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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s excellent rebuttal
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Running Time: 00:58:34
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Here's the transcript of the show:
Doug: Hello and welcome to Objective Health, another exciting episode. I am your host Doug and with me from our virtual studio are Erica and Elliot.
Erica and Elliot: Hello
Doug: And with us in the background as always is Damian.
Damien: Helloé
Doug: So today we are trying a new format. Well it's not really a new format, we used to do this periodically when we were doing our audio only broadcasts and we called it Connecting the Dots and it was basically just our opportunity to kind of go through the news, look at some of the headlines and comment on them. Because connecting the dots is too long a title for YouTube, we decided to call it In The News, or ITN. So this is the first of our ITN episodes on YouTube. We've seen a couple of things in the news that we wanted to kind of talk about.
We're going to be talking about fluoridation of water. We're going to be talking about big tech censorship and we're going to be talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a few other things we might talk about as well given how much time we have. We'll see how much we have to say, but maybe we'll start off with water fluoridation. So there was a Washington Post article recently that was talking about a study out of Canada that suggests that mothers who drink fluoridated tap water when they're pregnant, get children with lower IQs.
Now this isn't the first time that this information has come out. They've been talking about fluoride lowering the IQ of children for a very long time. I don't know exactly how long, but it seems it seems to me it's been a decade or something like that. But this one was a relatively high-profile study, I think because they had some government funding or something along those lines. But one of the things that's notable is that it's being reported on in the Washington Post, which is a mainstream publication which usually wouldn't touch the idea that fluoride had any kind of negative impact whatsoever. That's generally considered tinfoil hat conspiracy theory kind of stuff. So we thought it was worth talking about for that reason in particular.
For those who don't know, I know some of our European viewers might not be fully aware of this but, many municipalities in the US and in Canada do put fluoride into the drinking water and the idea is that it will help your teeth, help prevent cavities, help with dental health in general. There is evidence for that. There is evidence that by putting fluoride into the water it does actually help with teeth, and topical treatments as well of fluoride have been shown to help with the rotting of your teeth. But usually the reason that people are objecting to this is because there isn't a lot of research on the harmful effects of drinking fluoride. It's one thing to topically put fluoride onto your teeth, people aren't swallowing it, the exposure is relatively low, but when you're drinking it all the time, that's essentially mass medicating the population without any consent and there's no way of controlling for exposure.
If one person drinks three litres of water today, they're getting a heck of a lot more fluoride than somebody who's only drinking a litre, or only drinking like five hundred mils, because they're drinking soda and you know, root beer all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of, I think, very reasonable objections to the fluoridation thing, particularly because we really don't know everything that it's actually doing to people.
Erica: This whole idea of fluoride being beneficial for the teeth is one thing. The other thing that's not shared a lot is that it is a by-product of phosphate fertilization production, and if you read about what happens when they make this phosphate and this chemical by-product that is a result, it's pretty staggering. Fluoridealert.org has been carrying information on the negative aspects of fluoride for over 20 years because I had children who are now in their 20's and fluoridation was recommended and I was reading about this back then.
So it is extremely toxic, and part of the reason why it's kind of a tinfoil hot conspiracy theory, or people share it as that, is because you know they say 'Well there's no science to prove that this is bad' or 'It could make people dumb', or any of that. But if you actually look into the documentation about this process that they used to make phosphate fertilizer, it's really, really disturbing. In the 60's it poisoned thousands of animals, crops, and the Environmental Protection Agency has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for the phosphate industry's production of this fluoride.
In the past it was said, "Well what are we going to do with this so we got to find something to make it into so it's not such a huge loss so the EPA it's not continuing to pay out, you know, these big sums for this crop loss or animal loss." I have a quote here from an EPA official that expressed concerns about it, and he said "If this stuff gets out in the air, it's a pollutant. If it gets into the water, it's a pollutant. If it gets into a lake, it's a pollutant. But if it goes right into your drinking system it's not a pollutant. That's amazing. There's got to be a better way to manage this stuff." There is endless documentation about how this can kill you. If it's killing animals at an alarming rate that are in the general vicinity of where these phosphate plants are creating it, then there's some serious concerns. But they don't want to look at that. They want to find a way to make money off of it, and that to me is enough of a reason to not support it.
