What stage are we in toward a better understanding of health?

Health considerations finally prevailed over the tobacco industry, the Surgeon Generals warning appeared on all tobacco products, and ads like these disappeared overnight.

There were literally hundreds of ads like these.

Today the campaign against optimal health is orders of magnitude more profitable, insidious, and institutionalized. It was no accident that tobacco ads featured doctors. The tobacco industry knew their product was health destructive for two decades before the Surgeon Generals warning was issued. The best possible counter was the words of the trusted family doctor.

What are the corollaries today? Chemical companies that design and make the many pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides added to our foods. Foods designed by processed food conglomerates to fritz our instinctual circuitry and cause addiction to toxic "food like" substances. Factory farming of animals. Distribution channels for toxic "foods", including grocery chains and the fast food restaurant industry.

OK, so these megalithic industries have made zillions of dollars making us sick...now what?

Turn on the television and see that every other ad is for the latest and greatest pharmaceutical. We're not feeling too good and see one we think we might "need", and we make an appointment with our doctor (who has extensive training in administering pharmaceutical product). The multi faceted disease management industry (that goes by a misnomer as the health care industry) generates ungodly profits administrating solutions that are on average ineffective at best.

All of these industries put profit first, and have about as much concern for our health as the tobacco industry did: chemical, pharmacological, mono crop agriculture, factory farming of animals, food "science" conglomerates, grocery stores, restaurants, medical, "health care" insurance.

When cancer begins to become epidemic in children what do we do? Build pediatric cancer hospitals.

It's a complex picture that only begins to become clear when we add up the total profits made on production, consumption, and treatment of toxic food choices. The sum of those profits is probably the single largest source of revenues in history. And there is no "one bullet solution" as there was with the tobacco industry (with one bulletin from the Surgeon General). One wonders how it is we are collectively so unconscious and destructive to have generated a socio-cultural mess of this historic scale. Is it as simple as "following the profit"?