will toxic chemicals now be investigated?

 I am pro vaccine for routine vaccines since I saw these diseases kill children in Africa, and even saw some very sick cases in the USA before MMR etc was available.  (and saw measles deaths measles encephalitis, and Fetal Rubella syndrome)....Cost benefit ratio is important.

As for autism: I didn't see a lot on the reservation (lots of FAS) and suspect a lot of kids who 60 years ago would have been called retarded and put into institutions are now home, and hey, Retard is a bad word but autism, after the movie Rain Man, is more acceptable to middle class parents....

 but after the Dengue vaccine debacle here in the Philippines, and after the covid coverups and irrational insistance of giving it to low risk kids, such things do need to be discussed.

We grow organic rice, and both our brown rice business and Joy's working with the government to grow organic food in nearby (and very poor) Bulacan in a coop recognizes this is the healthy way to eat.

But in the meanwhile, I see junk food increasingly advertised on TV etc. and sold in kiosks for snacks. Due to soy sauce and patis, the high blood pressure problem is widespread and has been a problem for years. The decrease in stomach cancer in the US is because chemicals displaced smoking fish and meat, but it is still common in places like Japan.

But as for diabetes: Yes this is a problem. And it is dietary: The Pima Indians have the highest rate of diabetes in the US, but it is rare in their Mexican cousins who eat a traditional diet. Which is why a lot of our outreach to diabetic patients in the Objibwe (who also have a high rate of diabetes) is about dietary changes. The locals blame commodities: Government saw severe malnutrition (and people dying of TB and infectious disease due to low protein diet) so gave them high fat high protein commodities. Voila, thirty precent diabetes rate and huge adults (both tall and obese).

I am not totally opposed to food additives but junk food? that is bad capitalism.

And I left practice 20 years ago so am not up to date on a lot of this: I suspect the increase in junk food consumption is because single mothers or mothers too tired to cook from scratch after being forced to work 40 hours a week to survive.

Sigh.

I have written elsewhere about plastics and herbicides and pesticides maybe inducing metabolic syndrome (pre diabetes) in folks with this gene (which is why AmerIndians and Mexicans have such a high rate of obesity).

But remember: get rid of all these things and you have people with low grade malnutrition who die of infectious diseases. So do you use a diet that makes young people strong but they die of diabetes at age 50, or do you go back to expensive natural food, stay at home moms who know how to prepare and even have backyard gardetns, or what?

and for the third world, will getting rid of chemicals just result in food being so expensive that famines will result? (organic rice is labor intensive and costs more).

I was in Liberia when they increased the price of rice, and left two days before the army overthrew the president and there were riots all over the place. SriLanka collapsed when they went organic. And part of the blame for Syria's horrific unreported civil war was a drought that made farmers flee to the cities.

To me this is not an either or proposition; And you need a conversation about this. So having RFK join Trumpieby might result in interesting discussions areund the dinner table.

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update: