need it, using everything from the promise of the "best sex yet" to scare tactics that make you drop the tv remote and run right down to the nearest physician's office to get that "miracle preventive" in whatever form it comes. The rest of their commercial slot is used by some man or woman with a teflon tongue who can spew out the mile-long disclaimer - with nary a twisted dipthong - so fast that you figure it's not worth listening to, even if you could wrap your ears around it. What you are able to catch makes you roll your eyes in unfathomable disbelief at the convoluted logic they use to justify popping their wares.

And tv is not the end of it. Magazines, newspapers, on-line ads - they are everywhere! Even my beloved Reader's Digest, which I started reading in the 1950's whenever I visited my grandmother, is slam full of them. I counted the drug-related ads in this month's issue (June 2009), and there are eighteen, all but two within the first 89 of 204 pages. There were nine single-page pharma ads (two of which were for dog meds), three 2-pagers, five 3-pagers, and one 4-pager. There were only thirty articles to read (one for each day of the month), making the ratio of stories to ads better than 2:1.

We are inundated with big pharma. We have more drugs in this country than Carter's has little liver pills (dating myself now!) and yet, we remain one of the sickest with epidemic proportions of diabetes, cancers, obesity, Crohn's disease & Colitis, heart disease, and Parkinsons & Alzheimers. What's wrong with this picture?

What's really so sad is the fact that most of these diseases could have been easily prevented by eating real, whole foods. The modern American diet is filled with processed foods that we irradiate in microwaves. Nutritionless white bread that clogs the intestines, foods cooked in grease that does not liquify until well over 120°F (so what do you think it does once it's in your 98.6°F body?), artificially bulked-up beef, pork, and chicken that has been fed pesticide-laced grains, sawdust and other dead animals, soft drinks full of kidney/pancreas/mind-destroying lab-produced sweeteners and preservatives, and so many other "franken-foods" are the staples at our dinner tables . . . uh, should I say, the "fast-food" tables. But surely they couldn't have anything to do with the diseases this country suffers from in alarming numbers . . . could they?