Herban Sprawl

Lured by two yummy samples, I picked up a copy of Cooking Light. While at SUUSI, I was thumbing through it, looking for the two recipes so that I could plan for making them, when I was struck by something really frightening.

I began ripping out the ads for prescription medicines. Not including the one sided ads or the half page ads that had recipes on their pages, there were something like ten or twelve pharmaceutical ads. Each was as chock full of dire warnings as the next.

I faithfully read a column in our paper that is written by a doctor in Patrick County, VA. He has much to say about our broken health care system, as does our former doctor. From my point of view, it’s so broken it’s an embarrassment. Part of the reason is the pharmaceutical industry, and the amount of advertising to non-medical personnel pretty much verifies the fact that they lack any amount of common decency and will dupe the public whenever they deem it necessary in order to insure their profit margin, which is considerable.

This also served as a reminder to me as to why I never buy that magazine. I had a bunch of freebies several years ago, and I tossed them because I got tired of wading through the prescription ads. I also realized that they really weren’t the healthy magazine they made themselves out to be. People who cook from scratch have a sixth sense about what constitutes a truly good recipe, and those of us who don’t use packaged foods are pickier than most. Nothing impressed me much, except the amount of prescription ads and faulty information regarding good health.

So the lesson I learned is that Americans are dumb. They will read those ads and rush to their doctors to request medications they may or may not need. And American doctors are dumb enough to prescribe these chemicals without enough long-term information to guide their decisions. I’ve also learned that if you wait long enough, you will find a study that shows just how dangerous some of these medications really are. Look at how many of them have been approved by a very flawed FDA, and look at how many of them have been taken off the shelves.

Don’t tell me the problem is trial lawyers getting extremely high compensation for their clients – if they weren’t able to convince juries that Big Pharma is the culprit, those damages would never have been awarded. Juries, like the rest of us, are tired of being duped by corporate America. Witness the cigarette situation. To add insult to injury, under the clever guidance of the Bush administration, the penalties corporations such as the Big Pharma leaders are made to pay have been capped. Heaven forbid the shareholders get a smaller piece of the pie because the company they invested in turned out to be greedy crooks. The chemicals touted for a high cholesterol reading are probably more dangerous than the condition itself! I may have driven poor Mr. Frauens crazy with my inability to do chemical equations, but I did learn a little something about chemistry!

That said, I am still going to make the cherry coffeecake, but not with fat free sour cream because that substance is utterly awful and not necessarily healthy. Certain fats are essential for a decent product so why bother if it won’t be yummy?