The Demokratik Republik of Kalifornia

Do you ever get the feeling that something is wrong?

Umm… Is the FDA trying to kill us?

the idiot's avatar

  May I introduce to you the woman of my dreams:

Mrs. Idiot… The girl just crazy enough to marry me.

 She puts up with my shenanigans… She cultivates coconuts.

 And now,  she speaks out on….

Feeding the Village Idiot…and the Coconut Heads Or

 So… What Foods Won’t Kill You?

  It’s quite sad how difficult it is to only eat food in today’s crazy world. It seems that everything on the shelves has a dozen completely unnecessary brain-dimming and/or cancer-causing ingredients…just to make us stupid, agreeable and/or reliant upon medications. Ingredients like Red #40, which may or may not cause cancer like its predecessor, Red #2, but nonetheless still causes hyperactivity in children (and adults I’m sure). It’s completely unnecessary…it’s coloring…it doesn’t change the taste, it doesn’t change the “nutrition”….it just makes it more pretty.

  I’d prefer to eat something that’s a funky color as opposed to something that will kill me…..maybe that’s just me. Here’s another one: Monosodium Glutamate, aka hydrolyzed vegetable protein*, aka sodium caseinate*, aka autolyzed yeast*, etc. etc. etc. (*these ingredients aren’t just MSG, they contain MSG plus some other unwanted lab created crap too AND- these ingredients are often found in products labeled “contains no MSG”) Monosodium glutamate, among some other things like aspartame causes brain damage. Cool right?  Put some more in my food please, Uncle Sam.

 

 

  It used to be that there were some foods out there on the market that were unhealthy , albeit faster and more “convenient”, but for the most part, what you were buying when you went to the grocery store was indeed FOOD.

Are they trying to kill us?

  Somehow we’ve gotten to the point  that if you want to eat in such a manner that you will live until old age and still be able to think for yourself, you need to search high and low, scour nutrition labels and ingredient lists and, if you don’t have an unlimited grocery budget, investigate different stores for a reasonable price.

  Since making the decision– some time ago- to eat better and to feed The Village Idiot I’m married to and our 4 coconut heads healthier foods, I’ve made a few changes, but not as many as I should. (We still eat fast food sometimes, especially since a Tommy’s opened up in our city, and a sale on Oreo’s is hard to pass up, AND….well… we still eat junk, but I’m working on it)

The first thing I did was go through our pantry and refrigerator reading ingredients on virtually everything we had…

 Is This Crap Even Safe to Eat?

  I was appalled. I gathered up all the “food” we just flat didn’t need (i.e. pudding boxes, Campbell’s soups, Rice-a-Roni, etc) and gave them away. The next time I went to the grocery store, I started looking at the ingredients on different brands of some stuff. One in particular that stood out was sour cream.

  I grew up on Knudsen sour cream. Always had to be Knudsen, no other brand would do it. When suddenly I had children to feed, I started going for the store brand (1/2 the price, sometimes less… oh yeah). So here I am looking at the ingredients: Albertson’s brand has over a dozen ingredients which include xanthan gum, carrageenan, gelatin…Yuck. Next I look at Knudsen, it has cultured pasteurized grade A cream (from milk), enzymes. That sounds better. Then I look at Daisy Brand sour cream. Ingredient: grade A cultured cream.

  We’ve since only used Daisy Brand. It’s more expensive, but we use less at a time and the other stuff now tastes like a science experiment.

  Another change we’ve made is the peanut butter we eat. We used to use Skippy Creamy (roasted peanuts, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oils (cottonseed, soybean and rapseed), salt …

  Then Skippy came out with Natural…oooohhhh…that must be better for you (roasted peanuts, sugar, palm oil, salt). What the heck is sugar doing in peanut butter? Anyway, I started buying Laura Scudder’s Smooth (peanuts, 1% or less of: salt) There’s also the unsalted version, but I prefer the regular smooth.

  Laura Scuddder’s peanut butter is Expensive (have I mentioned we’re poor?) THEN, to my delight, Ralphs came out with a natural peanut butter (roasted peanuts, salt)- at about 1/2 the price of Laura Scudder’s 🙂

  It has been very difficult for me to change my eating habits because I’m an 80’s baby…I grew up on mac ‘n cheese, hot pockets, and all those super convenient packaged foods. That’s just how I learned to eat. I also grew up with the notion that if it’s allowed in the food, it must be okay. What a joke. I hope there aren’t many of you out there that still live with this notion…if you, dear reader, still think this way, it’s time for a reality check.

The FDA – Fvcking Diabolical A$$holes

  Here’s the deal… The FDA basically started with the Food and Drug Act in 1906, signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, but was already conducting tests on food and drug as far back as 1883. It was a good thing…. people were dying from untested toxins in drugs that were supposed to cure things that still aren’t curable today and the FDA put a stop to it. Rules and regulations were put into place gradually as time went on in order to protect public health. Super, wonderful, fabulous.

What went wrong?

