This society makes people sick!

By Dr. Suitbert Cechura

The title of the lecture is an assertion that requires proof. In my lecture, I will explain how in this society health damages are systematically produced, how they are calculated with, and how the victims of the damage are made responsible for the damage. The lecture is divided into four parts. First I would like to make a few preliminary remarks on lifestyle diseases, then I would like to give two examples of how they arise and are treated in the public discussion, and then I will give a summary. If any questions or objections arise during the lecture, you can make them known so that we can clarify the questions immediately. Otherwise, there will also be opportunities for discussion after the lecture.

Lifestyle diseases

It is common knowledge that this society causes illness: After all, the new epidemics are no longer cholera and diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc., but lifestyle diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diseases of the musculoskeletal system, etc. That the successful control of nature causes illnesses allows for some strange conclusions about the application of scientific knowledge when it brings humanity not prosperity and enjoyment, but health damages. It is often suggested in the case of lifestyle diseases that the citizens are too well off and that’s why they suffer health damages. This idea continues to be held even when statistics show that it is not the wealthy who are particularly ill and die younger, but the poor, who have a much shorter life expectancy. For example, men from the lower classes die 11 years earlier and women 8 years earlier than their gender counterparts in the upper levels of society. Therefore, this notion can’t be true.

With recommendations not to smoke, to drink alcohol only in moderation, to eat healthy and to play sports, it is made clear who is responsible for the health damages: the affected persons themselves, who destroy themselves with their unwise ways of living. What these practical recommendations are good for will be examined in the following.

In this lecture, I can’t deal with all the lifestyle diseases, so I will limit myself here to the two most common ones, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Should there be any questions regarding other topics, we might be able to discuss them briefly after the lecture within the framework of the discussion.

Cardiovascular diseases

According to statistics, cardiovascular diseases are the most frequent cause of death. According to the Robert Koch Institute, these are caused by fats accumulating in the vascular walls, resulting in occlusion of the blood vessels, so that depending on where the occlusion is located, the heart muscle or nerve cells in the brain die. The RKI cites the main risk factors: smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, fat metabolism disorders, high blood pressure and diabetes. High blood pressure is the first risk factor.

Blood pressure is a variable measure which normally adapts to the body's stress: low at rest, high with stress. When we talk about high blood pressure, we are referring to the fact that those affected are continually exposed to high levels of stress, so that the adaptation reaction becomes a chronic disorder. Fighting high blood pressure therefore means fighting the high levels of stress that cause it.  Permanent high blood pressure leads to damage to the vessel walls, into which so-called plaques are deposited, leading to occlusion of the vessels: a heart attack or stroke is the consequence, depending on where the occlusion of the vessels takes place.

When lifestyle diseases are talked about, smoking is always the first thing that comes to mind, and responsibility. According to the Foundation for Prevention, nicotine enters the bloodstream via the mucous membranes and thus the brain. From there, it affects the entire nervous system, and can have both stimulating and relaxing effects. Smoking narrows the blood vessels and can thus contribute to increased blood pressure. You have to smoke a lot to get high blood pressure from smoking. However, smokers do not smoke to increase their blood pressure. If you ask them, they usually say they smoke because it is pleasurable. This is a bit of an evasion. The first cigarette causes a coughing fit and tastes terrible. Inhaling the smoke takes some effort and you have to get used to it in order to enjoy it. Smoking helps you relax or improves your performance. A few cigarettes a day can hardly produce permanent high blood pressure. You already need to have the desire for relaxation or for increased concentration and performance through nicotine in order to damage yourself by smoking. This refers, however, to a way of dealing with stress that is self-harming. Here, too, people find themselves first and foremost exposed to demands, which they want to meet and which have damaging effects, and smokers, through their behavior, add an additional damage.