Another interesting thing, again, people in Europe might not know this, but in the US, all US military bases have fluoridated water. So that's concerning because people have said that it causes you to be what like a zombie, or easily mind controlled or manipulated. It's also used a lot in the US in frozen foods. It's added to chicken, ice cream, so it's not just necessarily in the water.
Elliot: And it's not just in the US and Canada. As well, there's a very small kind of area where the UK councils of government actually fluoridate. Unfortunately the small village that I grew up in and I lived in for 17 years was one of the only places that was fluoridated and it's interesting to see that the condition, dental fluorosis, which is actually characterized by teeth which start to go see-through, develop cracks and white streaks, kind of thing. That seemed to be more common where I lived previously, than elsewhere that I've been to in the local area. So that's just a little anecdote there.
So fluoride is an interesting kind of mineral. It's present in very small amounts naturally. It would be impossible to find any water source without minor or very trace amounts of fluoride in it. Some natural water supplies will have more in it than others. But again it's very, very, very, very small quantities and it can be toxic. It's particularly toxic to the central nervous system. I think that people who have like acute toxicities can die from all kinds of effects. It's causing dysfunction in the brain, in the brainstem, and everything like that. But it can also dis-regulate how the body utilizes calcium, and if I remember correctly it can contribute to things like Arterial Calcification, Calcific Tendinitis, Frozen Shoulder Syndrome, calcification of organs and parts of the brain. I think that the Pineal gland can be partially calcified when it's exposed to high levels of fluoride. So it's not necessarily something that is just safe and benign.
You made a really good point Doug in that if we look at the very high dose fluoride toothpastes, in the UK at least, some of those are actually on prescription, and they will be prescribed in a very specific case and it's not something you can necessarily just go and buy over-the-counter. For the really high level ones, you're going to get doctor's advice to get that, and I think that's because it's quite well established that actually, this stuff is really quite toxic if you swallow it.
So we have that on the one hand, but then we have this mass medicalization, or this mass kind of prescription almost. They decide, "Okay everyone needs that" and there's no informed consent there. You're not informed that you are taking a mineral that has a potentially neurotoxic capacity and which is ordinarily only found in very, very, very small amounts in the water supply. You're essentially participating in it in a big experiment and whilst there may be research showing that it might help with teeth, help with maintaining enamel and structure and density and that kind of thing, from what I know, before they started putting this into the water, I don't think there were any long-term studies, like on a population scale, long-term studies, with any significant number of people, with the amount of fluoride that they are putting into the water. I don't know of any, I could be wrong, I could be mistaken and there may be some, but from all of the things that I've read about it in the past I haven't come across anything that can categorically say that putting fluoride in the water is a safe thing, and yet it's the arrogance and the kind of hubris on the part of the legislators to go ahead and do it anyway.
Again, kind of similar story as always, is that okay, we'll discount the long-term health and the potential risks involved with this and we'll just go the financially the financially attractive route, let's say.
Doug: Right and that really is I think basically the entire motivation for doing it. Like Erika was saying, they had this toxic waste product that they didn't know what to do with. It's kind of like if you like had a nuclear power plant and it's like you had all this toxic waste building up and you're like, "We don't know what to do with this why don't we start putting it in the food?" :Yeah good idea let's put it in the food well tell people that it makes them smarter. Okay, let's do that, good. And we'll sell it to them at a good price, so we'll make some money off it too.". So now they're essentially scraping the smoke stacks of these fertilizer plants, taking that waste product, selling it to the municipalities to then put into their water. It's really ridiculous when you look at it like that, but you know, hey, if there's a chance that it might make it so kids can keep on eating candy and garbage and not get cavities then, well it's all worth it isn't it?
Erica: [laughter] No...
Doug: I think you're muted Elliot. You're muted.
Elliot: Yeah I'm muted. No I was just going to say that's the narrative right? That's the narrative. It's that they care so much about children's dental health that they will take this risk, that they will they will go ahead and this is the this is the incentive. That is complete and utter nonsense, because if they genuinely cared about children's dental health then wouldn't we be more focused on actually getting to the root cause of what is causing the cavitations in the first place? What is causing the poor dental health in the first place? Because it's well known that this is dietary related. These people say that they're doing it for the kids but that's BS. They need to get rid of this toxic waste. They're just going to push some narrative on the population, and everyone accepts it. Well actually if they really cared then we would be looking at all of the other factors that come into play with dental health, and they don't do that. They do the opposite of that.
