The greatest threat to American safety is not Osama Bin Laden -- it's obesity.
That is the premise of "Killer at Large," a shocking new documentary on DVD from the Disinformation company.
In it, pundits, celebrities such as Bill Clinton and dietary authorities describe the psycho-social causes of rampant obesity -- and diseases it causes, killing Americans with government complicity.
"There are children showing up in health clinics who are overfed, they're overweight, eating diets of fast food exclusively, who have nutritional diseases like rickets, things we thought we had banished a long time ago," says author Michael Pollan.
The film begins with Brooke Bates of Austin, Texas, who had liposuction at age 12 when she weighed 218 pounds. She just wanted to be popular, and after years of diets that didn't work, her parents agreed to surgery.
Her surgeon removed 16 liters of fat from her body, shown in graphic detail. But that's not the scariest part.
When it was over, she was 35 pounds lighter. Six weeks later, another 10 pounds was removed with more lipo and a tummy tuck. At 13, she was down to 155, closer to normal.
But in short order, she had ballooned again and sought lapband surgery.
In the film, people with obesity-related diabetes show their severed limbs and sores that don't heal. In scene after scene, marketing to children is shown as a major cause of the problem.
Radio host Jim Hightower says the corporate/government elite after World War II moved to make food a corporate industry, with big financial rewards not to farmers but to business leaders. Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, told farmers to get big or get out. And corn became more valuable than gold.
The government role in obesity is made clear in an interview of Pollan with TV commentator Bill Maher.
Corn is in most processed foods -- corn syrup is in coffee, wine, TV dinners, canned fruit, McDonald's burgers, "it's even in the vitamins," Maher says.
Pollan notes, "The agricultural policy of this country is now captive of this corn complex.
"They give a farmer a check ... for every bushel he can grow, even though we have too much corn. And one of the reasons we're getting fat and have so many cases of diabetes is that we're eating too much highly processed corn. Largely high-fructose corn syrup.
"At the same time as we're having this health crisis in this country, the government is subsidizing the thing that's giving us this public health crisis. It's absolutely absurd."
Maher nails it down: "The (petroleum) oil goes into the fertilizer, which makes the corn, which goes into us, which makes us sick, and then we need the pharmaceutical industry (to treat illness).
"So the oil industry, the corn industry and the pharmaceutical industry, they're all killing us, and they're all making a lot of money. I know Bin Laden is a bad guy ... but he hasn't killed as many people as those three industries, has he?"
http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2009/04/16/entertainment/doc49e656f395afd699075196.txt
