Germany's Freefall

Understanding the above logic with the “health pills”, which is incomprehensible from today’s point of view, is necessary in order to understand the relativity of “a healthy diet”, which therefore doesn’t exist.

Rice Wafers

In 2015, rice wafers came under fire as they were shown to contain arsenic. Apparently, the process of expanding the rice makes the heavy metal bioavailable. The rice came from China. Rice wafers: Those are those round things that come in a stack of about fifteen pieces with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (4 inches). It’s a popular food for babies or toddlers. By the way, they taste just how I imagine cardboard tastes.

Even venereal diseases used to be combated with drugs containing heavy metals. Their antibiotic effect was used for this purpose. The drug was called “Salvarsan”. That was less than 100 years ago. Of course, people died during this therapy; many thousands more than what we would call a “side effect” today. Penicillin is used these days. Penicillin is, by the way, a mycotoxin or mold-poison.

Whether heavy metal usage is still commonplace in China or whether the metal in rice wafers occurs naturally is something I can’t judge. However, this is of no importance.

Conversely, when we examine the nematodes in fish it’s exciting to see how people can mutate into “thrill seekers”. You eat raw fish (Sushi) and then complain about fish tapeworms. Since you want to be hip, you are willing to take that risk. Normal people cook meals. This shows that today’s diet has nothing to do with “common sense”.

The highlight are “black smoothies”, which contains finely dispersed activated carbon. The inherent “logic” is obviously (?) derived from activated charcoal tablets, which bind toxins in acute cases of poisoning. How these activated carbons want to “know” which substances are toxins and which are nutrients is a mystery. Apparently, drinkers of this kind of smoothie apparently attribute more intelligence to them than to themselves.

Smoothies are a “modern” food. Bacteria live on every plant and on

every fruit. This isn’t bad because they protect themselves with their cell walls. Leaves often have a layer of wax, making it very hard for bacteria to penetrate. When you put everything into a mixer, the cell walls will break up allowing the bacteria to multiply quickly because the surface that these bacteria can attack has increased one thousandfold (again, the area rule applies here; math is the same everywhere). To keep the temperature low, you add ice because 10° Celsius (50° F) more will double their growth rate. In the middle of summer, a smoothie is thus a proven way to get food poisoning if you let it sit for a longer period.

Toxins in Food

Somehow, toxins are being continuously detected in food these days. Surely we can do without them, can’t we?

One thing is clear: Pests and fungi propagate better in monocultures than in the wild. That’s statistics – the distance to the next identical plant is shorter. What’s more, they have to reproduce in a reliable way. To do this, they have to make sure that their seeds ripen. Conversely, if they do not have this mechanism, these plants wouldn’t exist. The astronomer Harald Lesch says: “One shouldn’t be surprised that cat fur has holes where the eyes are”.

Plants have “built-in” mechanisms that prevent animals from eating their fruit prematurely. Some fruits have hard peels. Apples have a peel with a wax layer.11 Most, however, contain toxins, so-called “stomach poisons”.

Humans invented several methods to render these poisons harmless: e.g. when making sourdough, poisons are rendered harmless by bacteria. But the most important thing is: to cook them!12 Humans are clever, too: When cooking beans, the housewife pours away the soaking water. This gets rid of some of the poisons. She knows that beans are quite toxic.

Another part of these poisons is rendered harmless by cooking them. In the course of evolution, humans have accustomed themselves to the remaining poisons.

Of course, different peoples tolerate different amounts of poison. Some people aren’t poisoned by raw beans. They need to have a genetic defect to do this, and they eat this type of bean to prevent tropical diseases. There are people who die from these beans as well. Perhaps they would have died much earlier from the tropical disease. This is a pure optimization process that selects the least evil.

Then humans began to cultivate plants. They did this to increase the yield, but also to reduce the poisons inherent in the plants that prevent them from being eaten. This protection was then acquired by humans. People know that the bitter tips of cucumbers should be cut off. The same is true for zucchini. Bitter areas show that they’re toxic: A German amateur gardener accidentally killed himself a few years ago on his own home-grown zucchini: His wife had refused to eat the bitter soup and survived. That’s why regulations exist for the seeds. If toxic varieties are created, things can end up badly, as the amateur gardener demonstrated in his self-experiment. The case was reported by the press. Unfortunately, not on what something like this implies and what it means to our modern system.

