The Drugging Of America Summarized In 19 Mind-Altering Facts

"There's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. " Aldous Huxley

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/15/2014 22:47 -0500

 

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The American Dream blog,
The American people are the most drugged people in the history of the planet.  Illegal drugs get most of the headlines, but the truth is that the number of Americans that are addicted to legal drugs is far greater than the number of Americans that are addicted to illegal drugs.  As you will see below, close to 70 percent of all Americans are currently on at least one prescription drug.  In addition, there are 60 million Americans that “abuse alcohol” and 22 million Americans that use illegal drugs.  What that means is that almost everyone that you meet is going to be on something.  That sounds absolutely crazy but it is true.
We are literally being drugged out of our minds.  In fact, as you will read about below, there are 70 million Americans that are taking “mind-altering drugs” right now.  If it seems like most people cannot think clearly these days, it is because they can’t.  We love our legal drugs and it is getting worse with each passing year.  And considering the fact that big corporations are making tens of billions of dollars peddling their drugs to the rest of us, don’t expect things to change any time soon.  The following are 19 statistics about the drugging of America that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 An astounding 70 million Americans are taking legal mind-altering drugs right now.
#2 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors wrote more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants during 2010.
#3 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug.  An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.
#4 Americans spent more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs during 2013.
#5 According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month.
#6 There are 60 million Americans that “abuse alcohol”.
#7 According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 22 million Americans use illegal drugs.
#8 Incredibly, more than 11 percent of all Americans that are 12 years of age or older admit that they have driven home under the influence of alcohol at least once during the past year.
#9 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is an unintentional drug overdose death in the United States every 19 minutes.
#10 In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.
#11 According to the CDC, approximately three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the United States because of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs.
#12 According to Alternet, “11 of the 12 new-to-market drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration were priced above $100,000 per-patient per-year” in 2012.
#13 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.
#14 Many of these antidepressants contain warnings that “suicidal thoughts” are one of the side effects that should be expected.  The suicide rate for Americans between the ages of 35 and 64 rose by close to 30 percent between 1999 and 2010.  The number of Americans that are killed by suicide now exceeds the number of Americans that die as a result of car accidents every year.
#15 In 2010, the average teen in the United States was taking 1.2 central nervous system drugs.  Those are the kinds of drugs which treat conditions such as ADHD and depression.
#16 Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are.
#17 A shocking Government Accountability Office report discovered that approximately one-third of all foster children in the United States are on at least one psychiatric drug.
#18 A survey conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that more than 15 percent of all U.S. high school seniors abuse prescription drugs.
#19 It turns out that dealing drugs is extremely profitable.  The 11 largest pharmaceutical companies combined to rake in approximately $85,000,000,000 in profits in 2012.
In America today, doctors are trained that there are just two potential solutions to any problem.  Either you prescribe a pill or you cut someone open.  Surgery and drugs are pretty much the only alternatives they offer us.
And an endless barrage of television commercials have trained all of us to think that there is a “pill for every problem”.
Are you in pain?
Just take a pill.
Are you feeling blue?
Just take a pill.
Do you need a spark in your marriage?
Just take a pill.
And most Americans assume that all of these pills are perfectly safe.
After all, the government would never approve something that wasn’t safe, right?
Sadly, what most Americans don’t realize is that there is a revolving door between big pharmaceutical corporations and the government agencies that supposedly “regulate” them.  Many of those that are now in charge of our “safety” have spent their entire careers peddling legal drugs to all of us.
We have become a nation of drugged out zombies, and it is all perfectly legal.  The funny thing is that many of these “legal drugs” have just slightly different formulations from their “illegal” counterparts.
If more Americans understood what they were actually taking, would that cause them to stop?
Perhaps some would, but for the most part Americans are totally in love with their drugs and giving them up would not be easy.
Just ask anyone that has tried.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-15/drugging-america-summarized-19-mind-altering-facts#comment-4440153

Jane Says: Sugar Isn't Addictive—but You Can Eat It Like an Addict

Understanding why we crave sugar, sometimes to excess, is more complicated than comparing it to drugs.

  By Jane Lear

Jane Lear was on staff at 'Gourmet' for almost 20 years.

“Are sweets addictive?”

 

—Erica Kern

 

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I should be opening a Maison du Chocolat box instead of Pandora’s box, but never mind. With the hand-in-hand prevalences of obesity and diabetes on the increase throughout the United States and the rest of the world, the scientific validity of food addiction—in particular, sugar addiction—is on the radar of every researcher who is trying to discover why millions of people pig out to the point where they develop life-threatening illnesses.
Our brains depends on a constant supply of glucose to function, so it’s no surprise that sugars in carbohydrate-rich foods have always been a part of the human diet. Scientists have long known that an innate preference for sweet-tasting foods is evident in infants and children around the globe; many think this characteristic arose because for millions of years, sweetness (i.e., ripeness) indicated edibility. Whereas fiber, for instance, was abundant in our ancestral environments, “it is extremely plausible...that we crave sugar and not fiber because we evolved in an environment where ripe fruit was both nutritious and in short supply,” wrote evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk in Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. “Seeking it out meant gaining calories that in turn made it more likely the seeker would have enough nutrition to survive and reproduce, passing along his or her cravings. Nowadays, in a world full of processed sugar in everything from ketchup to Mars bars, this eagerness to consume sweets backfires....”
And how. Fatty liver, high blood pressure, gastroesophageal reflux, orthopedic problems, marked insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, and emotional problems related to weight are among the woes cited by David Ludwig, M.D., director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, in The New England Journal of Medicine, and he was writing about kids.
Even though the term “food addiction” has been loosely used for decades to mean a strong preference or habit, can food really be as addictive as drugs or nicotine? After all, we don’t need drugs or nicotine to live (in fact, if they're given up, our lives markedly improve), but we need food, just as we need air to breathe. As far as sugar is concerned, self-diagnosed addicts feed their habit with cake, candy, cookies, doughnuts, ice cream, and so on. You would think they could satisfy their cravings instead with tangerines, bananas, grapes, watermelon, or mangoes, which are among the fruits highest in sugar and are healthier, to boot; in a July 2013 piece published by Ludwig in The Journal of the American Medical Association, he cited studies that showed increased fruit consumption is linked to lower body weight and a lower risk of obesity-associated diseases. But clearly it’s not that simple.
Leaving aside the food police’s current narrow focus on fructose (see the link above), for space reasons, let’s cut to the chase: the processed-food industry, with its sugar-salt-fat trifecta and principle of sensory-specific satiety. “The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos—owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating,” wrote New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss in “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” published in the Times Magazine about a year ago. The piece was based on Moss’ book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, a must-read for anyone who wonders why food corporations don’t have our best interests at heart.

