Of course, the idea that antioxidants are useless for preventing disease is as absurd as thinking the Earth is the center of the universe, or that pigs can fly. Yet this is the position being promoted by the press today in blatant abandonment of all rational thought. To state that vitamins don’t work on women who don’t take them is classic doublespeak ripped right out of the pages of the novel 1984. You might as well say that pharmaceuticals don’t work on people who don’t take them, either.

I wonder why they even bothered to give antioxidants to the participating women at all. If you’re going to count the results of all the women who don’t take the supplements, why not simply launch the study, give vitamins to no one, then announce the conclusion that vitamins don’t work? This could create a whole new way to conduct clinical research: Track the health results in people who have taken nothing! Think of what we could accomplish in medical science by following this model — we could test thousands of different substances by simply giving them to no one, then declaring whatever results we wish to notice!

Ultimately, that’s what’s going on here anyway. Researchers are simply declaring whatever they want with no real regard to scientific truth or common sense. Much of medical science today has become a self-reinforcing exercise in pro-pharma dogma. Listening to drug-company funded researchers talk about nutritional science is a lot like listening to President Bush talk about peace: There is simply no connection with reality.

There is no health announcement too absurd for the mainstream media to print. If the American Medical Association declared water to be harmful to human health, the media would run the story without asking a single question. If the FDA declared all vitamins to be toxic and announced a nationwide ban on all dietary supplements, the mainstream media would fall right into step, parroting whatever scientific half-truths the FDA was spouting at that particular moment. If the American Cancer Society declared that sunlight caused cancer and that the citizens should avoid sunlight and cover their skin with toxic chemical creams to block out the sun, the press would gladly run with that story, too. Come to think of it, they already have: That’s the story on sunscreen, and just about everything you read in the mainstream media about sunlight and sunscreen is blatantly false.

There are so many falsehoods routinely printed in the mainstream media these days that it has become a rarity to find any piece of truth. From fudged war casualty numbers to details about health care in America today, the media has proven itself incapable of printing anything resembling factual truth. Instead, it has become a pro-war, pro-corporation, pro-disease, pro-market, profit-minded mouthpiece for the corrupt elite who now run this country.