The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
July 9, 2010 by biotechbillboard.com
The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
Chemicals in everyday products are ruining your health-find out what you can do about it.
One hundred years ago, the promise of “a better living through chemistry” was given to consumers, setting us on a slippery slope that introduced thousands of man-made chemicals into our food, water, medicine and environment.
In The Hundred-Year Lie, investigative journalist Randall Fitzgerald shatters dozens of myths being perpetuated by the chemical, pharmaceutical, and processed foods industries. He shows how early advances led to a build-up of industry, and how the profit motive then led companies and even our own government to ignore troubling signs of widespread illness and disease.
Are we paying too high a price in our rush for progress? What happens when we blindly rely on the government to keep us safe? What does the future hold if we continue down this path? With a firm grasp on the latest scientific findings, Fitzgerald offers a clear-eyed view of a building crisis in public health.
Like Silent Spring and Fast Food Nation, this is a book that demands change. Fitzgerald not only sheds light on the problems we face from this unprecedented chemical onslaught, he tells us how we can turn the tide.
Rating: 
(out of 65 reviews)
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Review by Paul Tognetti for The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
Rating:
Just over a century ago, the Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. According to author Randall Fitzgerald it was this legislation that reassured the American public that the food and medicines they were consuming had been thoroughly tested and were safe to use. As it turns out nothing could be further from the truth! “The Hundred Year Lie” tells the sordid story of a century of deception and irresponsibility by the companies who process our food and manufacture the drugs and chemicals we use everyday. Indeed, the promise of “a better life through chemistry” is a notion we all need to examine and seriously reconsider.
At a bare minimum, reading “The One Hundred Year Lie” will make you stop in your tracks and think about all of the different chemicals you are ingesting and coming into contact with every day. It is not just the voluminous amounts of additives in your food that you must worry about. Stop and consider all of the personal care products you use on a daily basis. Add to that the over-the-counter and prescription drugs you may be taking and all of the household cleaning products that you employ. Then think about all of the chemicals that are applied to our clothing, our bedding and to our furniture. Next, you might want to consider the flouride in your municipal water supply and maybe the highly toxic arsenic in all of that pressure treated lumber around your property. Now if you are a pretty unscientific sort like me you will then appreciate Randall Fitzgerald’s attempt to explain the concept of “synergy”. Most people just take it for granted that the products they use must have been thoroughly tested and deemed completely safe to use. It is when you discover that the scientific community, the manufacturers themselves and various government regulators really have absolutely no idea how these different chemical concoctions are going react with each other in the real world that you just might become a bit concerned. On many different levels “The Hundred Year Lie” challenges the way we live our lives today and implores each of us as individuals and society in general to make the necessary changes before more damage is done. I simply cannot imagine that anyone who reads this book will not feel compelled to make some significant changes in his or her own lifestyle. In our never-ending quest for comfort and convenience we have done considerable damage to our our own personal well-being and to our environment. Some say the damage may be irreparable. This is a fascinating and well written book that is certainly worth your time and attention.
Highly recommended!
Review by John Morley for The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
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As Al Gore’s movie makes “inconvenient truths” about global warming more understandable, this book will open your eyes to the unintended damage being done to you, those you love and and every other creature on the planet.
In a story that makes clear the need for this book, the author stands outside a Wal*Mart. Shoppers are rushing past a state-mandated sign that warns of chemicals inside that are “known…to cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive harm.” He stops a shopper to ask if she had thought about the sign. She brushes past with the dismissal that, “If there was any danger, someone would tell us!”
Well, you are being told. If–like the shopper and most of the rest of us–the signs with the bold letters aren’t clear enough for you, this book certainly is.
Fitzgerald is a professional writer, rather than a scientist, activist, politician or scholar. This may be why his book is an enjoyable read and easy to understand. And it’s unburdened by the technical complexities or alarmist attacks that are too common to writing on this topic.
Also to its credit, the book goes beyond gloom and doom to offer practical solutions that you can begin right now. Although nothing quick or easy is promised, the case that we need to do something is made starkly compelling. Getting informed is the first step, and this book is information that we all need now to make better choices concerning every detail of what we eat and how we choose to live.
