RUSH: All right, here’s the Diet Coke story. Really all you need to do is read the first line and the last line of the story. It’s from the UK Sun. “Just two sweetened drinks a day can dramatically raise heart risk, studies show.” Okay, that’s the first line of the story. The headline: “Diet Coke Heart Risk.” And then elsewhere in the story you’ll find the reference to “two cans of fizzy pop a day” raised heart risk.
I guess they’ve gotta give the orange juice crowd an exemption. Do you know how much sugar there is in orange juice? Do you know how much sugar there is in apple juice? So they have to throw in fizzy drinks here in order to describe soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi, 7-Up, Sprite, you name it. Those are the villains.
And, you know, on the other end of it artificial sweeteners are gonna kill you. You’ve read that. Equal, that’s gonna kill you. Saccharin was gonna kill you back in the seventies. You know how they determined that? If a rat had an adult comparable amount of saccharin every day, you know, whatever an adult takes to satisfy the sweet urge, whatever that would be in a rat, they calculated what that is per day, and then they multiplied that times a million and shot the rat up with it. I mean, the rat would die from renal cancer just from that liquid being shot up.
Anyway, that’s how they tried to prove saccharin caused cancer. So now Equal, aspartame, all these other things, they’re gonna cause cancer and kill you. Sugar is gonna kill you. Fizzy sweetened drinks are gonna kill you. Global warming is going to kill you. It’s amazing, given abortion, it’s amazing anybody is alive. In fact, I’ve got a story here in the Stack coming up later about what is happening to white people aged 45 to 56. They are dying in inordinate numbers and nobody can figure out why because it’s not related to illness. The death rate in that age-group has researchers stymied.
So they’re offering a bunch of theories and they’re not coming up with this cockamamie stuff. They’re not coming up with global warming, climate change, aspartame, sugar, any of that. They’re admitting they don’t know, so they’re examining cultural influences that might be leading to early middle-aged death among only white people in a basic 10-year range. But, anyway, back to the UK Sun. “Diet Coke Heart Risk — two cans fizzy pop a day raise your heart risk 25%.”
Here’s the first line. “Just two sweetened drinks a day can dramatically raise heart risk, studies show.” Last line of the story. “It is not clear if the harmful effects are because of the drinks themselves or the lifestyle that goes with them.” So you have a headline and then an entire story devoted to the premise that if you drink soft drinks, two of them a day, you are vastly increasing your risk of heart attack from heart disease. And you know people believe this. How long is it gonna be, folks, how long is it gonna be before you’re walking down the street and you see somebody drinking a Diet Coke and somebody jabs you, “You know, that person’s gonna have a heart rate increase now because did you see that story in the news the other day? Yeah, two of these things a day and your heart rate increase goes way up.”
People are gonna start repeating this like they’re gonna be repeating the vitamin C myth, like they’re gonna be repeating every other one of these health myths. They just buy these up, they eat ’em up, and they believe ’em. Then you read the rest of the story, “But it’s not clear if the harmful effects of sweetened drinks are really because of drinks themselves or because of the lifestyle that goes with them.”
What is the lifestyle that goes with sweetened drinks? What is that lifestyle? Can somebody explain to me what the lifestyle is? What’s exclusive about people who drink sweetened drinks? Nothing. Exactly. It’s absurd. It’s a total, 100 percent totally made up absurd story that fulfills the crisis narrative each day: Keep people frightened, scared, or what have you.
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RUSH: I want to start with Dr. Tony, in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’m glad you called, sir, and I appreciate your patience in waiting. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Longtime listener. Great talking to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I appreciate everything that you’ve done for our country.
RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I called you because you were talking before about, you know, the sodas and consumption of two and the type of heart disease, and, you know, basically we get a lot of these studies and they usually come from Europe that basically puts down us eating or drinking anything in excess. And you don’t need a study to really learn how to take care of people. They did what they did in Sweden, I’m not sure if you’re referring to that one, they used 42,000 men and found out that the heart disease that they got from two drinks was something called heart failure. And that can mean anything. People can get heart failure from heart attacks or from just having high blood pressure or having a viral illness to their heart. So it’s a very nonspecific study to make conclusions. And it sounds like it’s another study to tell people, you know, like Bloomberg, how much quantity of what they want to drink is effective for them.