Alcohol has a stimulating and mood-enhancing effect. It is the lubricant of everyday life in this society and is enjoyed on many occasions.  Consumed in small quantities, it counteracts high blood pressure; consumed in larger quantities, it damages the vascular walls. As a means of enjoyment, alcohol can hardly cause widespread disease. Mediterranean cuisine with wine is almost recommended as an antidote to cardiovascular diseases. On the other hand, alcohol as a constant companion in everyday life, for kicking back and relaxing or for escaping the misery of everyday life, is something completely different. Kicking back and relaxing is not something that happens by itself, but requires special efforts such as relaxation training, yoga or alcohol in order to get away from the stresses of everyday life.  Like smoking, it is a self-damaging way of dealing with demands that obviously can’t be endured without this aid. The question therefore remains: what is the starting point of the stresses and strains that make aids necessary in order to endure everyday life?

Diet is an issue connected with cardiovascular diseases when it comes to diabetes, obesity or fat metabolism disorders.  That is why people should eat a healthy diet. This sounds reasonable, but is actually absurd. Nutrition serves the energy supply of the body, pleasure, or both.  Every mixed diet and even fast food contains all the necessary substances that the body needs. In this respect, it is surprising how obsessed the public is with healthy nutrition. The focus on nutrition serves neither the benefit or the pleasure, because a delicious meal is not always healthy, but also not particularly harmful. With the demand for healthy nutrition, a completely different standard comes into the world: nutrition should not only keep people alive or provide enjoyment, but should contribute to humans becoming more resistant to the health damages they are constantly being exposed to and should keep them in top shape for meeting the performance requirements. This is not something that nutrition can achieve, so it is not surprising that science is not able to say exactly what a healthy diet should consist of, and there is constant debate about how many carbohydrates, fats or proteins should be in the diet. If nutritionists recommend that people enjoy their food and take their time eating, they have an educational purpose: humanity should enjoy it because scientists assume that large amounts of food can’t be enjoyed and enjoyment only occurs when one can enjoy the special features of the individual dishes and their preparation. Gourmet restaurants therefore administer their dishes in very small quantities, and the only way the customers get full is through many courses. However, there are also people who find pleasure in a sumptuous meal, but this doesn’t fit with the ideas of nutritionists. When they recommend taking time to eat, they have in mind the fact that, in many households, there are hardly any regular meals and a lot of food is eaten on the go. This is a reference to the fact that many people are under time pressure in their everyday lives and that even food is experienced as a deduction from time for their own purposes.

Dietary recommendations are based on the observations of doctors that plaques from fat components in the blood are responsible for blocking the blood vessels. The take-away conclusion is that people eat too much and are too fat.  Eating too much does not cause all people to be overweight; mainly, people are fat because, under pressure, they secrete increased stress hormones and thus store more fat in the body, as researchers have discovered, but even fat people are not automatically high blood pressure patients and not necessarily sicker than others. Even high cholesterol levels do not necessarily lead to deposits and blockages in the blood vessels. For this to happen, the blood vessels have to be damaged by permanent hypertension. Which brings us back to the starting point.

It goes without saying that people should exercise. Why should I exercise when I am content to go from the fridge to the couch? Why do I have to train if I don't plan on climbing Mount Everest? Through exercise, the body should be made more resistant.  You really have to ask: resistant to what? Why does my body have to be trained if I don’t want to perform at my peak level? Exercise in the form of sports and games can be fun, but is not necessarily healthy, as many football players experience when they go to work on Mondays limping. As with eating, exercise is demanded as something other than people exercising when they feel like it or not. Exercise is about training the blood vessels and the heart, which apparently have to perform at their highest levels all the time. It doesn’t necessarily have to be physical in the sense of using the muscles, it even goes when sitting, when constant concentration and intellectual effort is demanded. Even then, blood pressure goes up and puts demands on the heart. Meeting these demands requires a well-trained body, so even outside their job people are encouraged to spend their time getting in shape.