Humans perceive the taste as “bitter” or unpleasant precisely because evolution has arranged things in such a way that humans can survive life’s struggle against poisons. If humans were to perceive poisons as sweet, then they would’ve died out long ago. Basically, no animal would ever think to say: “I'm going to eat this now because it tastes particularly nasty so I can get healthy.” Animals are smarter than humans.

Which isn’t to say that the system can overregulate itself sometimes. Experts and the people who write the rules also pretend to be on the safe side because they know what happens when you don’t write the provisiions correctly. I refer to the poisonous zucchini.

Now there is a perception that poisons, like the ones used by farmers, are bad and you have to do away with them entirely. How are plants supposed to “defend” themselves against predators? This is especially impossible because the stomach poisons have been bred out of them. Seen this way, insecticides and pesticides are necessary. By using modern technology, i.e. weather forecasting or other methods, it’s possible to minimize the use of poisons. Plants don’t have this option; they have to carry the poisons permanently with them because they don’t have a built-in weather forecasting computer.

It takes on religious traits when people want to use “natural poisons only”. They think that “naturally” extracted poisons are more harmless than the same poisons made from petroleum.

This is when you notice that the line of causality has been abandoned and that demons and gods have found their way back into modernity – post factually. Giordano Bruno probably would’ve never imagined, 420 years after being burned at the stake, that he would’ve been burned the same way by some people in order for them to practice their religion.

This nonsense becomes damaging to society when these same people get at each other’s throats: Normal people argue based on the current state of science and technology (which can change, too, but only within the valid laws of nature). Others do so according to the state of their religious convictions. Each only wants to discredit the other. Both sides nearly act the same.

During the Crusades, people were burned, murdered and raped in the name of Christianity. This doesn’t mean that the other religions are any better; just as all religions will at some time or another have to come to an end. But, no – with ours, the one we’ve got now, something like this doesn’t happen of course.

Meaning and Abuse of Religious Views

Religions provide valuable information on how the coexistence of people in the respective culture can proceed without conflict, as is the case with the 10 Commandments, for example. Furthermore, they serve to ensure the survival of the religious group. However, they’re also subject to a certain evolution. Might makes right here, too.

When it comes to the abuse of religious views, the arrogance of people who believe in God over non-believers or people of other faiths is currently in the spotlight. This attitude is pronounced among fanatical believers. This leads to their alleged right to subjugate and physically destroy unbelievers and people of other faiths. All you need to do is recall the persecution of Christians in Africa by Muslim extremist groups, the expulsion of Muslim minorities by the Buddhist Burmese, the constant clashes between Buddhists, Hindus in India, and Islamists and Hindus in Pakistan. Last but not least, there’s the perpetual conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, which always claims a large number of lives – all in the name of Allah.

Individual groups of non-believers (atheists) are not sparing in their arrogant remarks about believers who don’t regard the life of man as limited to any earthly existence. Atheist-oriented leaders have proven to be hostile to religion. For example, Stalin persecuted Christians, and Christians had to endure substantial disadvantages in East Germany.

However, 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.

The “Poison” Glyphosate

The German press reports that Monsanto was convicted of using glyphosate in America. That’s incorrect: Monsanto was convicted because the company failed to warn the American public in time about the dangers of “Roundup”.

Roundup contains glyphosate as the herbicidal active ingredient. According to Wikipedia, the lethal dose in rats is up to > 5 g per kilogram body weight.13 An 80 kg (176 lb) man would have to consume 400 g (almost 1 lb) to kill himself. In order for glyphosate to be better absorbed by the plant, it needs a wetting agent. The wetting agent, tallowamine, which is only found in the original, American Roundup, has a lethal dose of about 0.9 g per kilogram of body weight. It’s thus about six times more toxic than glyphosate itself.

It’s obvious that excessive use doesn’t make sense because the weeds will become resistant as well, like penicillin. Since glyphosate has a slight antibiotic effect, any excessive use will destroy soil life as well. But this is probably the case with any fertilizer. Glyphosate is an alternative to plowing. This, in turn, is not optimal for soil life either. No system is without its disadvantages.