Erica: These are organizations that allegedly are looking out for the benefits of children, like the American Academy of Paediatrics. They basically say it prevents tooth decay, it's been incredibly protective, and it reduces the prevalence of cavities by about one-fourth, and then the CDC comes in, of course, and says that's the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and they consider water fluoridation one of the top 10 health achievements of the past century, on par with vaccines and anti-smoking campaigns.
Doug: Well there you go a trifecta!
Elliot: Yeah I agree with him there, you know. [Laughter]
Doug: Yeah it's kind of crazy.
Erica: I just want to say that I do, with both of you, I agree that it's interesting that the Washington Post put this out and that the focus was pregnant women and IQ. You know what I mean? As opposed to all the other things that they could have come out about it with because everyone is concerned that their child is not going to perform the best. But it's just bizarre. You almost wonder if it's like, is this from The Onion, is this real?
Doug: Yeah. Well, maybe we could move on to our next news item. There was a letter to the Organic Consumers Association and the name of the article is Terrifying Techno Fascist Acts Against Health Freedom You'll Probably Never Learn About. That's a bit of a sensational title, but, it's basically focusing in on the latest push by social media and the tech giants to censor health news. Relatively recently, Google changed its search algorithm which they do periodically. I know people who are really into the search engine optimization, freak out every time Google changes its search algorithm, because they can really affect people's traffic. Where your website is coming up on Google searches can pretty much determine whether you sink or swim as far as your business goes.
But in a recent change that they did, they started pushing out a lot of different health sites, alternative health websites. So some of those include HoneyColony, Green Med Info, Doctor Axe, Erin Elizabeth of Health Net News, Self Hacked and Dr. Mercola. Dr. Mercola is probably the biggest name on there. So Mercola.com was one of them. So big tech is collaborating with Big Pharma to suppress free speech, essentially. If you want information that is a little bit off the beaten path, that's not the same big pharma-approved health information, you're now going to have to search kind of high and low for it. If you don't already know about Mercola.com, chances of you finding it in a Google search are very low, very low.
They're a private company, they have the right to do this, but the fact of the matter is they kind of have a monopoly going on here, and for them to be pushing out this information, they are essentially controlling how people think, what information you are allowed to have access to. Everybody kind of has their own personal thing that they're interested in. People who aren't interested in health probably are going to be watching this show, but, even if you're not interested in health, this goes across like all kinds of different spectrums. There's different ways that they're tweaking their algorithms, so you know, you're not getting the political commentary that you're looking for, or you're not getting information about, I don't know, go-kart racing that you're looking for. There are any number of things where they can be steering the information that you actually get access to.
Erica: Well we really saw this starting to happen with the vaccine thing, with the scrubbing of content. I think even Amazon joined in, and now Mercola, with not being able to put up videos that question vaccines.
Doug: Yeah... Instagram, Facebook.
Erica: Yeah. So it's not really that surprising, but how they're doing it is really nefarious.
Doug: Yeah, and the other thing too is that Google's parent company is Alphabet, and they actually own pharmaceutical subsidiaries. In 2013 Google founded Calico which was run by Arthur Levinson, who's a former CEO of the biotechnology corporation Genentech. Calico's mission is to understand biology that controls lifespans and treat age-related diseases. It's going into a whole bunch of different levels of what Alphabet actually owns and stuff. But the long and the short of it is that they are partnered with pharmaceutical corporations. It is in their best interest to put pharmaceutical solutions to any kind of disease state or condition, because then they will make more money. So that's in their best interest. Alternative solutions that don't funnel money into the pockets of GlaxoSmithKline, or whoever, Pfizer, Merck, it's not in their interest to offer people alternatives.
Elliot: Of course not, and especially someone like Mercola who has been rallying against this for you know, almost since the dawn of the Internet, right? He was the first one. You've got to give it to him. The guy is frankly spot-on about a lot of things you know? And he's done a great service to many people who are given some drug, or they are told that there's nothing they can do about their health condition, then they go on Google, and one of the first things that pops up when they type in alternatives to this treatment, alternatives or natural treatments for this, you know, Mercola would come on top, and chances are he's got one or a couple of articles about it telling you about the dangers that you should look out for and what you can potentially do, which is evidence-based, you know? It's very much evidence-based.