Stress is often used to explain the pressure that many people are exposed to and want to live up to, as showed by the boom in relaxation techniques, yoga, Pilates, etc. According to the media, even elementary school students suffer from stress, university students especially, and workers at their limits. But stress is not an explanation. Stress is not a reason for anything, because stress represents a reaction to requirements. Stress describes the state of being tense, mentally as well as physically. The person affected by it feels overwhelmed because he doesn’t know whether he can meet the requirements or not. Where the pressure comes from is left out for the time being, even if most people can give the reason why they are stressed out. The physical and psychological tension is the same, regardless of whether the pressure comes from private plans, when I realize that I can’t do what I set out to do, or whether the pressure comes from guidelines that are set for me from the outside by school, training, or work. With private pursuits, I can influence the pressure by reducing what I intend to do. Pressure from the outside, however, can’t be gotten rid of so easily. Which brings us to the main causes. How work and leisure time stress people so that their bodies are ruined in the form of cardiovascular diseases still has to be investigated.

The fact that work is the source of stress is largely undisputed and there have been many studies on this.  Many people also recover from work by pursuing hobbies in the garden, in the garage, etc. Work serves to produce goods or services. Work is always an expenditure of muscles, brain and nerves.  But work does not have to ruin the workers, as is showed by working at a hobby or in spare time, even though most accidents happen there because of a lack of skill. It all depends on the relation between effort and recovery. If I notice that I am getting tired and then able to recover, this alternation of effort and recovery will hardly cause any damage. Damage occurs when the recovery needs of the workers are not sufficiently taken into account and they are unduly strained.  So it’s not work that ruins people, but the kind of work that does not take into account their need for rest.

In our society, work mainly takes place as wage labor, even if it is usually no longer called that nowadays. You don't just get a wage, you get a salary or compensation package, but it's still the same. Those who work offer themselves as workers because they have nothing else but themselves at their disposal. This is called freedom and is praised and not seen as deprivation. Because everything one needs to live is property, belongs to people who do not need these goods, but who have produced or acquired them in order to make more money out of their money. They use their power over this wealth to gain access to the money of others. For all those who need these goods, this means they need money, so they have to make money as labor power in order to make a living. This plight is not considered poverty, but a normal condition.

However, you only get money if you find someone who wants to use you as a worker. The employee’s freedom is his dependence on an employer who only employs a worker when it is profitable. The first consequence of this relationship is that those who have to make a living from work live in insecurity, which is more or less stressful, regardless of whether they are to be laid off or rationalized or not. Reorganizations of work are constantly taking place and what this means for one's own position in the company is therefore open.

The employment of labor power is profitable when the payment for disposal over the labor power is less than the revenue that can be obtained from its performance. The payment for disposal over labor power, what has to produced in this time, how much performance can be gotten out of it – all this lies in the way the company or the workplace is organized. Because the work should be profitable, the labor power is poorly paid and as much performance as possible is demanded of it.  This is the cause of the constant overstrain that workers are subjected to. This is also evidenced by the various legal regulations, such as working hours laws, leave, and the like, which force employers to take into account the recovery needs of their workforce, so that they can continue to be used in a profitable manner. Employees are only protected with regard to the amount of time they are required to work; during the paid period, companies are free to use them as intensively as they can. This should ensure the usability of the workforce.

As I said, it is not the service provided by the worker that is paid – then where would the profit be? – but the disposal over the labor power. In hourly wages, the time in which people can be used is paid. In the case of piecework wages, the starting point is the average normal performance that a worker can continually provide without health damage. If it is the average performance, then there are also people who can’t make this average and can only make it with such strenuous efforts that health damage is a foregone conclusion. In addition, the normal productive rate is only supposed to be the starting point for the extra productivity that should be surpassed through piece work. The result is captured by the saying “piece work is murder,” but this doesn’t mean that piece work has disappeared. Agreements on goals and project work are the new forms of remuneration that put the business risk entirely on the workers. The payment is for a performance that is guaranteed to pay off for the employer; the amount of time and energy spent achieving the result is of no concern to the employer and is entirely at the expense of the person who has to meet the performance. This is how the entrepreneurs can completely free themselves from government regulations. So while there is a legal minimum wage, employers, e.g. in the cleaning industry, pay their workers the minimum wage, and at the same time specify the amount of surfaces or spaces to be cleaned.  Whether these can be cleaned in the time in which the minimum wage is calculated is a completely different story. And so the employees often take a much longer time than what they are paid for. Extra work is the rule.

