''OBESITY IS NOT A RIGHT'' - Michael Smith

We came across an op-ed from an Australian daily that raises the anti-obesity campaign by one more notch, bringing it to a level that our critics claimed would never reach while dismissing us as fear mongerers when we first warned about it five years ago.

Well we are there folks and expect it to get a lot worse as the obese will soon be looked upon as fringe members of society labeled by their peers as a dreadful affliction that should be eliminated by any and all means much like the smokers are now relegated to second class citizens soon to be tolerated only in their own ghettos. After all, the author of the article claims that ‘’obesity is not a right’’. How then can the obese expect that society treats them with respect unless they vow to continuously struggle to lose weight in order to conform to what public health deems the right way to be? And please don't think that this will be the fate of the Australian obese exclusively. Healthism is a global movement with so called civilized countries setting the trend and taking cues from each other. One would think that they're inexorably competing as to which one will succeed to implement the toughest policies that not so long ago would have been unthinkable.

Demagoguery such as the one demonstrated in this article brings chills down our back and immensely saddens us as we imagine how, if the populace continues to adhere to the healthist philosophy, the obese will be forced to make the choice to either deny who they are, whether it is by choice or because of genetics and illness, or be denied by their peers. One can always hide the french fry, the cigarette and the bottle of booze to pretend to be a good obedient citizen, but how does one hide from his own body?

Euphemisms such as ‘’encouragement’’ , ‘’help’’, ‘’incentive’’ , to attenuate the effect of the once dreaded word ‘’force’’ seem to no longer be necessary as an excerpt from the article illustrates ‘’ Preventative Health Taskforce report, (…) recommended measures to force people to make healthier decisions through the tax system and prohibitions on promotion and advertising of unhealthy foods.’’ Can it possibly be that we are at the point where forceful means are now widely accepted by the indoctrinated populace that the healthist proponents don’t even attempt to sugar coat their propaganda? Are we now massively disregarding Benjamin Franklin's wise warning that ‘’ any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.’’ ? What a frightening perspective!

Obesity is not a right

POURQUOI TAXER SEULEMENT LES BOISSONS GAZEUSES SUCRÉES - LA POLÉMIQUE ENTOURANT LE STEVIA

Intrigués par ce qui a motivé le retour des pourparlers d’instaurer une taxe spéciale sur les boissons gazeuses sans pour autant taxer les boissons diététiques qui ne sont évidemment pas aussi engraissantes mais tout aussi néfastes pour la santé. ni des autres aliments hypercaloriques, nous croyons avoir trouvé la ou du moins une partie de la réponse.

L’auteure de ce commentaire, jardinière à ses heures, a fait pousser du stevia (herbe aromatique) dans son potager au début de l’été. Ayant entendu parler que le stevia remplace avantageusement le sucre, l’expérience fut alléchante. Or, le temps de la récolte venue, elle a fait des recherches sur l’internet sur la façon d’y procéder. En plus d’avoir en effet appris de quelle façon s’y prendre, elle a découvert les bienfaits de cette plante qui produit des feuilles délicieusement sucrées. En effet, elle favorise le maintient d’un taux normal de glycémie et elle permet de faire baisser la pression artérielle, entre autres. Quel fut son étonnement de découvrir également la gigantesque controverse et complexité politique par rapport à cette plante dont les amérindiens s’en servent depuis des millénaires.

En effet, le marketing de cette herbe comme substitut édulcorant fut interdit dans bon nombre de pays occidentaux y compris les États-Unis et la France, jusqu’à récemment. Santé Canada quant à eux l’approuvaient seulement comme supplément alimentaire pourvu qu’on ne vantait pas ses propriétés 300 fois plus sucrées que le sucre. Des études ayant dévoilé que la consommation de cette plante pouvait causer des problèmes rénaux ont servi de motif pour son interdiction. Bien entendu, les études conduites sur l’aspartame, le sucralose, le sirop de maïs, et le Splenda sur lesquels on a répertorié des effets davantage néfastes, ne motivent nullement les autorités sanitaires à les bannir du marché.

Depuis 2008, lorsque la FDA a approuvé l’utilisation des dérivés du stevia dans la chaîne alimentaire suite à des pressions des géants agroalimentaires Cargill et Merisant, qui fournissent les édulcorants à Coca-Cola et PepsiCo et que la France a suivi le pas cette année, on a fait breveté le rubiana un dérivé du stevia. Peu importe que quiconque, comme l’auteure de ce commentaire, peut faire pousser du stevia dans son potager et l’utiliser comme édulcorant dans son état naturel, ces géants corporatifs font breveter ce succédané de sucre en altérant ou en rajoutant des ingrédients au stevia sûrement dans le but non avoué de le rendre admissible à la loi des brevets.