  In my opinion, one of the things that went wrong is the simple fact that as the FDA was given more and more regulatory power over more aspects of food and drug, it remained one body. We needed to break it into the Food Safety Administration and the Drug Safety Administration. We could do that now, but I think it’s too late, they’d be in cahoots anyway.

  ANYWAY, I’m ranting… my husband is rubbing off on me 😉 What we’ve got going on now is “hey, this chemically engineered stuff causes <insert ailment here>. But wait, we just gave the OK on a new drug for that ailment, so if we put it in the food, we’ll sell more drugs. PAYDAY!!!! WooHoo!!!”

  I’d better stop here before this gets too out of control. The point of this story was supposed to be that’s it’s difficult to eat right in today’s world, and that I’m making an effort to feed my family well so we can continue to be (or in my case, become) rational and free thinking individuals.


The Village Idiots Wife
This has Been an Article by The Village Idiots Wife… The Names have been changed to protect the Coconut Heads.

 

  I do have one more word of advice, whether you want it or not: don’t drink the water. We use reverse osmosis…it gets at least 99% of the fluoride out.

 

6 thoughts on “Umm… Is the FDA trying to kill us?”

  2. Sounds about right to me. Only I would add that another problem would be that
    CEO’s of the food and drug companies get picked to head the FDA. Then as soon
    After they make their toxic product legal, they go back to the company. CONFLICT
    OF INTEREST………ANYONE, ANYONE??

  3. “CONFLICT
    OF INTEREST………ANYONE, ANYONE??”

    Unfortunately Most Everyone is too strung out and zonked on weird meds in order to manage their ill heath brought on by eating chemically tainted food to be paying attention to anything more complex than Reality TV.

  4. I agree, however as a student working on a term paper on the FDA all I seem to find is just public opinion and nothing to back it up with. Here is just a tidbit of my paper:

    “Watch me as I pull this rabbit out of my hat ….Padoofa”

    PDUFA which is known as The Prescription Drug User Fee Act became a law in 1992.

    This law makes it possible for the FDA to collect fees from pharmaceutical companies filing new drug applications. Let’s make this clear to my reader that “PDUFA” was created because the pharmaceutical companies had complaints that the “drug approvals were taking too long”. The FDA has gone on record and stated that they are “under staffed” and “ill funded” to accommodate the new applications in a speedy fashion. The FDA can take the time and spend millions of “publics” money to file suit against local farmers for selling “raw milk” but it does not have the resources to accommodate new applications? According to the FDA and its chairman Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. in a report intended for congress and the president himself, she states that 86 new drug applications were received and of those 86 applications 90% of the applications were handled in a timely fashion. With the “standard” application time of 10 months handling time and the “priority” applications a 6 month handling/processing time. She also states that a total of 86 applications were filed in 2010 at a record low. (source; The FDA 2010 Commissioners performance report for the President of the united States of America). Now is the time for some tricky math and I will ask my reader to have some patience with me. Simple math of 86 new drug applications at the cost of drugs requiring “clinical data” is $1,841,500 and or new drugs not requiring “clinical data” is $920,750. This leads us to a total of approximately $529,276,543 of all fees collected for new drug applications to PDUFA. Now we come to the big finish PDUFA is claiming that its total expenses for the year of 2010 including rent, travel etc. are $573,258,400. Oh my that would mean they are in the “hole/red” for 2010. Trying to ensure I “dot my I’s and cross my T’s” I went to the public website to make my own calculations. My reader can easily go to the FDA website and search for the article named as Obligation of User Fee Revenues (FY 2010 PDUFA). When I saw the totals for rent, travel and the box marked other I nearly threw up. Then my eyes lead to the “rent” total and it read “rent for the year of 2009 was $20,893,636 and it increased to a total of $26,801,316 for the year of 2010. Yes you heard me correctly a six million dollar increase for one year. That is an average rent per month at 223,000.00 (two hundred and twenty three thousand dollars). When reading this one might find themselves thinking “whom are they renting from”? According to the FDA its number of PDUFA “fulltime employees” in 2004 was a total of 2,503 (two thousand five hundred and three persons). (source; White Paper Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA): Adding Resources and Improving Performance in FDA Review of New Drug Applications Executive Summary 2010). Let’s be generous and say that even though we are in a rescission they now have 2,600 employees as growth of a new agency is very important to this economy. For the record there have been no reports of an increase of employees but I am one that likes to give the benefit of the doubt. Now back to that trusty public report of PDUFA’s expenses which states that “personal compensation and benefits” for the year of 2010 totaled $361,264,217. Getting out my calculator if you divide the amount of employees by the amount paid out in compensation this averages out to approximately 138,000.00 per person (one hundred and thirty thousand dollars). On a side note I found myself stopping my paper to fill out an employee application as I am sure someone such as me finishing up her Master’s Degree in Legal studies will surely be considered for a position. I would like to conclude this portion of my findings by saying “abracadabra presto change O PDUFA ……paadoufa”.

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