Free time officially begins when work stops. Working time includes the usual working time of around eight hours, but not lunch breaks, even when you work through it and provide employers with unpaid overtime.  Working time does not include the journeys to and from work which are also becoming increasingly extensive. Also not part of working time are all the necessities that are part of everyday life, such as shopping, eating, house cleaning, laundry, sleeping, etc. This reduces the time you have left over for your own purposes. Then you should also exercise, which often leads to the desire to relax and just veg out. If there are also children, then a stressful free time is complete. They should have it better than us, a wish that has prevailed for generations and apparently never comes true and gives parents and children a huge program. 

With the recommendation not to do too much, those affected are advised to cut back on their own interests in favor of their functionality for the operation. So everything is a sign of work and it is also clear that one lives in order to work and that’s why stress is omnipresent and cardiovascular diseases are common illnesses.

What is currently being celebrated as the German economic miracle is the freedom of companies to use labor power. What they have to pay is entirely up to their calculations. They determine how long people have to work. Collective agreements stipulate working hours between 35-39 hours, with an average of more than 43 hours.  Thanks to the flexibilization of working hours, there is hardly any overtime pay and the company determines when you can really turn off the cell phone. When you have to start work and for how long is all in the hands of the company. And the end of work in the form of a pension is also made more flexible, so that people might continue working their whole lives if their pension is too low. Due to working hours, leisure time is so full of necessities that there is often hardly any time for one’s own purposes and relaxation. So this source of stress, how one can make a living on a low salary, how one meets the demands of work, ensures chronic health damages.

Cancer

Let’s take the second example, cancer. Cancer is the second most common disease. According to the RKI, every second citizen becomes ill with this disease during his or her lifetime. It is caused by mutation of the DNA, which controls the processes in the cell, resulting in growths or neoplasms. Mutations always occur in nature, but are rare, such as Down syndrome. What stimulates the mutations and turns them into a widespread disease is also known: it is the many toxins and radiation that have an effect on the body, can penetrate the cells and the cell nucleus and cause cancer.  Because it is impossible to tell which toxin or which radiation is responsible for the outbreak of the disease in individual cases, the causes of cancer are repeatedly downplayed and reinterpreted as possible risk factors. In addition, not everyone becomes ill in the same way as a result of these damages. Even coming into contact with a flu virus does not make everyone sick, yet nobody would ever think that the cause of the flu is unclear. Yet medicine is finished with the causes of cancer: although doctors also care about environmental damage, they are primarily concerned with human beings and try to influence diseases in humans. They find out that there are people who are more likely to develop cancer, which the good ones can withstand during its course. The differences are then tied up with the genes, and in addition to the toxins and the radiation, one has already found a cancer gene. If the patient is pre-damaged by viruses and therefore more susceptible to cancer, then you also have a cancer virus. If the disease occurs more frequently at an older age, which is not surprising in the case of permanent damage, then it is not due to the toxins and radiation, but age, and cancer is a sign of aging, even if many people die of this disease at an early age.

Smoking is also the number one cause of cancer. And indeed, smoke contains a whole range of substances that cause cancer. However, these substances occur in virtually all combustion processes. These substances can therefore be found not only in smoke, but everywhere in the air we breathe, especially in inner cities. A great deal is being done against smoking, including numerous bans, but according to the politicians, not much can be done about the particulate matter in city centers.  What becomes clear from the different ways smoking and particulate matter are treated is that the politicians make a fundamental distinction in how the sources of damage are treated. Smoking serves private pleasure and is therefore intolerable. When it comes to combating particulate matter in urban centers, economic interests are always involved. It remains outside the debate that power plants and industrial plants spread poisonous substances all over the whole country from their chimneys and comprehensively contaminate the landscape with such beautiful substances as heavy metals and dioxin, which is therefore also found in organic eggs. The dirty delivery trucks of the distributors can’t be burdened either, because that would impair their business. Only private traffic gets attention, but if it is kept away from the city center, the retailers there suffer as well. So signs with “environmental zone” are put up, which nobody understands as a warning of toxic air, and stickers are issued so that old gas guzzling clunkers can no longer enter these zones, but nobody checks. How much the generous limit values were exceeded is then regularly communicated to the public and the resulting deaths registered. The EU puts the death toll at 450,000, i.e. the size of a medium-sized city, for the EU area. This already makes it clear that the politicians are calculating with health damages and deaths because of business and its success. Obviously, the politicians can live with the resulting victims, because this does not impair the basis of business, so that there is currently no pressure to act, even when the source of the danger is clear.