This guy isn't like a kook. A lot of the stuff good quality content, but of course this is not conducive to Big Pharma, to their aims, to what they want to achieve with Google are hand-in-hand with them. I remember reading through those statistics, I think that Mercola says that after this change happened with the algorithms, his traffic went down by 99 percent!
Doug: Yeah. Yeah that is insane.
Elliot: Yeah, yeah, and he was also saying that previously, if you would type in, let's say, psoriasis, you'd type in psoriasis Merola, then it would come up with all of the different articles and resources that he had compiled on that topic, whereas now apparently just by putting Mercola, it doesn't follow you through to his website as it would before. You actually have to be very specific and put Mercola.com. Because if you miss out the dot-com, then it kind of draws you away on some other tangent kind of thing. It's very unfortunate that this monopoly's tentacles have grown so far now. For the majority of people who are interested in alternative health, each of us probably has their own news sources that you know where to go to - they haven't shut down the website, so that's okay for people like us. But quite frankly, for anyone looking to, you know, who's still within that bubble and tries to step outside of it, they've just made it a thousand times harder.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah, Back in the day Google's algorithm was all based on what was considered authoritative by the number of hits that it got, the number of keywords, how many other sites were linking to that site. So if you had an article about a certain health condition or something like that, that a lot of other internet sites were linking to as a reference, and you had all the keywords in there, you would get a pretty high Google ranking. You would probably be on the first page probably, and maybe even number one in the search results for it. But none of that stuff actually matters anymore. That is the stuff that would actually lead a person to find what they're looking for. Now they're not actually interested in what the person is looking for. They're interested in showing them what they consider to be the most authoritative source, or what they consider to be not fake news, or whatever the case may be. It's the acceptable content.
So they're no longer like facilitating a person finding what they want to find. They are specifically directing them on what they want them to find.
Elliot: It's like impression management on a mass scale, but with every single possible topic that you can conceptualize. It's an amazing feat that they've even managed to do that, but...
Doug: It's pretty incredible in a dystopian nightmare way.
Elliot: Yeah, the consequence is, unfortunately, the average person has to deal with those consequences.
Doug: Yeah exactly, yeah. It's one thing for you know a newspaper or something like that a news broadcast to be particular about what they're reporting and deciding what they will report and what they don't report. People understand that when they go to a news source, that news source has a bias, or that news source has a particular slant. They're going to be a little bit more left-wing or a little bit more right-wing, whatever the case may be. But when you use a search engine that's supposed to be just innocuous, it's supposed to be just helping you to find what you're looking for, and it's not anymore, and in fact it has more of a slant to it than even a newspaper or something like that, I would argue anyway. So yeah, it's a scary new world actually.
Erica: Well and what, weren't they even talking in the article, about how previously, people who had degrees or had written academic papers or had some actual documented data and evidence behind what they were researching, were presented and now just anyone willy-nilly can write stuff and they don't have to have any sort of background or academic research behind what they're saying. Dr. Mercola is a good example. He always lists all his references and information, and now you can get people going on there saying, "What are you talking about? Fluoride is good." They'll write a whole article about it but have no sort of reference or documentation, just making those claims. Especially if you're new to this whole health paradigm shift, and you're starting to question things, you can get really lost in all of the nonsense and especially with moms or parents. They don't have hours a day to sort through information. They want to find something quickly and that's helpful, and it really, I think, is targeting, especially with the vaccine topic, is targeting people that are looking for good solid information to make health decisions for their family that could have very long-term effects.
Doug: Yeah, yeah that's true.
Elliot: Well I think that was quite a good bridge there Erica.
Erica: Building them as opposed to tearing them down? [laughter]
Elliot: Yeah the bridge onto the next topic perhaps.
Doug: Take it away Elliot.
Elliot: Right yes, so, I came across one other article in the news this week or last week. It's detail Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Over the past couple decades, he's been very outspoken on the topic of vaccine safety. He has time and time again, presented rational, logical, kind of responsible viewpoints and statements about vaccines. He will openly say in public that he is not anti-vaccine, he is just pro-science. He is pro-safety. He has been lobbying time and time again for more research, more science to be done on the topic of vaccines, on the topic of vaccine safety, and has basically just been just been an advocate and has been standing up to Big Pharma all along. There's an article titled Americans can handle an open discussion about vaccines - RFK Jr's response to criticism from his family that Politico would not publish. Was it three of his family members have openly criticized RFK Jr. and it...