Review by C. Wagner for The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
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“The United States spends more than twice as much on health care than any other industrialized nation in the world-$6,100 per year for every man, woman, and child. Fifteen percent of the economy is now devoted to medical care, up from 10 percent in 1987. Yet, the United States ranks forty-sixth in life expectancy and forty-second in infant mortality among the nations of the world.” Pages 86-87. A frightening expose of the chemicals which afflict all living things on the earth with humans, of course, at the top of the toxic chain. Expect more toxins to enter our little nature web without regards to long term effects, thanks to a government and FDA in the pockets of well heeled business. In the end, it may be ourselves who can take what little action is possible. Fitzgerald’s stay at the Hippocrates, with its pure food diet and physical regime, seemed at first reading totally bizarre. But, he claims it radically reduced the toxins in his own body and seemed to actually heal many of the patients. And, after watching modern medicine actually kill, in my opinion, friends of mine, not before extracting obscene amounts of money and inflicting terrible pain, I would personally consider this alternative option. Important reading for anyone interested in their health and the health of their offspring. Why then only 4 stars? Simply because in the long run this book will make no difference. Business and government will pollute more systematically and nothing Fitzgerald has to say will slow the process.
Review by Randall Fitzgerald for The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
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When I see a book review from an anonymous self-styled critic impugning the motives or integrity or background of a book author,I am reminded of the adage that ‘cowards hide in the shadows of their own dark spirits.’
The prevous review characterizing me as being an editor with Phenomena is inaccurate and irrelevent. That magazine has not been published for several years now, though the four issues that were released did contain articles from me as a freelance writer. Those articles concerned scientific research into claims about the existence of psychic phenomena. This association is irrelevent because, during 36 years as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I have written about every subject you can imagine. Do the three books that I wrote about government disqualify me from writing about medical science subjects? Of course not.
As to the accusation that my conclusions in The Hundred Year Lie are pseudo-science, the anonymous accuser cites no examples and has nothing to offer, which tells me the person has not read the book. This book is a warning of where we are headed if current trends continue. Dozens of physicians and scientists cited in the book, and interviewed during the research process of the book, concur with the book’s findings. Only someone with a dogmatic or arrogant point of view, or someone who works for one of the industries being criticized in the book, could reach a pseudo-science conclusion based on not having fairly considered the evidence.
–Randall Fitzgerald, author of The Hundred Year Lie
Review by Alexandre Merineau for The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health
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Fitzgerald goes where few would dare in this meticulously researched Magnum
Opus on the rise and ubiquity of unsafe and largely untested synthetic
chemicals passing as food, medicine, and their undeniably extreme impact on
our ability as a species to maintain our health
and civilization. Impressive…
Fitzgerald’s book is not abstract, it is not philosophical, it is not a cheap
attempt at self or product promotion, and it is completely devoid of
finger-pointing or blame.
Even when he identifies the culprits that have generated, maintained and
profited from what he calls “The Synthetics Belief System” (a century old
attempt to equate the application of synthetic chemical “discoveries” to food,
medicine and consumer goods with notions of identity, self-worth, and the
myths of “progress, all promoted by the processed food, pharmaceutical and
chemical institutions… and our blind belief) he convincingly points that it is
we consumers, we employees, we stockholders, we government officials and the
electorate that are ultimately keeping this pattern of “accelerating
degeneration” in place…all because we have come to aggressively demand all
this synthetic chemical “food stuff” and “medicine stuff” and “consumer stuff”
as our birthright. We have been taught an awful lesson.
The implications are such that our actual birthright (a state of “naturally
occurring health” as he puts it, where the body burden of synthetic chemicals
is allowed to be eliminated, a point he drives home in the book by chronicling
a experiment in detoxification himself) has been deftly robbed from everyone
on the planet, including the planet itself it seems. We have become entirely
dependent on stuff that is clearly destroying our health.
In fact, we are complicit in this attack on everybody’s health by maintaining
our habits, which in turn are heavily reinforced by everything we hear and see
everywhere on a daily basis.
I saw how my purchase decisions are not only destroying my health and the
health of my family (even my kid’s ability to reproduce) but how MY consumer
choices are in fact destroying people everywhere, animals everywhere and the
very ecosystem we entirely depend upon.
I’m a Gen-X’er with a predilection for healthy living. He’s a Baby Boomer.
Regardless, everybody everywhere is confronted with this super-massive
problem. Like the old Palmolive ad kept repeating on TV when I was a kid:
“You’re soaking in it!” That’s the problem nobody wants to talk about.
Luckily Fitzgerald offers us a framework in which to begin dealing with these
realities, not just talk about it like some novelty item that is as dangerous
as any WMD. I’d say the Synthetic Belief System is the WMD we need to be
talking about as citizens of all countries.
Read this book.