Après avoir pris connaissance de toute cette polémique, il n'est pas illogique de fortement soupçonner que ces géants agroalimentaires font des pressions auprès des gouvernements afin de taxer les boissons contenant du sucre dans le but de faire propulser à grand déploiement les boissons diététiques sucrées avec leur propre succédané dérivé du stevia compétiteur autant du sucre que des édulcorants artificiels tel que Splenda et l’aspartame, dont les populations en sont rendues méfiantes.

Taxer le coca-cola pour payer les pontages

HOW LONG WILL THIS BILLION DOLLAR CHARADE CONTINUE? - John R. Polito

With Mr. John Polito’s, - a well known advocate of cold turkey tobacco cessation - explicit permission, we are posting here his comment on how far the pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the tobacco issue, more particularly the cessation methods. His passionate comment is rich with links you can follow that illustrate precisely his point. Mr. Polito has advised us that anything he publishes on the web is public domain, so please feel free to spread it far and wide. Politicians must be made to feel that we have had enough of allowing Big Pharma to operate without any accountability for the damage they are causing individuals and society through their unethical, immoral and fraudulent marketing tactics for economic gain.

As posted in Dr. Siegel’s blog at: http://www.haloscan.com/comments/mbsiegel/8151429188389081481/

Dr. Siegel, thanks for helping expose the greatest research sham in pharmaceutical industry history. The ALF, ALA, ACS, RWJF, CDC, AHRQ, DHHS, GSK & Pfizer all are aware that they have been active participants in scamming smokers into believing that quitting without pharmacology is nearly impossible, when in fact that's how 9 out of 10 long-term ex-smokers succeed. It's a false and deceptive campaign done solely for economic gain.

By the way, Professor Simon Chapman, Australia's leading tobacco control voice, just released an attack upon Pfizer (entitled: "Pfizer's campaign to drug as many smokers as possible") that sounds an awful lot like something Dr. Siegel might say: http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/09...rs-as-possible/

The bottom line is that all of these organizations are by now fully aware that it's impossible to blind smokers with significant quitting histories as to the onset of full-blown withdrawal. As a study by the nicotine patch co-inventor (Jed Rose of Duke) just found, four times as many placebo nicotine patch users were able to correctly identify their group assignment as were wrong about it. More than 200 placebo controlled cessation trials have measured levels of frustration not efficacy. What's sad is how all of the above organizations insist on ignoring all real-world findings showing that real cold turkey quitters have yet to be beaten by any form of pharmacology and it's consumer fraud of the worst sort to suggest otherwise. Many of these quitters are fighting to save their lives and what do we do, we lie to them!!!!!!! God, help us!!!!!

Placebo use in drug addiction studies is a license to steal. Participants in these studies were not expecting to go cold turkey and endure full-blown withdrawal. Instead, they joined in hopes of obtaining weeks or months of a free chemical ("medicine") that would stimulate their dopamine pathways, thus diminishing their withdrawal syndrome. If assigned to placebo it didn't happen. Often 80-90% of the placebo group relapsed within the first few days. It isn't that they necessarily relapsed because they couldn't quit but because this particular effort failed to live up to expectations. The results aren't science. They're junk.

How much longer will this billion dollar charade continue? President Obama promised that science would be driven by facts not profits. When, Mr. President?

Thanks for focusing on the ALF's pharmacology sales site, www.BecomeAnEx.org, Dr. Siegel. Dr. Richard Hurt's name, face and advice are all over the BecomeAnEx site. But as disclosed in this 2009 paper, he also serves on Pfizer's Advisory Board - http://caonline.amcancersoc.org/...ct/ caac.20031v1

In this video clip Dr. Hurt crams pharmacology down the viewers throats by falsely asserting that pharmacology doubles "your" chances. Dr. Hurt knows that that is a real-world effectiveness representation he's making there, not a clinical trial placebo efficacy claim -

http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 2

Here's a second clip claiming medicine can double "your" chance of success (at tail end) - again, it's a clearly false effectiveness claim -
http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...earn_overview/ 3

Here Dr. Hurt explains how to pick the right pharmacology -
http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 3

In this ALF video Dr. Hurt teaches how to chew nicotine gum -
http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 4

Here the ALF's drug store teaches about the nicotine lozenge - http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 5