Erica: Yes.
Elliot: Yeah, so they've said - like I haven't got the quotes - but my impression is that they've said that this guy is like a quack. You need to discount what he's saying about vaccines. Vaccines are safe, this is basically just anti-vaxxer nonsense, which is the typical kind of narrative that you get from anyone, that's the kind of backlash at work. Whenever you ask just a rational question about vaccine safety, the immediate response that you will get from the critics is you're an anti-vaxxer, anti-science blah blah blah blah blah.
So he actually posted a letter as a response, right? An article as a response, and there's this well-known magazine called Politico in the US and there were three attempts to have this response published, and they were declined on all fronts, and when you read through the article, the points that Kennedy makes are very cogent. He makes a coherent argument and I think that anyone reading this article would be much more likely to come around to his viewpoint, and I think that that's one of the reasons why this magazine has not published it.
Doug: Yeah, it's really disingenuous of them to publish the article with three of his family members criticizing his views and not allow him to respond, taking a look at his response and saying, "Oh no this isn't really what we want to have in our magazine so no, we're not going to publish the response." That's just shitty, you know? {laughter} "We're going to let this person come on here and criticize the hell out of you and we're not going to let you respond. We're not interested in what you have to say. We're only interested in one side of this discussion. Thank you very much." It just goes along with what we were previously talking about, big tech censoring. It's like on a smaller level, Politico magazine. Just, "Screw you. We don't want you to have the other side of the story. We only want you to hear the smear."
Erica: It's his family members that actually wrote the article in Politico and the kind of summary under the caption or the title - and I know it was up there a minute ago - says, "We love Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but he is part of a misinformation campaign that's having heart-breaking and deadly consequences." And then for our listeners and viewers, you can see in the political article, their backgrounds. So Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and former chair of the Global Virus Network. Joseph P Kennedy is former Congress member of Massachusetts, President of Citizens Energy Corporation. And then Maeve Kennedy McKean is Executive Director of Georgetown University's Global Health Initiatives. So is this a family issue, or is this a funding issue? What are they doing? You know what I mean?
Doug: Blood is not thicker than water apparently.
Erica: Or money!
Doug: Or money, yeah. Well the thing is that people should actually read RFK's response, because it's like Elliot was saying, it is cogent. It is backed up. It is hard to read that and actually refute it you know, point by point.
Elliot: Yeah.
Doug: And the fact of the matter is he makes such a good argument. It's a lengthy article but it's not so long that it's unwieldy and it's definitely worth a read. There were a couple of real bombshells he dropped in there. We were just talking about them before the show. One is where he's talking about, particularly, the social media censorship. I'll just read this quote here. He says, "Mainstream and social media outlets, which collectively received nine point six billion in revenues from pharmaceutical companies in 2016, have convinced themselves they are protecting public health by aggressively censoring criticism of these coercively mandated zero liability, and untested pharmaceutical products." He's talking about vaccines of course. "But the absence of press scrutiny leaves industry no incentive to improve vaccine safety. Muzzling discussions of government corruption and deficient safety science and abolishing vaccine injuries by fiat is not a strategy that will solve the growing chronic disease epidemic." Boom, mic drop. {laughter}
Elliot: Yeah, I would definitely recommend the listeners to check out the article because it's just packed full of multiple different arguments for why people should really be questioning this stuff. He just makes some very basic points. He's talking about the governing agencies or bodies that basically tell the public at large that these things are completely safe and that we should be having, what is it? 56 shots before we're 13 years old or whatever? He points out that the FDA receives 45 percent of their annual budget from private sources...
Doug: That's the CDC isn't it?
Elliot: No that's the FDA.
Doug: That's the FDA?
Elliot: Yeah that's the FDA, that's the FDA. Whereas the WHO gets roughly half of its budget from private sources, including Pharma and its allied foundations. Okay so you've got the FDA, you've got the WHO and then you've got the CDC, and he makes a really funny comment. I never really thought about it like this, but he says, "And the CDC, frankly, is a vaccine company. It owns 56 patents and buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children Program, which is over 40 percent of its total budget. Furthermore, Pharma directly funds, populates and controls dozens of CDC programs." So, it's like okay, so we're meant to trust these agencies, these organizations and yet most of them get roughly half of their funding from massive big pharma companies.
