Pulse Beat

Moneylife Digital Team 26 April 2016

Strange Bedfellows

There is a strange new love between the Amazon Forest loggers’ mafia which has destroyed the best part of Amazon for greed and the greediest pharmaceutical lobby in the US. Money and greed for money could bring strange bedfellows together! The pharma lobby thinks that the Amazon and such large forests will have to be preserved because they could harbour some of the most potent drugs for the future, since the chance of discovering something new in the chemistry laboratory is tough, dangerous and expensive. They did taste blood with the discovery of vincristine for cancer treatment from Vinca Rosea found there; we have it in India abundantly. They have befriended the forest mafia showing them that these newfound treasures could be much more lucrative compared to simple timber. Strangely, they also want to preserve some of the forest-dwellers who have no contact with the outside (‘civilised’) world as they could have some of the best remedies for longevity and good health!

Cancer and Chemotherapy

In a survey done in 2013 in the US, 75% of the doctors said that they would not take chemotherapy themselves! Sadly, as reported by News Target, “Statistics on chemotherapy-caused deaths are difficult to come by, because hospitals and oncology physicians always assign the blame to ‘cancer’.” How convenient that is—even if the eventual cause of death is infection that is caused or aggravated by chemotherapy-induced immune system weakness, the official death diagnosis is blamed on the cancer itself.

Pure, White and Deadly

This is the title of an interesting book written by a professor of nutrition at London, in the 1960s when I was a student there, at the peak of the fat theory of atherosclerosis, riding the crest of its success wave. Professor John Yudkin was a brilliant scientist who came from a poor background as his parents, both Jews, were thrown out of Russia in the early part of the last century. John had a small house in one of the poorer localities in the midlands in England. With great difficulty, his parents managed to send him to a grammar school as he was very bright. John then earned his scholarship to Cambridge and there was no looking back. He became a professor at the London University.

Since the end of World War II, Europe slowly became prosperous and people could buy good food for themselves. So, in Europe, consumption of fat went up, along with so many other things, sugar included. John found that the same relationship holds good for sugar consumption. He wrote a popular book Pure, White and Deadly which got him so much publicity that it attracted the wrath of his colleagues who believed that fat alone is the factor behind obesity. He was forced to retire.

The University did a smoke-screen cover-up by giving him a small room in an old unused building in their campus to do his research and replaced him by a junior professor who was one of the leaders in fat theory. John Yudkin simply disappeared from the scene. I have been writing and talking about his book over the years and showing how fallacious the fat theory was. Now, I have been proven right and the American bosses have done a U-turn on the fat theory.

I used to think that such suppression of facts occurs only in India. My own University had condemned me for opposing oral polio drops for malnourished children by going to the press saying that I had forgotten my medicine and no one should believe me. They were better than the London University but the disease is prevalent all over the world! I am happy to see that they are now giving injectable polio vaccine in India, a good 15 years after my struggle to stop oral polio.

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