it’s particularly reprehensible to persuade people with promises of paradise to drag other people to their deaths as living weapons for the sake of faith.
Armed conflicts between the different Christian communities and the crusades against Islam in ancient Palestine are a thing of the past. Yet they’re threatening to erupt again in the Irish conflict in the course of the Brexit.
But the focus should be on the discussions between the spiritual leaders of the various religious communities and atheist groups in order to counteract the abuse of religious views and to promote interpersonal tolerance.
Organic – What’s That?
Organic – is in most cases nothing logical: First of all, you have to know that toxicity thresholds are in reality often set in a quasi arbitrary (!) manner. Sweden has high dioxin thresholds for Baltic fish. The dioxin content in the Baltic Sea is high. Organic chickens are contaminated more with dioxin than battery-caged chickens. But even this dosage can be completely neglected because nowadays everything can measured, even micro traces. These can always be found if you look hard enough.
Conversely, some people think that even the smallest amount of poison is harmful. A 2017 special issue of the German issue of “Spectrum of Science”, entitled “The Mysterious World of Poisons”, had questioned this: According to the current state of science, minimal amounts of poison have a positive effect. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that children who grow up with cats, dogs and horses have fewer allergies. Hydrogen sulfide has a healing effect. If you consume too much, it’ll be poisonous. So it’s not as simple as it seems. People have learned to live with poisons. Caffeine is the stomach poison of the coffee plant. It protects against intestinal cancer and has a mood-lifting effect.
It’s unscientific to claim the existence of “natural” and “unnatural” poisons: When the chemical formula is identical, the substance is too: The origin is irrelevant. The cultivated plants have to be sprayed with some kind of poison because the poisons that originally protected the plants against insects and fungi were “bred out” of them. So, they have to be applied externally (see also chapter “Grain, Corn and Organic Potatoes”).
That’s why prehistoric people ate much more meat because it doesn’t require stomach poisons. Most animals have other mechanisms to protect themselves from being eaten.
The advantage of organic products may be that poisons aren’t used as carelessly as in conventional cultivation. However, the disadvantage is that instead of spraying “artificial poisons”, things like copper are sprayed instead. This sounds more “natural” than “wicked chemistry”. In the long run, however, the soils will become enriched with the heavy metal copper. Metals are elements that, unlike hydrocarbons, i.e. modern poisons, can’t be broken down at all. Is this “idea” really that good?
A gastric and intestinal therapeutic agent is currently under attack. It contains celandine as its active ingredient. It’s a “natural” substance, but may, in some cases, lead to liver failure. This was known, but not mentioned on the package insert [43]. The Bayer company (producer of Roundup) probably wanted to sell it as a “natural medicine”.
You should beware of foods like stevia, soy or goji berry the next time you visit your local health food store. Their effects aren’t conclusive and humans have not had time to adapt to these substances during their evolution.
By the way, “Kamut”, a cereal that you can buy in any health food store, is a patented wheat. There’s nothing “primordial” about it because if grain were primordial it couldn’t be grown at all, as the yield would be so miserable that every organic farmer would be forced to file for bankruptcy. Organic knows marketing, too. But this does not mean that this grain is somehow “bad”.
Poison – What’s That?
The dose makes the poison. It’s a well-known saying. Dihydrogen monoxide can also be fatal, although the lethal dose isn’t recorded anywhere. It’s readily available and considered completely non-toxic. When ingested in quantities over seven cubic decimeters, however, it can be fatal. This is especially true if you avoid the simultaneous intake of supposedly harmful sodium and chlorine ions.
Too high? Dihydrogen monoxide is also called H2O or, colloquially, “water”. If you drink too much water, the salts are flushed out of it and you suffer from “hyponatremia”. “Hypo” means “too little”. “Hyponatremia” thus means “too little sodium”. In extreme cases, this causes water to be stored in your lungs or brain (“edema”) and can lead to death. In 2015, a man who only drank tap water died this way during a heat triathlon.
An acquaintance used to drink about five liters of fluid each day. She fell down regularly – for years. A new family doctor prohibited her from drinking it and she stopped falling down. Unfortunately, even older people are often told that they have to “drink a lot of fluids”. When they fall down, they often suffer a fracture of their femoral neck, which often has fatal consequences in old age, especially since their weaker hearts have a hard time coping with the amounts of water.
Many poisons (hormones are something else) can be easily broken down by the adult body at moderate amounts as long as the organ (e.g. the liver) that breaks down these toxins isn’t damaged. Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt reached a very old age. I don’t want to know how many poisons he had absorbed in his lifetime from countinuous smoking. Cigarette smoke not only contains nicotine, but fine dust, tar and arsenic as well, not to mention nitrogen oxides. It’s therefore relatively difficult to poison smokers with arsenic because their bodies get used to it. These people are called “arsenic eaters”.
The raspberry is a rose plant. If you were to take a blender and examine it for poisons in the laboratory, its sale would be prohibited because it exceeds any poison thresholds [80]. Strange, isn’t it?
The subject of poisons is complex, both from a legislative and a chemical point of view. Actually, you need a chemistry degree to evaluate these. For example, the press wrote that glyphosate was discovered in milk and even in breast milk. An indignant outcry was the response. What I was told, however, was that’s there’s no way (i.e. no metabolism) that glyphosate can get into milk. The mistake, not to overexcite you, was in the detection method: it hadn’t detected glyphosate but its breakdown product, AMPA (aminomethylphosphonic acid). AMPA is an industrial cleaning agent as well. AMPA was detected in micro traces and was thought to come from glyphosate. Milk contains phosphorus as well (by the way, it has more phosphorus than Coca Cola, which is allegedly poisonous from the E150 dye). Hence, a measuring error may have possibly been involved. The detection methods had to be developed first.
How do you arrive at AMPA?
Normally – not at all. This crazy logic is stunning when it comes to abdominal fat: For years, people theorized that the fat that you ingest is deposited directly into the body as abdominal fat. But when you eat something, it first passes through the digestive tract (stomach, intestine) where it’s broken down by enzymes, absorbed by the intestinal wall, then enters the blood to be finally stored as abdominal fat when the energy isn’t required. There’s no metabolism of how glyphosate gets into milk because it would have to float around in the blood and then get into the milk from the mammary glands.
Meanwhile, glyphosate can, as far as I know, be detected directly. Since then, nothing has been detected in milk. No press release corrects these false reports.
As a “normal person”, you have to trust the press releases, which do not report that you can end up in hospital after two glasses of goji berry juice. The “normal” name of the goji berry is “common wolfberry”. That’s a bad sell, like the kiwi. When it began its triumphal march from New Zealand forty years ago, my father exclaimed: “I know that one”, then checked his “Parey” horticultural dictionary and stated: “You see – it’s called a prickly fruit!” A kiwi is a bird. It’s certainly edible, too. But that wouldn’t be politically correct.