Although the connection between alcohol consumption and cancer has not been proven, as can be seen from the publications of the German Cancer Research Center, there are constant warnings about the danger of alcohol. Again, it comes into play that alcohol is only for private pleasure, the benefits of which are well appreciated, which is why, in contrast to smoking, only its excessive consumption is warned against. 

The subject of diet also plays an important role in the context of cancer. A whole branch of nutrition advertises with organic products that these are less contaminated than other products. It is strange that you can advertise this and this is not a scandal. It makes clear that many foods do not deserve their name because they are anything but suitable for the functioning of the organism or for enjoyment, but rather are harmful to the organism. The reason is no secret either. Food is a commodity and its primary purpose is to make a profit and the profit is only realized if there are buyers for it. So there are high-quality products for wealthy customers, whose number is limited, and a mass market, whose ability to pay is very limited because they have to live on wages. For them, there are cheap products of corresponding quality. Food counterfeiting is therefore widespread and largely permitted. However, this does not necessarily pose a health risk. Horse meat in lasagna may even be less contaminated than beef or pork, but it is not what the customer wanted.  Chemicals used in food processing are not harmful per se either, but their quality is important.

In the production of food, however, the business purpose requires the use of numerous poisons to control weeds, fungi or insects, so that the yield is high and the costs as low as possible.  However, these substances do not always remain on the exterior of a crop, so they can be washed off, but penetrate into the crop and are therefore also found in the food chain of slaughter animals and humans. Meat production is controlled with hormones, so that the female animals are ready for conception during artificial insemination, the hormones control the birth of the animals, so that the event can be scheduled accordingly in the operation and thus one achieves predictable numbers of pieces which are ready for slaughter at the same time and can be driven to the slaughterhouse. In order to be able to feed and dispose of feces mechanically, there are the appropriate animal factories, promoted by the EU agricultural policy to world market maturity, in which the stock is always endangered by epidemics, which is why this type of production is not possible without the use of antibiotics. These meat factories are therefore the breeding ground for resistance, which also makes the old epidemics dangerous again.

Food should not only be cheap to produce, but also durable for transport and attractive for selling. This makes the use of other chemicals or irradiation necessary. Since many people hardly have any time left over to prepare food, there is also an increasing demand for pre-cooked products, which can be processed quickly and cost-effectively using chemicals that are not necessarily wholesome.  Most things are allowed, but it only becomes a scandal when the purpose of the business leads to gross violations of these regulations or causes illness. However, toxic chemicals are not only found in food. Whether in clothing, carpets or children’s toys, there are warnings everywhere about toxic or carcinogenic chemicals. There are around 30,000 chemicals on the market, most of which have not been tested for their effects on the human organism.  A proposal by the EU to test all these chemicals for their health effects was stalled by Germany because this would put a strain on the chemical industry. The initiative is called REACH. It has been agreed that newly developed chemicals should be tested, with the manufacturers themselves, as in the car industry, carrying out the tests and reporting if they have found anything negative. Once again, the goat is turned into a gardener, because business takes precedence over the health of the population. The EU reviews the credibility and completeness of the documents submitted. These are the highly praised consumer standards that are so vehemently defended within the framework of TTIP and apparently cannot be shaken by the VW diesel scandal.

In addition to the many carcinogenic toxins, humanity is also exposed to radiation that is carcinogenic. Radiation does not only emanate from nuclear power plants, where it is pointed out that the amount of radiation is not greater than the radiation which, for example, affects mankind through natural uranium deposits. This is supposed to calm us down. But even if the radiation from nuclear power plants is really no higher than the radiation from nature, it does increase the amount of radiation that affects the citizens. The fact that X-rays are also harmful in medicine is documented by the heavy lead vests that must be put on during the examination.  The amount of radiation should be recorded in an X-ray passport in order to keep the dose administered as low as possible. Doctors, who are also business people, rarely ask for or issue an X-ray passport. For them, this is an effort that is not worthwhile and is therefore often omitted.