So it's like, there's, without a doubt, a conflict of interest right there and when you have it laid out for you like that, it would make perfect sense as to why these why these agencies are so flippant about the vaccine kind of thing and how they're so dismissive against anyone who even raises the slightest question, because in fact if they were to really, genuinely investigate vaccine safety, then they would potentially be losing half of their budget.
Doug: Yeah.
Erica: He talks in there about how vaccines are basically liability-free and effectively compulsory to a captive market of 76 million children. So these are companies like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Santo and Pfizer. And then he writes how these four companies that make virtually all the recommended vaccines are all convicted felons. "They've collectively made over $35 billion, with a B, since 2009 for defrauding regulators, lying to and bribing government officials and physicians, falsifying science and leaving a trail of injuries and deaths from products that they knew to be dangerous and sold under the pretence of safety and efficacy." So he says, "Doesn't it kind of require cognitive dissonance to believe that vaccines are untainted by greed, negligence, and corruption, that bedevil every other pharmaceutical product?"
Doug: Yeah.
Erica: I see why they didn't want to publish that. That's just so scathing right there, they're like no, can't do that.
Doug: Yeah, well I wonder how much Politico gets in advertising revenue from pharmaceutical companies. It might be as blatant as that. It's kind of like, "Oh no, we can't publish this. Our pharmaceutical advertisers will pull out. We can't do it."
Elliot: Yeah but like I said before the show that demonstrates just a whole other level of nastiness. They're real scumbags, these people. They're spineless, and I wonder whether the editor who made that decision, whether they allow their children to have vaccines. I would really be interested to know that because there's one thing being kind of believing what you're told and then kind of going along with that, but there's another thing consciously looking at both arguments, seeing that one argument is just so thorough and evidence-based and makes so much sense, and then still choosing not to publish that, 'people don't need to know about that,' because there might be some financial gain from not doing that. It's a conscious thing. It seems like it's a conscious thing and that's what makes it really dirty almost.
Erica: Yeah.
Doug: Yeah evil.
Elliot: Yeah very much evil.
Doug: Anyway people should really go check out that article. We'll link it down below in the description. Well moving on here I'm just kind of looking through the other things that we're going to talk about. What do you guys want to talk about? {laughter} I guess a way that...
Elliot: Sorry, before we get on to that one Doug, there's just one more thing that kind of ties into this, which is corrupt agencies making decisions and lying to the public, probably for financial gain. There was one article which did come out a couple weeks ago actually almost two weeks ago, that was called EPA Defies California Rules Over Monsanto Roundup, Still Insists The Herbicide Is Safe. So if any of you have been living on planet Earth the past couple of months, then you will have seen that Monsanto have had to pay out, or are potentially going to have to be paying out a lot of money. I don't know if they paid out money, but basically they've been like convicted or charged. So, that is for the ties between the glyphosate herbicide otherwise known as Roundup and various different types of cancer. There was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but I believe that there's many other different types of cancer. And there's are a couple of thousand people now who are trying to sue Monsanto because they've been given some issue there.
In California not long ago, I think it was in the last couple years, I think we covered it on the show, there was something called the Proposition 65 which was like a new legislation which came out and it's a list with the acceptable quantities of chemicals that are allowed in any product. So for instance if it's something that you might come into contact with like an herbicide, or if it's a supplement, if it's a type of food, if it's anything with ingredients which could potentially be problematic, then as part of that proposition, you legally need to list that on your product.
So for instance if you were producing a supplement and it contained levels of lead which were higher than what that legislation or that list found acceptable, then you would have to state that it contained dangerous levels of lead on that supplement. All right? So according to Proposition 65, if you look at glyphosate, glyphosate is considered by that proposition to be cancer-causing. So, legally in California it would be legally so that Monsanto on the Roundup bottle they would legally have to identify this is this is probably carcinogenic to humans blah blah blah.
