When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" FDA approves Crestor for people who have no health problem to correct

Thank you Mike Great Article!!
(NaturalNews) Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don't need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It's all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients -- things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.

The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.

This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.

All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.


Medications are not vitamins

The very idea that these drugs can somehow prevent a person from becoming sick in the future strains the boundaries of scientific credibility. Only natural therapies like nutrition can prevent the onset of disease, not patented chemicals that don't belong in the human body in the first place.

The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!

The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.

If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?

So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!
Pharmaceutical deficiency

That's really where all this is headed. When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" for the human body, it's only a matter of time before the industry starts talking about your "pharmaceutical deficiency."

Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.

The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.

Patented Big Pharma chemicals, after all, provide all the nutrition you'll ever need!

Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals -- On Larry King & Ellen Show

Farm Forward Board Member and New York Times Bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer released his third book, Eating Animals, today. Foer’s first work of non-fiction is part memoir, part modern muckracking and the most important book on animal agriculture in decades. We say the most important because no other honest account of animal agriculture has ever addressed the issue on so many levels—something we believe is essential to creating lasting change.

Part of what makes Farm Forward unique is our insistence that how we raise farm animals is not simply an issue of animal welfare, ecological sustainability, or sound economics, but all of these and more. How we choose to feed our families and ourselves says a lot about who we are as individuals and as citizens. Our food choices are also statements of values. Foer’s book is so powerful in part because it recognizes that, “Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.”

Farm Forward is proud to have played a part in making Foer’s book possible. Speaking of the contributions of Farm Forward founder Aaron Gross, Foer writes, “It’s often said that such-and-such wouldn’t have been possible without so-and-so. But in the most literal sense, I wouldn’t have, and couldn’t have, written this book without Aaron.”

You may have already seen some of the fabulous reviews and coverage of Eating Animals. Here are just a few of our favorites:

* Farm Forward in the Huffington Post
* Natalie Portman on Eating Animals
* Dr. Andrew Weil on Eating Animals
* Rabbi David Wolpe on Eating Animals
* Excerpt from the New York Times Magazine

At Farm Forward we, of course, had high expectations for the book Foer would write. What we didn’t expect, though, was a book that articulates so much of Farm Forward’s own philosophy. For example, Foer singles out Frank Reese as the most important farmer in America. We’ve felt that way for years. Reese has the ability to recreate a more humane and sustainable poultry industry, which is why supporting Reese’s work is taking more of Farm Forward’s attention than any other project.

Lauded as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, Foer is uniquely positioned to raise awareness about the troubling state of animal agriculture and the impact of our food choices. He is exactly the kind of culture-maker America needs to help us remember why food and farming matter and to inspire us to action. His choice to speak out has already inspired many others. Natalie Portman exclaimed that “Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist.”

The ability to make conscientious food choices is predicated on awareness and understanding. Eating Animals will help increase public awareness as well as enrich the public discussion of the problems in animal agriculture. It may well open the most important discussion about food and farming in a generation.

Farm Forward will continue to support culture makers like Foer to help advance our mission to “promote conscientious food choices, reduce farm animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.” Foer found our help indispensable, but our work can only continue with your support. Help us change the national discussion of food and farming, and be sure to sign up for the Farm Forward newsletter (the form is just below the animal buttons on the right)!

From -  Farm Forward Website:

Factory Farming

Factory farms, also known as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) or IFAP (Industrial Farm Animal Production) facilities,1 can house up to 125,000 animals2 under one roof and are designed to produce the highest possible output at the lowest possible cost to the operator. These farms and their associated industrial slaughterhouses produce “cheap” meat, eggs, and dairy by externalizing their costs. The costs to the public from the ecological damage and health problems created by factory farms are not considered any more than the law requires, and companies have often found it less expensive to pay fines than to alter their methods. For this reason, the true cost of meat is never reflected in the price consumers pay. Animal suffering is given no meaningful consideration except in a few idiosyncratic cases.

Factory farming now accounts for more than 99 percent of all farmed animals raised and slaughtered in the United States.3 (Virtually all seafood comes to us by way of industrial fishing or factory fish farms.)

Farmed animals are remarkable creatures who experience pleasure (pasture-raised pigs, for instance, are known to jump for joy)4 and have complex social structures (cows develop friendships over time and will sometimes hold grudges against other animals who treat them badly).5 The cheap animal products churned out by factory farms come at a high cost to the animals themselves (many are confined so intensively that they cannot turn around or stretch a wing).6 The structure of factory farming ensures that even the animals’ most fundamental needs—clean air, sunshine, freedom from chronic pain and illness—are denied them.

The present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food.” –Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production

At the same time, factory farming’s industrial slaughterhouses have created worker conditions that Human Rights Watch describes as “systematic human rights abuses.”7 Employing illegal immigrants and underage workers is a common practice, in part because the vulnerability of these populations allows the industry to avoid compensating them for the numerous injuries and chronic pain that are equally standard in industrial slaughter. Processing-plant line workers in California interviewed by Farm Forward reported, to their shame, that it was not uncommon for them to be denied access to the bathroom in order to “hold the line” and maintain productivity.

The factory farm record on the environment is no better: World Watch, the Sierra Club, the Pew Commission, Greenpeace, and other major environmental watchdogs have singled out factory farms as among the biggest polluters on the planet.8 There is now a scientific consensus that animal agriculture is the single largest contributor to global warming—outstripping even the transportation industry in its production of greenhouse gases.9 A 2008 New York Times article reported that “if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan—a Camry, say—to the ultra-efficient Prius.”10

The disturbing nature of these problems can make it difficult for many people to accept the truth about factory farming when they are first confronted with it: “Surely,” one is tempted to say, “it can’t be that bad.” But once the scale of the devastation that this industry is wreaking on our health, the environment, and animals becomes clear, the most surprising aspect of factory farming is how effectively these problems have been hidden from the public in the first place.

There are more humane, more just, and more sustainable ways to eat, and, more than ever before, there are numerous, progressive alternatives to factory farms. With your help, we can find a better way forward.

1. 1. While “CAFO” is often used in newspapers to refer to factory farms in general, it is technically defined by the EPA as referring only to a subset of the largest factory farms. Thus, some smaller factory farms are officially not considered CAFOs. The term “IFAP” was coined by the Pew Commission to refer to all factory farming. When Farm Forward speaks about factory farming, we are referring to IFAP facilities.
2. 2. Environmental Protection Agency, Producers’ Compliance Guide for CAFOs, August 2003.
3. 3. Farm Forward calculation based on U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2002 Census of Agriculture, June 2004; and ibid.
4. 4. Jonathan Balcombe, Pleasurable Kingdom (New York: Macmillan, 2006).
5. 5. Jonathan Leake, “Cows Hold Grudges, Say Scientists,” The Australian, February 28, 2005.
6. 6. Bill Niman, Niman Ranch Cookbook (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008).
7. 7. Human Rights Watch, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, 2004, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/usa0105/usa0105.pdf.
8. 8. Worldwatch Institute, Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry, August 2005; Sierra Club, “Water Contamination From Factory Farms,” Article here; Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, Putting Meat on The Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America, April 2008; Greenpeace, The True Cost of Food, March 2007.
9. 9. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Livestock’s Long Shadow, 2007.
10. 10. Mark Bittman, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler,” New York Times, January 27, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html.