You have to wonder when everything in this society uses radiation. In the preservation of food, it is not contaminated radioactively, but causes changes which also have a negative effect on the human body. If there are regulations on radioactivity in drinking water, then it will also be in the drinking water. With their decrees, government agencies have given permission for the discharge of cooling water from nuclear power plants into rivers from which drinking water is obtained.

Limit values on the use of toxic substances are supposed to provide the consumer with safety. An argument connected with this is that, according to the old pharmacist Paracelsus, every substance is poisonous, it just depends on the dose. Even water is poisonous in excess. However, this refers to acute poisonings. There are also substances that are toxic in any dose, such as dioxin, or that become poison through their storage in the body. Nevertheless, it is always assumed in the case of limit values that it is possible to determine a does which is harmless to the body. It is measured by the ADI, the Acceptable Daily Intake, which is the dose that people can take every day without any health risk. To determine this value, a substance is given to an animal population in which all the animals first die, then the dose is gradually reduced so that no animals die. This value, determined in the animal, is then divided by 100 for safety reasons and then issued as digestible for humans per kilogram of body weight. Long-term effects are supposed to be precluded by investigating this remedy over several generations of animals, which are quite short-lived in contrast to humans, so long-term effects are recorded only to a very limited extent.  In addition, the animals are always exposed to only one single substance. However, humans are always exposed to a cocktail of toxins that can interact with each other. The lack of objectivity in these values can also be seen in the discussion about glyphosate, which the WHO warned is possibly carcinogenic; the German Institute for Risk Research contradicted this and recommended to the EU that it continue to be used because it has not been proven with certainty that it is carcinogenic, that it can be found in many foods, as well as in the urine of people who eat exclusively organic products.

In the case of radioactivity, limit values are determined which should make radiation  acceptable, which makes no secret of the fact that such a value cannot be determined scientifically at all and that the determination is a political decision.

The consumer is held to be responsible for the poor quality of food and other products.  The consumer’s purchasing behavior is supposed to be responsible for ensuring that these poor products come onto the market because he has a bargain hunter mentality.  The strange thing about this argument is that the majority of consumers do not even know how the products are made or what they contain when they buy them. All this is decided by the manufacturers who make a business with it. Nor do the many instances of consumer protection make this argument ridiculous. Why do they need a consumer protection agency, consumer protection laws, and consumer advice if they decide everything with their purchases? After all, consumer protection is only necessary when the consumer is constantly bamboozled when buying things.

The fact that consumer protection does not simply enlighten the consumer about what he is buying shows that consumer protection is not intended to harm the business with these commodities.  This is documented by the many regulations on consumer protection, which would not be necessary if producers had to write on their goods what is inside. Then it would be bad for many consumers and they would not buy the goods. The state therefore weighs exactly how much information the consumer has to receive, the font size and how it is expressed, where on the packaging, without the business in these products suffering as a result.  This is how the state signs off on the systematic counterfeiting and contamination of products.

Consumers are advised not to get excited and protest any more, but to be more realistic, which should lead them to make the best of bad conditions. Then one discovers that even the more expensive organic products are not an alternative.

Conclusion

To sum up the result of these remarks: people in this society are systematically damaged by wage labor and the commercial use of all aspects of life. This is reflected in common diseases. The statistical record of these diseases and deaths also documents that these health damages and deaths are calculated. They are observed as collateral damage of the commercial use of the population, the damage should not jeopardize business, so there are the corresponding regulations. In the public discussion, the victims are held to be responsible for the damages because they harm themselves with their lack of healthy behavior. Instead, they are called upon to compensate for or mitigate the effects of constant damage through their healthy behavior.  Many people take this on out of self-interest in health; the protest against these conditions is very limited.