Worry less about chemicals, more about calories and fat. Pesticides and food additives pose less of a health threat to humans than diets too rich in calories, fat and alcohol. That’s the conclusion of a committee of the National Research Council in its report Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet. The report confirms there are many natural and synthetic cancer causing chemicals in food, but says there are a minor problem compared to the overall bad dietary habits of Americans.
While some chemicals in the diet do have the ability to cause cancer, they appear to be a threat only when they are present in foods that form an unusually large part of the diet,” says committee member Ronald Estabrook of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “The varied and balanced diet needed for good nutrition, including fruits and vegetables, seems to provide significant protection from the natural toxicants in our food.”
(Courtesy Your HEALTH)
Over the past two decades, our government-dominated education apparatus has bombarded schoolchildren with misinformation about recycling. Every schoolchild “knows,” for instance, that recycling paper saves trees, since fewer trees are then required to make paper. But economics teacher Roy Cordato, writing in the December 1995 issue of The Free Market, observes that curbing the production of newspaper from trees means that, “there would be fewer trees planted. In the paper industry, 87% of the trees used are planted to produce paper. For every 13 trees ‘saved’ by recycling, 87 will never get planted. It is because of the demand for paper that the number of trees has been increasing in this country for the last fifty years.”
Youngsters are also being brainwashed into believing that we are running out of landfill space, when in fact “there is no landfill shortage.” Cordato notes that if, “all the solid waste for the next thousand years were put into a single space, it would take up 44 square miles of landfill,” a mere .001 percent of the U.S. landspace. And they are being told that recycling reduceds pollution, but “are not told that the recycling process itself generates a great deal of pollution.” For example, recycling newspaper, “requires old ink to be bleached from the pages. This is a chemically intensive process that generates large amounts of toxic waste, as oppose to the benign waste that would result from simply throwing the papers away.”
(The Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL 36849)
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
Return to Spreading the Facts