But then you've got the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. It says "The US EPA has defied California regulators by no longer approving labels claiming Monsanto Roundup is known to cause cancer." So according to this California proposition, on the labels of Monsanto Roundup, you need to say that it causes cancer whereas the EPA has basically saying "Well no, actually we don't agree with that. We don't think that there's enough evidence." So they've done this review, their own professionals, their scientists, have reviewed the evidence on glyphosate and have said, "Well actually we don't think that it causes cancer, so we're not going to accept any of the labels that say that there is a potential risk." And the reason that they've done this is they've said that 'the EPA action rejects the idea that the weed killer is likely to pose a risk, despite rulings against Bayer-owned Monsanto in California earlier this year." I can't find the quote, but basically they they've said something like, 'we don't agree that we should be misleading the public, we don't think that labelling this as carcinogenic it's correct and therefore, we're actually going to disagree with that and actually stop them from labelling that'.
Doug: It's unbelievable. I mean it's not really surprising considering how in bed the EPA is with Monsanto Bayer. Well Monsanto before it was Bayer, but now Monsanto Bayer. When the Monsanto papers came out - and unfortunately I forget the name of the journalist who was instrumental in exposing a lot of what Monsanto had done - but when those Monsanto papers came out if any of the viewers want to just look up the Monsanto papers, get some popcorn because it's really kind of mind-blowing. But the connections between the EPA and Monsanto, is just unbelievable. It's like they are so in bed together. It's like they have no shame, that they can just kind of step forward and be so blatant, It's like saying "Well this is my best friend and I'm not going to let you say anything bad about my best friend, so no you're not allowed to put that label on your thing." Even though this California body has done its research and said, "No, you have to say that this is a carcinogen", they're like "No we did our own study and it's better, so no, you don't get to say that on your label." It's unbelievable! It's unbelievable!
Erica: It's unbelievable too because these cases that are being filed against Monsanto are happening in the state of California. So it's not like they're in Minnesota or something. Most of these cases, there's 1290 lawsuits pending just in San Francisco alone. What better way to have damage control than to just be like "Nope, we're not going to do it." The journalist that you were talking about Doug, her last name is Gilliam.
Doug: Yeah.
Erica: She wrote a book about it too, called Whitewashed. Gosh! It's just like straight out of some sort of ...
Doug: John Grisham novel?
Erica: [laughter] Yeah
Doug: Yeah it's crazy.
Elliot: What I don't understand is how they can deny that it's even just a possible carcinogen, because there's lawsuits where Monsanto were having to pay out millions. Why would they be paying out millions if there was no link with the case? Surely if there was no link with cancer then they wouldn't have to pay out millions in lawsuits. It's just so transparent, so see-through. You'd think that they would be able to do better than that at hiding their kind of direct connections that they were in bed with Monsanto. It's like they don't even care. They don't even try to. That's the sad thing. It seems like they don't even try to hide it, because they know that basically they're above the law and they don't really have to answer to anyone. They can just get away with doing whatever they want to do.
Doug: Well the other thing that's crazy about it too, is that there was an article in Salon, that I think Damian just had up a second ago, where it's talking about how corporations are legally allowed to put carcinogens into products and not have to report about it, because of the whole corporate personhood thing and that that interferes with the corporation's freedom of speech, or freedom not to speak, which is just so mind-blowing. We could do an entire show on corporate personhood and the fact that corporations have rights under the law, as if they were actual people. A corporation has freedom of speech. Have you ever heard a corporation speak? It's a fictional entity. It doesn't have a mouth. It doesn't speak! It's unbelievable. But, by them saying Cheerios or whatever, that has like ridiculous amounts of glyphosate found in it, they don't have to tell their customers, that there's glyphosate found in it, that their product is toxic, because that would interfere with their freedom of speech. They have the right to say what they want about their product. It's like...
Erica: Well before they were doing that, they were just saying it's proprietary information, that they don't have to share it. So now that's reworked to favour them. Now you know these proprietary ingredients or inert ingredients are causing cancers and people want to know why. Well now we'll just call them a personhood and then we'll move on to the next kind of damage control strategy. They're notorious for ghost writing articles, hiring trolls. They've gone through every dirty tactic that they possibly can through the history of this company. Then I think the idea of selling the Bayer was like, "Oh we'll just we'll eliminate the negative connotation of the word Monsanto," but if anyone does any background research on Bayer they're equally as disgusting as a company.
