Will we ever learn?  Just when you think there might be some hope, real hope for humanity, there's another scientific breakthrough, or senate speech to dash your hopes.  I've been feeling quite frustrated lately by the violent opposition to common sense that I see all around me.  Last month's absurdity was Nina Planck's totally refutable op-ed piece in the N.Y. Times in which she proudly stated that "babies are built from protein, calcium, cholesterol and fish oil."  There were volleys of retorts and rebuttals fired from all corners of the vegan and medical world, so I won't beat a dead horse.  Then I found that my car, which I just put up for sale, had been vandalized by the same ungrateful teenagers of well-to-do parents that smash liquor bottles on our front walkway every weekend.    

Today, the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium announced to the world that it has found 24 genetic risk factors -- half of them completely new -- linked to seven common diseases.  Good news!  Right?  Not so fast, I say.

Perhaps there are some real truths to be found in genetics.  This study examined DNA samples from 17,000 people across the United Kingdom, bringing together 50 research groups and 200 scientists in the field of human genetics from dozens of U.K. institutions, resulting in the analysis of 10 billion pieces of genetic information.  I hope all that effort was not to waste.  What disturbs me is how the media seizes on these studies at every opportunity and stops just short of pronouncing them the cure for all the world's ills.  They betray their corporate-minded agenda to us every time.  We're so dumbed down and distracted by the all the sparklies dangled in front of us at every turn that we don't notice.  If we do happen to notice, most of us don't care!  We don't care!  THis is our world, our lives going down the toilet!  We are rolling over and dying for them, holding up our credit cards to offer them whatever's left of our limit in our dying gasps.  

Getting back to the scientific breakthrough at hand...  the 7 diseases they've found some obscure genetic links between (they still have years of research to do to determine what the exact nature of the links is) are: Crohn's disease, Rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, Bipolar disorder, Coronary heart disease and Hypertension.  So, when the world reads this good news they can feel better again about ignoring the real, immediate causes of these diseases.  

"By identifying the genes underlying these conditions, our study should enable scientists to understand better how disease occurs, which people are most at risk and, in time, to produce more effective, more personalized treatments," says University of Oxford Professor Peter Donnelly, who has led the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium.  

More effective, more personalized treatments are more drugs!  The most personal and effective treatment you can undertake, should you have these diseases, is to stop eating what gave you the disease in the first place.  I know, nobody wants to hear that.  Nobody wants to be well.  As a western society, we're not happy unless we're sick.  Everything's a disease or a condition.  Why is our healthcare system overburdened?  How is the wool being pulled over our eyes?  We're doing it to ourselves.  Even our language has cancer.  'Prevention' has mutated into 'early detection'.  It's societal suicide, on a scale not seen since the Romans.  An argument could be made that it's genocide, but that's a whole other blog.  

The point is, we're much happier barking up the wrong tree than facing our demons and taking even a small step towards real health.  Maybe some good will come of this study after it stops spinning.  If scientists are connecting all these diseases, and obesity, genetically, maybe we, the sick and indulgent, will connect them at the causal level.  You see?  There I go having hope for humanity again!