This is Dr. Hurt selling the nicotine patch - http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 6

This is his nicotine inhaler clip -
http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 7

This is his nicotine spray clip -
http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 8

This is his Zyban and Chantix clip. Amazingly he does not advise viewers of any adverse event or death concerns associated with using Chantix. As a member of Pfizer's Advisory Board, how does he get away with it?

http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...arn_addiction/ 9

In this clip he again encourages quitters to talk with their physician about medications. If using an OTC product, why would they also need to make an appointment to see their doctor? http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...rn_addiction/ 10

This clip is about getting medication and setting a quit date. The problem with the ALF's advice is that we now have two studies asserting that not setting a quit date, that quitting spontaneously, doubles your chances. These are the study links:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubm...pubmed/ 16443610

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubm...pubmed/ 19509277

So which is it ALF? Get visitors to buy medicine and pick a quit date or advise them to jump in the quitting pool without meds? This advice should be immediately corrected. If not, it's a rather glaring admission that ALF's quitting site is nothing more than a pharmaceutical industry drug store. http://www.becomeanex.org/the-ex...#being_ex/ share

Overall, a fair assessment of the ALF's quitting site would be that it strongly suggest that quitting without medication is far less successful than quitting with it.

Did the ALF read the National Cancer Institute's quitting method survey showing non-pharmacology quitters actually doing better? How about the long-term results from the UK's NHS Stop Smoking Program? Do you care about "truth" or is that simply some job security slogan to tag tobacco companies with?

I used to think cessation pharmacology researchers were simply misguided but it has been way too many years and there's now far too much evidence for them to continue to claim ignorance. I hate to say this but I now believe that most are either amazingly stupid or criminally culpable in the deaths of untold thousands of pharmacology scammed smokers, who trusted the fancy credentials and lies into their grave. It's Dr. Drug Rep all over. It's pretty sad that history will record that money was more important than their legacy.

By the way, I see the word "quitting" getting bantered about when discussing the e-cig. Until the pharm industry extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant all quitting involved both quitting nicotine and its delivery device. For the sake of accuracy and both youth and user understanding I'd encourage use of the word "transfer" instead of "quitting" as delivery continues.

Regards,

John R. Polito

UNE INTERDICTION EXPÉRIMENTALE ?

La campagne anti-tabac et ses effets indésirables ne semblent guère avoir servi de leçon aux bien-pensants qui tentent désormais de changer les autres habitudes de la population.

Ils n’ont évidemment rien appris par le fait que les interdictions de fumer aux endroits déclarés arbitrairement ‘’publics’’ ont à peine fait baisser le taux ‘’avoué’’ du tabagisme et que pour certaines tranches d’âge il a même augmenté. Peu leur importe que les parents des enfants qui ne peuvent plus trouver des endroits pour fumer fument sûrement davantage à la maison exposant ainsi leur progéniture autant au tabac qu’aux parties d’adultes souvent bien arrosés. Sont-ils carrément indifférents ou ignorants du fait que la campagne incessante contre le tabac a rendu cette habitude attirante pour les jeunes qui y trouvent un intérêt accru à défier l'autorité et expérimenter avec le tabac dont ils peuvent se le procurer dans leur cour d’école pour aussi peu que 1$ ou 2$ le paquet souvent vendu par leurs propres camarades ? Ils n’ont sûrement rien appris non plus de l’expérience d’autres endroits au Canada où on y pratique le taxage et la ‘’contrebande’’ des friandises dans les écoles où on les interdit.

Non, nos bien-pensants québécois s’imaginent qu’ils peuvent changer le monde et que d’interdire la malbouffe à un périmètre donné aux alentours des écoles inculquera des bonnes habitudes alimentaires aux enfants. Ceci va tout à fait à l’encontre de toute psychologie de la jeunesse ainsi que les paradigmes du passé en ce qui a trait aux interdictions. À moins que les plans futurs de ces ‘’experts’’ soient de contrôler tout-ce qui rentre dans notre réfrigérateur et garde-manger, il serait prudent de leur demander dès maintenant ce qui sera leur prochaine interdiction lorsqu’ils se rendront compte que nos enfants s’y adonnent à cœur joie à la maison ou ailleurs à tout-ce qui leur est interdit à l’école et ses alentours et ce tant que les parents qui ont réellement besoin d'aide pour l'éducation de leurs enfants sont laissés à eux-même avec très peu de ressources.

Trois municipalités s’attaquent à la malbouffe