The German Railway uses tons of glyphosate to keep its tracks free of weeds. It’s the last approved highly effective herbicide. But a problem crops up even here: Applying glyphosate to sealed surfaces isn’t allowed. For example, it’s prohibited to apply glyphosate to paved cycling paths, which develop slits through which a lot of weeds can grow, especially on street corners, which become hazardous when it rains. This increases the risk of falls for cyclists who are on the road in an eco-friendly manner. In track beds, however, glyphosate is only sprayed on the stones. The ban on applying glyphosate to sealed surfaces doesn’t apply here.

The opponents of glyphosate don’t ask what to use instead when it’s prohibited. Since about 2010, when the Monsanto patents expired, it had “become” a poison. In mid-2017, it was discovered that the Deutsche Bahn is its biggest single customer in Germany. On South Tyrolean cycle paths, the agent is used to suppress Mexican grass that destroys the asphalt surface. The choice here is between using glyphosate and re-asphalting the paths every fifteen or eight years – without glyphosate. German vacationers can be seen taking pictures of the apple orchards there. Often, no green stems can be found under these trees. It’s all sprayed away with glyphosate.

Glyphosate hasn’t killed a single person yet in Germany; the risk of cancer is theorized here without one single piece of evidence, although many other substances are considered “probably carcinogenic” as well, and hundreds of people had died from the insecticide E605 in the past.

Psychological Tricks and Manipulations

The following is an example of the methods being currently applied. Science is being misused since valid scientific results are mixed with opinions and psychological tricks. This can be seen in the case of the environmental protection association “Bund e.V.” when it discusses the subject “glyphosate” a.k.a. “Roundup”. The difference isn’t quite clear, which is probably intentional.

The Bund e.V. writes (April 2019):

»What is glyphosate? Glyphosate is the world’s best-selling weed killer and a so-called “total herbicide”. It kills any plant that has not been genetically engineered to survive its use as a herbicide.«

That’s not correct: plants do exist that are not genetically manipulated and don’t react to it.

»Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in Germany and the world; it is used on 40 percent of Germany’s arable land.«

That’s correct. But the argument implies that only farmers use this herbicide. It fails to mention that others like Deutsche Bahn is using it to keep the tracks clear.

The statement that glyphosate is the most commonly used herbicide has “wicked industry” undertones. Since glyphosate is the last cheap herbicide ever approved, it should come as no surprise that it’s the most widely used. The passage implies that real alternatives are available, which isn’t correct.

»70 percent of Germans are in favor of a ban on glyphosate. It can be detected in the urine of over 70 percent of Germans.«

Prevailing opinion is of no relevance whatsoever for the evaluation. In a technically oriented society, decisions must be based on facts that represent the best compromise. The argument that 70% of all Germans would be against glyphosate is therefore a pseudo-argument. Glyphosate has not been detectable for a long time, only its degradation product AMPA. It’s a cleaner as well, and a drug against osteoporosis. False reports are thus disseminated in order to argue with public opinion.

Urine is relatively rich in phosphorus. The first synthesis of phosphorus took place with urine when alchemists wanted to produce gold. They discovered the element phosphorus. In AMPA, the “P” stands for phosphorus. This indicates that something incorrect may have been measured here since micro traces of a simple phosphorus compound are supposed to have been detected in urine with its inherently high phosphorus content.

»The German authorities lack the necessary critical distance to the pesticide manufacturers.«

The line of argument against glyphosate was duly explained. It starts with “...it kills every plant that hasn’t been genetically engineered to resist it...”, which is incorrect. Anyone who sprays a cactus can test this. Exactly these people are accusing the German authorities of “failing to maintain a critical distance to the manufacturers”. Glyphosate is a herbicide, not a pesticide.

»Scientists regard the negative influence on the fertility of people who come into active or passive contact with the glyphosate-containing pesticide “Roundup” as conceivable.«

Which remedy do you mean: Roundup or glyphosate? American Roundup contains relatively toxic tallow amine, the European variety does not. Everything is used interchangeably.

At the same time, glyphosate “mutates” into a contact poison. What’s more: What kind of “scientist” does Bund. e.V. mean? Even a social scientist may think something like this is possible.

»Even the smallest amounts of a harmful substance can cause great damage; especially substances that have an influence on the endocrine system«

Correct: The endocrine system is at risk. This is especially true for children because they’re particularly at risk for everything.