Doug: Yeah and at that book you mentioned, its Kerry Gilliam. Damian had the image up there, Thank You Damian. If you want to read about the insane level of manipulation that Monsanto has gone through, I would read Kerry Gilliam's book, because it really exposes the intimidation of journalists and scientists. It'll blow your mind. They are the most evil company on the face of the planet, I'm pretty sure.
Erica: Along with GlaxoSmithKline. {laughter}
Doug: Well I mean there's lots of bad ones out there, Nestle. We could start a list. {Laughter}
Erica: Yeah Whitewash. But good on her for sticking through it and really being a messenger to the people, saying, "Look, this is how they do it, and this is what you need to watch out for." Maybe that's why we all are so sceptical here on the Objective Health Show.
Doug: Yeah. Well we're coming up on our time here, we've covered a few good ones. We didn't get to everything we wanted to again. Maybe we'll have to do another one of these In The News shows in the future. But we do have a pet health segment from Zoya today and she's going to be talking about handedness of cats and dogs, like whether they're left-handed or right-handed, I totally didn't know that was a thing.
Zoya: Hello and welcome to the Pet Health segment of the Objective Health program. Ten percent of humans are left-handed, but what about animals? So this time we're going to explore how apes, cats, and even kangaroos, might have handedness. Watch the following video to learn more about it, and don't forget that there is a cute and funny video in the end. Have an awesome time everyone and goodbye.
Handedness is a universal human trait. Some people prefer the left hand, some the right and some are ambidextrous and can use both. But what about your dog? Can it be left pawed? [Music] Hey left-handed mice users, I'm Jules here for D News. Human handedness is influenced by a huge number of genes and environmental factors. That being said, a consistent 10% of the human population is left hand dominant, so there's definitely a big genetic component. A study in PLOS genetics identified a gene PCSK6 which helps determine how the body organizes itself in early development and correlated it with hand dominance. But if handedness is genetic, shouldn't we see it throughout the rest of the natural world too?
Well it is seen in some animals. For example, great apes have handedness. It's been detailed in studies published in behavioural brain research and animal cognition. Scientists have theorized one of the influencing factors of hand dominance is rooted in the language processing part of the brain, but it could also have been passed down by our ancestors, thanks to the use of our tools. The studies on great apes found that they use different hands for different activities, they prefer their right hand for inanimate targets, like sticks or toys, but for grooming they didn't report any dominance at all. Researchers believe this may be due to which hemisphere of the brain is being used. Grooming is emotional and social while grabbing sticks is for purely functional purposes. Seventy percent of chimps are right-handed for functional tasks, like manipulating a tool, or hilariously, which hand they choose when they throw faeces at researchers. MRI scans again showed it was probably due to brain hemispheres.
Evolutionarily scientists believe this preference for one hand may have appeared even before chimps and humans split from their common ancestor, as the scans showed similar structures in our own brains. Some enterprising researchers found similar brain structures towards handedness exists in cats, but with a twist, they're sex-specific. When cats want to play with toys or remove food from jars, they found that females prefer to use their right paw while males went left. Cat brains have this weird specialization too. Dogs on the other paw, don't seem to have this brain specialization. A 2006 study in behavioural processes found no population level preference for a dominant hand, but that it might just be split 50-50.
Scientists haven't just studied our fur babies though. Kangaroos were discovered to be hands specific. Weirdly though, most of them are lefties, and frogs were found to prefer the right foot for some tasks. Fish prefer one eye to the other when spotting predators and even some birds, like chickens and pigeons have brain level hemisphere specializations for some visual tasks. But overall quadruped animals aren't often studied for handedness. One, because they don't really have hands, and two, because they're usually walking on all of their limbs.
That's obviously a weird thing to think about, but handedness is kind of weird anyway. Even though we've identified some genes involved, geneticists don't agree on the exact process of how it happens. So we don't really know where it comes from, it just is, and overall as usual, more research is needed.
Doug: Aww.
Doug: Oh that was great. I'm going to check my cats now to see if they're left-handed or right-handed.
Erica: I definitely have right-handed dogs.
Doug: Oh yeah?
Erica: They steal the food with their right hand every time.
Doug: Never thought to check which hand they're using. That's interesting. Okay well that is our show for today. Thanks everybody for joining us. Make sure to click like and subscribe below if you're so inclined. Join us next week. We will have another fascinating topic to discuss and we'll see you next time.
Elliot: Bye everybody.
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