Fake news, fake food

“Like fake news, fake milk is hard to swallow,” Sue Lani Madsen’s viewpoint, (Spokesman-Review, July 14, 2018), is a fact well-received by this reader having been born at home before 1944, nurtured first with real breast-milk and then real (unprocessed, i.e. unpasteurized) cow’s and/or goat’s milk thereafter (and still).

With an acquired higher education in the life sciences as well as the ever-present school of practical experience, as an adult I possess an even larger frame of reference on the subject of real as opposed to fake, especially in the field of nutrition against disease. Using him as a “good” bad example, I agree with Garfield the cartoon cat in that, “You are what you eat” (or drink, smoke, snort, inject, et al., ad nauseam) because what is not mentioned, perhaps not known by Madsen, is the fact special manufacturing interests began the lobbied demise of wholesome real (raw) milk the year I was born.

1939 was way before “refined” foods - stripped of their vitamins and minerals - were ordered “enriched” by adding back into their bleached flours a few petrol-chemical-synthesized lookalikes of the 20 or more nutrients manufacturers (still) remove to ensure that product has for them a profitably longer shelf life. This is after researchers discovered a link between nutrient-deficient foods and the appearance of mental problems, learning disability, neurological disease and digestive disorders.

200 words expose barely the tip of this iceberg. What if most or all of the chronic degenerative disease plaguing U.S. mentally and physically now is indeed of our own making caused by the fake news that the creators of fake foods have promoted the past 70 plus years?

In the words of the cartoon, Pogo Possum, whom I read all through high school: “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

Rose Larson

Greenacres