Opinion: Prohibit the production of tobacco, and alcohol products. I just made more than a billion enemies, didn’t I? I would exempt from that red wine. I just made back millions of friends. Still the odds are against me…
This one is pretty easy to explain. The elements of harmful substances such as smoking, alcohol, street drugs, abused drugs, ill advised use of food preservatives, hormones and polluted air all can and do hurt our health. The breakdown:
• Alcohol: affects the nervous system such that it doesn’t function efficiently. That is in the short term. In the long term if ingested regularly then it will impair the body’s ability to absorb essential nutrients from the gastrointestinal tract with the subsequent ill effects that that will lead to. Another long term effect is transforming many body cells especially brain cells to where they are dependent on the availability of alcohol to be able to function. This will probably affect the availability of endorphins, serotonin, GABA et cetera, and hence the ugly picture of withdrawal from alcohol. Another long-term result of chronic alcohol intake is direct damage to certain organs especially the liver. No one is exempt from these effects. If you drink long enough and hard enough then you will pay for that with bad health. My exemption of red wine is because it contains cyanocobalamin, improves the blood pattern of cholesterol, and promotes absorption of essential minerals. This should be in moderation though. A rough guide would be not to exceed 4 oz (120 ml) daily. Don’t take this as a promotion though. If you don’t drink an alcoholic beverage now you don’t need to start.
• Street drugs: such as narcotics, cocaine and so on will shut down the body’s own system for producing endorphins and make the person reliant on these outside substances to have endorphins and other important chemicals in the body. Without endorphins our thought processes and moods will be very much down in the “dumps”. Here I am not even touching on all the dangerous agents and chemicals that come along with the process of recreational substance intake such as poisons, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) virus. Don’t forget – you're probably just making a rich evil person richer.
• Smoking: similar to above as far as endorphins are concerned. Cortisol is another hormone whose production is probably affected negatively by the nicotine dependence. Withdrawal can be hard with eventual weight gain. That it promotes cancer is beyond any doubt in my mind. Top above off with immediate lowering of oxygen in the blood, when you inhale smoke, which has its bad effects on the function of every cell in the body including those that are responsible for preventing cholesterol deposit inside artery walls. (More later.)
• Polluted air: similar to smoking but without the withdrawal and endorphin effect. Cancer here is a major concern.
• Hormones in food: most countries in the world don’t allow the use of hormones in their food production. The USA is one that does. Specifically I am talking about bovine somatotrophic hormone (BST). This hormone is injected into farm animals to make them bigger and produce more products such as milk. This substance is supposedly not absorbed significantly via the human gastrointestinal tract. That is fine, but what about its local effects and what about the other substances that will be present in products like milk. In the latter instance I am talking about insulin growth factors. The villi size of the intestinal tract of rats tripled in size in two weeks when given above hormone orally. (Villi are the absorptive structures inside the gastrointestinal tract). It’s logical to assume that humans ingesting similar substances (which will be present in the beef, pork and dairy products) will have a significant increase in size of their villi also. Let’s see now – increasing the size of tissue structures unnaturally, may that not lead to more or worse cancer? The adult population in the USA is the most overweight in the world at the time of writing of these words. This dubious ranking became much more entrenched after the use of hormones in the USA in the decade of the nineties. Let’s see again – more absorptive structures, might there not be a tie in with people’s weight gain? I think we should hold off on the use of these substances until more proof is available for them being safe in the short and the long term.
• Hygiene: avoiding unhygienic environments and conditions is well known to promote good health.
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