Category Archives: Corruption

There is an expression which never ceases to annoy, and that people sometimes use as a replacement for actual information.

It goes, “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence”.

Sounds a lot more clever than it actually is. And if the last 3 years has taught us anything at all, there is plenty of both to go around.

An expression we do like, is that “whenever someone offers you 2 choices, they are trying to sell you one of them.” The point being that there is pretty much never just two choices. And in the case of many of the events that concern this site, there are at least three, and the third is corruption.

How would this work. Well, you have malice, where companies who make products that they know have not been properly tested and will probably kill and maim a lot of people, manage to corrupt regulatory bodies by offering them fat jobs down the road if they approve these untested products. And then you have more malice by government agencies who know they are not properly tested but mandate them at the threat of losing everything you have if you don’t take them, combined with a healthy dose of corruption as they themselves appear to be profiting directly off the money they pay with national treasuries to those companies. So malice, plus corruption. The incompetence is a matter of definition. All the pharmacists who knew it was a bad product, they were more afraid of the immediate consequences of not pushing the stuff the way the governments demanded. So how does fear factor in? Fear is another variable altogether perhaps.

Doctors? Well they took an oath to exactly protect the public from this sort of thing. So have to go with corruption or incompetence on that one. A liberal dose of fear as well. Some of them may have genuinely believed these were good and important products. But nothing makes it OK to make someone take a medicine they don’t want. Because you never know who is right down the road and frankly, the simplest and best definition for freedom we feel, is the most basic right to do one’s own risk assessment. This was the entire point of the Nuremberg trials.

And now we come to this: CNN-Zero-calorie sweetener linked to heart attack and stroke, study finds

A sugar replacement called erythritol – used to add bulk or sweeten stevia, monkfruit and keto reduced-sugar products –has been linked to blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and death, according to a new study.

“The degree of risk was not modest,” said lead study author Dr. Stanley Hazen, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention at the Cleveland ClinicLerner Research Institute.

People with existing risk factors for heart disease, such as diabetes, were twice as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke if they had the highest levels of erythritol in their blood, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

“If your blood level of erythritol was in the top 25% compared to the bottom 25%, there was about a two-fold higher risk for heart attack and stroke. It’s on par with the strongest of cardiac risk factors, like diabetes,” Hazen said.

Additional lab and animal research presented in the paper revealed that erythritol appeared to be causing blood platelets to clot more readily. Clots can break off and travel to the heart, triggering a heart attack, or to the brain, triggering a stroke. […]

“It’s become the sweetheart of the food industry, an extremely popular additive to keto and other low-carb products and foods marketed to people with diabetes,” he added. “Some of the diabetes-labeled foods we looked at had more erythritol than any other item by weight.”

Erythritol is also the largest ingredient by weight in many “natural” stevia and monkfruit products, Hazen said. Because stevia and monkfruit are about 200 to 400 times sweeter than sugar, just a small amount is needed in any product. The bulk of the product is erythritol, which adds the sugar-like crystalline appearance and texture consumers expect. […]

To confirm the findings, Hazen’s team tested another batch of blood samples from over 2,100 people in the United States and an additional 833 samples gathered by colleagues in Europe through 2018. About three-quarters of the participants in all three populations had coronary disease or high blood pressure, and about a fifth had diabetes, Hazen said. Over half were male and in their 60s and 70s.

For those who have watched the series, Dopesick, or have lived through the past 3 years without a blindfold on, we can see that major regulatory bodies can alter their findings to allow big money to poison the public if it pays well enough.

Maybe its time to scrap the FDA and whoever or whatever else approves products like this above, and start over with a system that has transparency and real punitive measures for people who trade their authority for position or money.

Meanwhile, if you have products at home with erythritol in it, maybe its time to take it back to the store with a print out of the article and demand a full refund. That might encourage retail food stores to not purchase products that contain it. Or at least force the manufacturers to change the name of it and keep shoving it at us.