Author: Ian McAllister
Assorted Diet Lies and Dirty Tricks. Until about 1974 I had a naïve and idealistic belief in the medical industry. I even believed the lies that the patient always came first and that doctors would never harm a patient for profit.
The cause of SIDS is known, but suppressed
Then I read in an Australian research journal about some brilliant research done by an Australian doctor. As a technician the methodology fascinated me.
The doctor observed that Aborigines had many more cot deaths than white people, so he did blood tests to find out why. He found that vitamin E was absent from the blood of the victims and very low in the blood of the mother.
So he gave free vitamin E supplements to pregnant and nursing mothers and cot deaths disappeared completely. That's right - not the usual 40% success rate that you have come to expect from drug trial, but 100% success rate.
The doctor was interviewed on TV a few days later and then a so-called expert from the drug companies was asked what he thought about it. That was the first time that I had seen the advice of Mr Freud junior demonstrated "If you are caught out attack the qualifications of the person who has caught you out. Don't debate it."
The so-called expert sneered "Well vitamin E has been described as a vitamin looking for something to be good for, but you can't really give any credence to vitamin research that doesn't track the blood levels of the vitamin."
I was amazed because the entire research had been based on tracking the levels of vitamin E in the blood. That was the end of the discovery. I never heard again that the cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome had been discovered and every year we have a "red nose day" to raise money for research into preventing SIDS. All that money would have dried up if the "expert" hadn't succeeded in suppressing the information.
Many years later I saw the same tactics used to hide the cause of hyperactivity. A mothers' group in Eastern Australia cut out all foods that contained additives (that meant a lot of cooking for themselves) and the hyperactivity in their children disappeared.
The "expert" interviewed on TV made some sneering remark and I never heard any more about it. About a year ago an expert had to admit that hyperactivity and other diseases such as asthma could be caused by additives.
Expert attack usually points to something good
Think about it a moment. The drug companies don't need to discredit an alternative remedy that doesn't work...they'll just say I told you so, and advise you not to be caught out by alternatives again. That means that if they go to enormous expense to discredit something it is working so well that it is a threat to them.
My first experience of that was when they banned the sale of apricot kernels from health shops, and took the discoverer of vitamin B17 to court charged with distributing poison. During the case the prosecution was so incautious as to give a direct answer to a question. Dr. Richardson asked "How many apricot kernels would I have to eat to kill me?" He was told that a handful would be enough. So he said "I am now going to commit suicide", and ate two handfuls. He won the case.
For more than a dozen years now I have been eating a tablespoon of apricot kernels each day. They are still banned in the health shops, but they are part of the traditional cooking of Asian peoples, so I get my supplies from the Oriental supermarkets. I still haven't dropped dead from cyanide poisoning.
While the EEC was trying to decide whether to ban the sale of effective amounts of vitamins and minerals the drug companies produced a document full of lies and half-truths about vitamins and minerals. I only remember the outright lie that vitamin C causes cancer. I knew all along how good vitamin C can be, so I wasn't surprised by the attack.
Prevention can't be proved
If an alternative food protects you against colds and flu and cancer and heart attacks how can you prove it? You can't. I only know that I used to get three severe attacks of flu-like disease each year and it doesn't happen now. It could be coincidence!
Get it banned
A nurse in the northern continent of America created a mixture of 4 common weeds that cured cancer. The government promptly banned the sale of these weeds, so the nurse published the recipe so that anyone could collect their own weeds and make the treatment.
An Australian man gave the mixture to a lady expected to die of cancer in less than 2 months. When her doctor found no trace of cancer in her body he asked what she had been taking. She told him. His response was "I'm not having him interfering in my business like that" and soon after the medicine was banned. So the vendor changed the name and continued to sell it under the new name.
The Commonwealth Research Organisation (CSIRO) discovered that an Australian herb called "devils apple" or "Sodom apple" cured skin cancer. The drug companies couldn't get it banned because of the prestige of the CSIRO so they got the government to say that the medicine could only be sold on prescription, and then prescriptions were never given.
Comfrey has been described as a first aid kit in a plant. It is so widely effective that books have been written about it. It has saved many lives. So the drug companies got it banned on the grounds that some people had died after eating a plant that is in the same family. That logic means that you shouldn't eat potatoes or tomatoes because they are in the same family as deadly nightshade.
