In 1911 a soap company taught America to eat a candle.
Procter and Gamble were not in the food business. They made soap and candles, and both needed fat. That meant lard and tallow, bought from meatpackers who had them over a barrel on price. So P&G went hunting for a fat they could own, and found one nobody else wanted: cottonseed oil, a waste product of the cotton gin, treated as near-worthless industrial slop.
Then a chemist showed them a German trick called hydrogenation. Pump hydrogen through that cheap liquid oil and it stiffens into a pale solid that looks, if you squint, like lard.
It was meant for soap. But P&G looked at this lard impersonator and asked the only question a soap company asks: why sell it for pennies as soap when you could sell it for more in a pie?
They called it Crisco, and they did not advertise it so much as evangelise it. A free cookbook in every home. The clean, modern, scientific fat, set against the dirty old animal fats your grandmother trusted. It worked. A waste product from the cotton gin became the fat in the nation's kitchens.
That is the clever business story. Here is where it turns into something worse.
Skip to 1948. The American Heart Association is a small, broke club of cardiologists nobody has heard of. Then it lands a windfall of around 1.7 million dollars, the better part of 20 million today, and explodes into the most powerful voice on heart disease in the country.
Where did the money come from? The AHA will tell you, primly, that Procter and Gamble never wrote a cheque. True enough. The money was raised through a radio contest called the Walking Man, on a programme Procter and Gamble sponsored and used to plug its products. The company sponsored the show that gathered the money, pushed its goods across it, and stamped its name on the whole affair.
A bribe with an alibi is still a bribe. Routing it through a game show does not change what it bought.
And what it bought was a pulpit. The body that would soon tell every household in America to bin the butter and cook with vegetable oil was launched into national power by the company that made the vegetable oil. The makers of Crisco built the pulpit, and the man in the pulpit preached Crisco.
Preach it he did. The animal fats humans had eaten for all of history were recast as killers. The factory oil was the cure. It went into the schools, onto the guidelines, out of your doctor's mouth.
There is a punchline, and it is not a kind one. The hydrogenated oil they spent decades calling heart-healthy was riddled with trans fats. By the 1990s the evidence was overwhelming, and in 2018 the very fat the establishment had championed was banned from the food supply as a danger to the heart. The FDA reckoned it was killing around 7,000 people a year before they pulled it.
A soap company invents a fat. It buys the body that blesses the fat as healthy. The fat is fed to a nation for a century. Then it is banned for killing people.
Nutritional science grew up in a soap works with a marketing budget, and it has never entirely left home.
Read the label. Then read who paid for the study behind it.
@HowIsAnyOfThis@PrepperCanadian@HealthRanger Right, let's just throw out the entire court system and make and handful of rando psychiatrists judge, jury and (eventually) executioners. What could possibly go wrong?
Government overreach mission creep.
Haven't they already established that they can use MAID to "end" people with a wide range of psych disorders in Canada?
Not hard to picture where this inevitably leads with political dissidents in the near future when the machine gets turned on. This is a denial cope.
@Megatron_ron You put your investments on autopilot through one of these investment firms, and this is what will happen... by default.
An investment in the S&P index fund is by default mostly the Mag 7 stocks, which are all AI. So yes, you're fueling this.