Germs first. More specifically, the microbes that we can’t live without. Michael Pollan offers another fascinating read in Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs. Further confirmation that grandma knew best.
Between the combination of the western diet that includes a high percentage of food-like substances and our modern-living through chemistry, we’re killing off all the good germs with the bad. Or the good germs are collateral damage of “our way of life.” (Leading one man with severe allergies to seek an extreme “cure”. Gross but only a bit more so than the fecal transplant treatment being done by a few physicians in special situations.)
Now on to Dirty Medicine by Katherine Eban in “Fortune.” Did you know that:
…More than 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients for all U.S. drugs now come from overseas, as do 40% of finished pills and capsules.
I didn’t. Is it reasonable to assume that those drugs are as safe as crayons and girls jewelry from China (both tainted with lead)? Or baby formula and dog food with melamine? (The black market for US produced baby formula is strong in China.)
The US FDA is no more equipped to oversee the food and drugs grown and manufactured around the globe than the IRS is able to manage a flood of scam 501(c)(4) applications. Just at the floodgates to “free trade” began opening in the 1990s, this country also streamlined government by cutting back on all those pesky bureaucratic regulators. But who cares when we can consume more and more because everything is now so much cheaper? Well, everything except healthcare which despite all the cheap generic drugs that we can now get, the total cost just keeps going up.