Oh, they also did some "research" in which all the baby rats that had concentrated comfrey injected into their abdominal cavity died. That would be the equivalent of an adult human eating 47 thousand leaves in one day, and the leaves are about 18 inches long by three inches wide.
I know an old lady approaching her centenary who has been eating 2 comfrey leaves each day for about 40 years. She is still active in her organic garden which naturally has comfrey growing freely.
Phony research projects
Ginkgo biloba makes deteriorating blood supplies grow again. That means that it can make seniors, whose supply of blood to the brain has deteriorated, more intelligent again. I would be suspicious if someone sold it to make teenagers more brainy because their blood supply should be in its prime.
Naturally it takes several months to re-grow a blood supply so the drug companies conducted research for 6 weeks and then trumpeted the results that Ginkgo had no observable effect. Of course it didn't. They only gave it 6 weeks!
Prove that a refined product doesn't work
Lets consider vitamin C. It occurs naturally with folic acid and about 7 other vitamins and minerals that make it work better, and hundreds of other plant chemicals. So if I wanted to discredit vitamin C then I would start by refining the mixture to pure vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid) and test it out in quantities that are too small to work. Oh... I see... It's been done already.
Pauling who got his Nobel Prize from his work with Vitamin C was plagued by scientists who couldn't get the same results with ascorbic acid. You need the other vitamins and minerals for it to be effective.
Ephedra was a useful herb. So the drug companies refined and concentrated what they said was the main constituent, and patented it as Ephedrine. They then proved that Ephedrine can kill you and had ephedra (but not Ephedrine) banned.
Lie about a successful product
I've seen so called experts discuss the Atkins diet on TV. According to them the diet would be impossible to maintain for year after year, because it doesn't allow any carbohydrates. According to them you get your energy by digesting ketones which is less effective than digesting carbohydrates.
Ketones are the waste product after breaking down fat for energy. They are not a source of energy as the "expert" should have known. The "experts" didn't even know that the Atkins diet is four diets that are used in succession. The first one that they discussed couldn't be maintained for years and is intended to be used to kick-start you for two days. They couldn't even get the amount of carbohydrate right. You are allowed some.
The "experts" agree that you get too few vegetables from the Atkins diet. The final maintenance diet allows you between 40 and 60 grams of carbohydrate. Fruit like apples, pears, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries have about 4 grams per serving. Vegetables like celery, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, capsicum are only about 2 grams per serving, so you would have to eat about twenty servings of fruit and vegetables each day to reach the limit. How does that compare with the nine fruit and vegetables that they are recommending nowadays?
Oh, a banana would take up 20gm of your daily allowance. I no longer follow the Atkins diet but I used it for several years to lower my weight and prevent it rising again. Now I use a slightly modified version so when I ate a dozen figs per day straight from my fig tree for 6 weeks I didn't gain any weight. My weight is right in the middle of the ideal weight range for my height.
The experts claim that cholesterol will skyrocket and the "victim" will be listless all day from lack of energy. In fact, cholesterol comes down, diabetics are cured, and I had above average energy. On day I was helping a friend deliver mail in the countryside from her van. This meant grabbing the letters and parcels for an address, leaping from the van, running to dump the mail in the letterbox and running back to leap into the van again.
Then I came to a place where the round divided into two sections. So I grabbed the bagful of mail for one section and my friend drove round the other section. When she came back for me she thought that I had lost my way, because her husband was usually half way round the section and I was all the way round and walking back. No. I never felt any lack of energy!
Scare tactics
I implied earlier that the drug companies wouldn't dare to take on the prestigious CSIRO. However the CSIRO created and published a sensible diet. The book sold out and more had to be ordered in. That was too much for the drug companies to stand so this time the expert on TV said that they had severe reservations about the CSIRO diet because it would destroy your liver. The beauty of this attack is that the CSIRO would be too sedate to dignify this with a response, so the public might believe the attack. I think they outdid themselves that time. Sales of the book continue. There are limits to the dirty tricks that the general public can accept.
If you still haven't read about the health frauds that are the biggest killers, read the earlier articles in this series. 
Next in this series (which ends by telling you how to avoid the lies for a healthy diet) you can find out about extreme cases of lies and dirty tricks for money. 
