(NewsTarget) Do you ever wonder just to what degree mainstream media (MSM) organizations are influenced by food corporations? On January 2, 2008, CNN Health posted a story that claims pizza, burgers, Canadian bacon and ice cream are diet-friendly and good for your waist line!

Did they mean it's good for watching your waist line grow to an ever-expanding size? No, they actually mean these foods are good for slimming your waist line!

The article was brought to my attention by a concerned NewsTarget reader. When I first saw it on CNN's website, I thought was a hoax. But it's no hoax. Turns out it was written by Health Magazine!

That fact alone should make you wonder exactly what's going on over at Health Magazine (as well as CNN Health). It seems that the people writing these articles are nutritional idiots who know nothing about the correlation between food and health. Where to begin with dissecting this awful piece of so-called reporting?

Listen to my audio podcast on this topic (free!) for an audio-powered smackdown of CNN's nutritional nonsense:
http://www.newstarget.com/podcasts/HRR_017_Badfoods_48.mp3

Let's start with the Canadian bacon. Made with sodium nitrite, Canadian bacon is a processed meat that's directly linked to increased risks of pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, leukemia and other cancers. The increased risk of heart disease and cancer from eating processed meats is so large that the World Cancer Research Fund recently made a bold announcement and warned that processed meats should be avoided by everyone. There is no safe level of consumption of processed meats, the WCRF says.

Of course, this Health Magazine article didn't say these foods wouldn't give you cancer. They just said they're good for your waist line. And I suppose they have a point there. Nothing causes you to lose weight and shrink your waist line faster than getting pancreatic cancer! Eat more processed meat and you, too, can lose weight faster than you ever dreamed possible… that is, if you survive the cancer.

Eat pizza to lose weight? Get serious…
Now let's talk about the pizza. Let me just say right off the bat here that any person actually recommending pizza as a health food deserves to be suffocated by a vat of molten Velveeta. Pizza is made with refined flour (which lacks vitamins and minerals) that's cooked to high temperatures (creating cancer-causing acrylamides), then smothered with tomato sauce made with refined sugar (yes, there's sugar in most pizza sauce), then layered with more processed meat (yet more cancer risk) and processed cheese (can you spell H-E-A-R-T D-I-S-E-A-S-E?). Slapping a few flappy bits of overcooked green peppers and canned mushrooms into this pie does NOT make it a health food.

Geesh. You would think this stuff would be obvious by now. A magazine sporting the name "Health Magazine" should at least have a clue about nutrition, wouldn't you think?

We haven't even talked about the ice cream yet. Here's another case of just outright nutritional stupidity. If that writer thinks ice cream is a healthy food that causes you to lose weight, then I have a question to ask her: Why aren't all the ice cream eaters THIN? Gee, don't you think that if ice cream could cause you to lose weight, then America would be a nation of thin supermodels?

I challenge the author of this story (someone named Camille Noe Pagan) to spend her days eating burgers, ice cream, pizza and Canadian bacon, and see just how much weight she loses. Where are your super thin fitness photos, Camille? Mine are posted at www.HealthRanger.org and I got fit by avoiding all the things you're recommending! What does your waist line look like?

Nutritional nonsense in the mainstream media
Friends, this CNN story is just another example of nutritional nonsense appearing in the MSM. As you can clearly see here, neither Health Magazine nor CNN has any clue about the links between food choice and weight loss. You want to know how to really lose weight?

• Avoid all animal products, period (no meat, milk, cheese, etc.)
• Avoid all processed foods, period (no factory-made products)
• Eat fresh produce: Veggies, fruits, nuts and seeds
• Eat superfoods and juice your produce on a regular basis

That's the recipe for lasting weight loss. You certainly don't lose weight by eating pizza, ice cream and burgers. You do it by eating fresh produce and avoiding processed foods and animal products.

The title of this article is completely nonsensical to begin with: "Bad foods that are actually great for your waist." How can foods that are bad somehow magically be great for your waist? This article implies that these junk foods will result in a reduction of your waist size. And yet any person with even an inkling of nutritional knowledge knows that the foods recommended in the article actually increase your waist size. That makes the article yet another example of truly bad (and downright irresponsible) journalism put out by a mainstream magazine and a major cable news organization (CNN).

The bottom of the article offers a "free trial" of a subscription to Health Magazine. Wow, I can't wait to see what other nutritional nonsense will be contained in future issues. Will Health Magazine tell me that I can cure cancer by smoking cigarettes? That I can reverse diabetes by eating more sugar? Maybe it will say that eating broccoli, celery and cabbage makes you fat!

Action Item: Tell Health Magazine they're full of bunk!
Here's the contact URL for Health Magazine: http://www.health.com/health/talk/email

Join other NewsTarget readers in telling Health Magazine what you think about their article that recommends people eat pizza, ice cream, burgers and processed meat to lose weight. (Maybe they should change their name to Bad Health Magazine, huh?)

Here's the CNN comment box for their health section:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form1.html?13

The story in question here is posted at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/diet.fitness/01/02/healthmag.bad.foods/index.html

and it's entitled, "Bad foods that are actually great for your waist"

The main points to get across to the CNN editors are:

• The article promotes processed junk foods that actually cause weight GAIN, not weight loss.

• Recommending that readers eat more junk foods is irresponsible journalism. It misleads readers into pursuing unhealthful lifestyles that will only result in more weight gain and the development of degenerative disease.

• Many of the foods recommended in the article are well documented to promote cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other serious health problems. The Canadian bacon recommendation, in particular, is one that directly promotes cancer. (See http://www.newstarget.com/sodium_nitrite.html )

• The source of the story (Health Magazine) is not up to date with the nutritional science published over the last decade.

• The pro-milk agenda of the story is obviously put in place to please advertisers (the dairy industry). The pro-milk research quoted in the story was funded in part by the dairy industry!

• The main "expert" quoted in the story (Bonnie Gluck) is a "dietician," and dieticians follow a very limited view of nutrition promoted by drug companies and food corporations. Dieticians are still taught nutritional information that was outdated ten years ago. (For example, they still do not distinguish the qualitative differences between raw foods and cooked foods, and they have no education about superfoods like microalgae.)

• The story contained absolutely no recommendations about truly healthful foods except, perhaps, eggs.

• The ice cream suggestion was made without any thought whatsoever about all the diabetic readers who crucially need to avoid saturated animal fats as well as processed sugar (and those are the two main ingredients in ice cream).

Contact CNN and Health Magazine using the links given above and let them know what you think about their lousy health journalism.

And when you read health articles from any mainstream news source or magazine, keep your skeptical thinking cap on. Remember: The bigger the news organization, the less credibility they have. (Because they have to please all their big advertisers…) more…

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