Last year, a research team led by Ludwig conducted a small but very interesting study that demonstrates how one particular dietary factor (the glycemic index, a measure of how a food affects blood sugar levels) that is distinct from sweetness or calories can trigger the pleasure center of the brain and encourage overeating. They conducted MRIs of 12 overweight men after they consumed two kinds of milk shake: The only difference was that one contained rapidly digesting (high-glycemic) carbohydrates, and the other, slowly digesting (low-glycemic) carbohydrates. Among the findings, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in June 2013, was that after participants consumed the high-glycemic index milk shake, they experienced an initial surge in blood sugar levels, followed by a sharp crash four hours later. That decrease in blood glucose was associated with excessive hunger and intense activation of the nucleus accumbens, a critical brain region involved in addictive behaviors.
According to the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, which created and published the Yale Food Addiction Scale, “behavioral markers of addiction, such as continued use despite negative consequences and unsuccessful attempts to cut down, are evident in problematic eating patterns. Additionally, neurobiological research has identified similarities in the way the brain responds to drugs and highly palatable foods. Finally, animal models have identified marked similarities between sugar consumption and drug addiction. These findings have led to the hypothesis that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process in susceptible individuals.”
Animal models have their limitations: One is that rodents metabolize fructose differently from humans, as Scientific American pointed out. But what makes some individuals more susceptible than others? I reached out to Nicole Avena, neuroscientist at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center at Columbia University and coauthor of Why Diets Fail. “So many scientists are trying to figure out what causes some people to occasionally use drugs (or indulge in a brownie), while for others it leads to a spiral of distress and addiction,” she replied. “...It is most likely that multiple factors contribute. Some people may have a genetic propensity toward addiction (meaning that they have perturbations in certain genes, such as the dopamine gene) that make them more likely to develop an addiction (be it to drugs or maybe even food). There is also the environment, which promotes addiction to food (via cues, advertising, and the social norms that make it acceptable to eat food pretty much everywhere and anywhere). It may be that some stressor causes addiction to ensue in people who are genetically prone, or who have been severely affected by the environment, or some combination of them both.”
More evidence is needed before food addiction can be formally recognized as a mental disorder, and that was a hot topic at last October’s European College of Neuropsychopharmacy (ECNP) Congress, in Barcelona, Spain. Speaking at the conference, Suzanne Dickson, professor of neuroendocrinology at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden, noted that in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a new class of eating disorder (binge eating disorder, or BED) and behavioral addiction (pathological gambling) is recognized. “Certain obese individuals appear to express addiction-like behavior, e.g., BED,” said Dickson. Although some 10 to 20 percent of obese individuals suffer from BED, it is not a major cause of obesity, and, in fact, often occurs in people of normal weight, she added. “... in man, there is no solid evidence that any food, any ingredient, any combination of ingredients, or additive (with the exception of caffeine) causes us to become addicted to it.... Still, if we move away from food and concentrate on the individual, we can see that certain obese individuals express addiction-like behaviors."
The previous year, a London conference titled “Food Addiction—What is the Evidence?,” organized by the British Nutrition Conference, was chaired by John Blundell, professor of psychobiology at the University of Leeds, who is concerned that the term “food addiction” is an oversimplified explanation for a very complex set of behaviors in millions of people. The reasons people reach for food, after all, can run the gamut from quelling low blood sugar or emotional trauma to coping with stress, frustration, loneliness, or boredom.
Bucking a culture in which overconsumption on all fronts is not just legitimized but celebrated is far from easy. Factor in a reliance on processed foods, a largely sedentary lifestyle, and the human brain, with its highly functioning reward system, and it’s no surprise our collective waistline is expanding. But prevalence rates show that the obesity epidemic cannot be fully attributed to addictive eating.
You wouldn’t know that, though, from the media, which fans the flames at every opportunity. In the matter of high-fructose corn syrup, for instance, read how public opinion trumps data in “Sweet and Sour: The Media Decided Fructose Was Bad for America, but Science Had Second Thoughts,” in Forbes. Another particularly egregious example is the widespread coverage of a Connecticut College study suggesting that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine in rats. All the news reports were based on one press release about a study that hasn’t been vetted by the peer-review process and published in a scholarly journal. I found that so frustrating I practically inhaled not one but three clementines. They tasted like candy, only better.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/02/12/sugar-addiction?cmpid=foodinc-fb