RUSH: You’re right. It was a survey in Sweden, since you asked, and he’s right on the money here, folks. “Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden tracked the health of 42,400 males over 12 years — but warned the findings may also apply equally to women.” They didn’t study it. They just say if the men are gonna die, the women probably will too. “Researcher Dr. Susanna Larsson said people should consider reducing consumption of sweetened drinks to lower the risk of heart failure.” And then they quote a guy from the University of Essex. Now, the point is, Dr. Tony, these things don’t kill you. What do they do to your heart? They don’t cause heart attacks. What happens if you have three Diet Cokes in a day?
CALLER: I’m like you, I started in New York, I ended up south, I’m now here in North Carolina, so I got to get practice in both areas. The people in the South drink a lot more soda, and the bottom line is very simple, Rush. If you eat too much or if you have too many cans of soda, you’re gonna increase your calories, you’re gonna increase your sugar, there’s a tie-in with insulin and insulin resistance and something called the metabolic syndrome. All those things, they can lead to diabetes. So indirectly you can have a pathway to where you can get a higher chance of heart disease.
RUSH: Wait a minute. That’s not what these people are saying. Because the last line of the story is: “It’s not clear if the harmful effects are drawn from the beverages themselves or the lifestyle that goes with them.” It’s caca! It’s a scare headline. See, if I were Coke or Pepsi or Sprite or 7-Up these are the kind of people I’d run around suing. They put on their lab coats, they get an icon or a logo, they get a fax machine, they put out their stupid study claiming that if you drink the stuff you’re gonna get a heart attack. At most your blood pressure may go up. Anyway, they even admit the last line of the story, they don’t know. They really don’t know what they’re reporting and revealing.
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RUSH: No, look, my point is, this is all absurd. I’m torn every day when I get these health stories. “Don’t drink this! Do drink that!” Not even mentioning them… Just to use the news is to fall into the trap and put the idea out there. It’s literally absurd. Folks, if you like Diet Coke, drink it. If you like Equal or aspartame, drink it. Have you seen the life expectancy lately? It’s going through the roof. Have you seen athletic records being set? People are doing better, they’re living longer, we’re healthier. Screw all this! These people are just looking for grant money.
They’re trying to impress rich millionaires and billionaires, get grant money to support their work. Or they’re leftists and they’re trying to support bigger government with more regulations, control over your life. You’re not gonna die by buying something on sale at a grocery store, unless you’re gonna eat the arsenic, if you can even find it. This is absurd, all of this health stuff. And eventually next year there’s gonna be a story saying this is all wrong anyway. Every one of these stories features a correction some years later.
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RUSH: Here is Ray in Plant City, Florida. It’s great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I’m going back to the research, the research that was done about eating, and every four years — winter or summer — we set more records in Olympics. We’re bigger, we’re faster, we’re stronger. I don’t know where they get these studies. Of course, I asked the circle of people I live around. Have you ever called or looked for the number of research scientists? Nobody ever has. If they didn’t work for the government, I guess they wouldn’t have a job. Maybe we should go ahead and not delay Social Security, with everybody dying eating all this stuff.
RUSH: Well, look, the point that he’s making out there is something that I briefly landed on mere moments ago. And he’s bouncing off the story that two Diet Cokes a day could kill you. Yes, a study of 42,000 human beings by a bunch of Swedish researchers. They found that two soft drinks — “fizzy.” It has to be “fizzy.” It can’t be orange juice ’cause they say it’s good for you. Not apple. It’s gotta be “fizzy,” carbonated, with sugar, naturally sweetened, whatever they put in there. Sugar. It can cause heart disease. Yes!
Just two a day. Just two.
In the last sentence of the story: “Researchers are unclear if it’s actually the beverages contributing to this or the lifestyle associated with it.” Well, “researchers are unclear” means “researchers don’t know,” which means everything that came before it is caca. So how can it be that the lifespan is growing? How can it be that athletic performance continues to set records for speed, endurance, strength, power? How does this happen? We know that Olympic athletes drink Coke and Pepsi. We know that all kinds of athletes do.
These are some of the most popular beverages in the world.
How in the world is this explained?
It’s a crisis industry, and the purpose of the crisis… This is an example of how everything is political, even the things that you think would not be. This is totally political. It’s political in the sense that in order to fix this “problem,” we need to empower government to regulate the diet and what is permissible to eat and drink. And if you doubt me, don’t forget that loony mayor of New York who wanted to limit the size of soft drinks, ’cause you didn’t have the intelligence yourself to know when too much was too much. You give them one step inside your door, and you’re done. They’ll be controlling every aspect of your life you will let them, and they’ll be blaming you for everything that goes wrong everywhere.